On September 3, 1966 — a Saturday, the middle of the Labor Day weekend — the Fillmore Auditorium was running the second night of a three-night stand held together by a single poster: BG-26, Wes Wilson's design, the one built around a nude portrait of his wife Eva (wolfgangs.com BG026; trps.org). It's a poster worth pausing on, because it's the first time Wilson used that image, and because the bill printed on it is really a whole weekend compressed onto one sheet — Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Country Joe & the Fish, Martha & the Vandellas, and the smaller names (Ph Factor Jug Band, Andrew Staples, Johnny Talbot & De Thangs) distributed across the nights.

The chickenonaunicycle per-night list puts Jefferson Airplane on top for this Saturday, with the Ph Factor Jug Band and Andrew Staples under them. It's a telling moment for the Airplane specifically: this is the band a month or so before their lineup changed for good. Signe Toly Anderson was still the woman singing with them; Grace Slick — who on this very weekend was across town with the Great Society (see the Avalon, below) — wouldn't join until the middle of October. So the Airplane you'd have heard at the Fillmore on September 3 is the *Takes Off* band, not the *Surrealistic Pillow* one; the change everyone remembers was six weeks away.

Across town, the Avalon was two nights into its own Labor Day weekend: FD-24, the Mouse & Kelley poster nicknamed "Barnyard," with the 13th Floor Elevators up from Texas and the Sir Douglas Quintet (denverartmuseum.org 2007.4366). And at the Matrix, the Blues Project had settled in for a long residency that would be taped and released as *Live at the Matrix, September 1966* — Robbie Basho opening the early nights. Three rooms, three very different scenes, one weekend.

(A note for the reader who counts posters: I'm treating BG-26 as one poster covering September 2–5. It is. What changes night to night is who headlined, not the sheet on the wall.)