Saturday, September 2, 1967 was night five of Cream, the Electric Flag and Gary Burton at the Fillmore Auditorium — one night from the end of the BG-80 stand, which closed on the 3rd.

Across town the same evening the Avalon was running its own weekend on Mouse and Kelley's "Angel" sheet, with the Miller Blues Band, Mother Earth and Bukka White. Two halls, four blocks apart, and between them on this single Saturday: a British power trio at the height of its improvisational powers, a jazz vibraphonist, Mike Bloomfield's horn band, a young Steve Miller, and a Mississippi bluesman who had recorded at Parchman Farm in 1939. That range across one night in one city is the strongest single argument for why this period is worth cataloguing at all.

Blashfield's poster hung over the Fillmore half of it: the man with the bird hand-puppet, band names in the Roller alphabet, on white index stock. The run closed the following night, and Cream left San Francisco with the live reputation that defined them for the rest of their short existence — they broke up fifteen months later.