David Singer's poster for the opening of the 1969 fall season is orange, and at the center of it a dark hand reaches down into a field of grass and lifts out a disc of earth, as though the lawn were a lid. Inside the opening is another photograph entirely — pale sky, a figure seated on the ground. The image is a collage of two unrelated pictures joined at a circular seam, which is what Singer did instead of drawing: he cut things out and put them where they did not belong until they meant something.

Below it, in the art-deco lettering that had replaced the hand-drawn psychedelia of three years earlier: SANTANA. SEA TRAIN · YUSEF LATEEF. Lights by Brotherhood of Light. FALL SERIES BEGINS — Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, September 4, 5, 6 and 7.

Thursday, September 4, 1969 was opening night, and Santana were headlining Bill Graham's hall.

That is the whole story of the year in one line. Almost exactly twelve months earlier, in the last week of August 1968, Santana had been third-billed at the bottom of Lee Conklin's lion poster, under Steppenwolf and the Staple Singers, listed in the venue records as a single word with no article. In between came Woodstock — the August 1969 set that made them nationally famous before their first record was even out — and the self-titled debut album, released that same month, wearing a redrawn version of Conklin's lion on its cover. By the time this poster went up they were the name at the top in the largest type on the sheet.

Second-billed was Sea Train, the Bay Area group built partly out of the Blues Project's remains. Third, and the reason this bill is worth pausing on, was Yusef Lateef — the Tennessee-born multi-instrumentalist who played tenor saxophone, flute, oboe and the Middle Eastern reed instruments he had spent years studying, and who had been making records since the 1950s. Putting Lateef under a Latin-rock band at a psychedelic ballroom is the sort of programming that had defined the Fillmore from the start: Gary Burton under Cream in 1967, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band under the Grateful Dead in 1968, Bukka White under the Miller Blues Band at the Avalon. Graham kept doing it because it kept working.

There is a small symmetry in the sheet worth recording. The 1968 fall season had also opened with a poster that announced FALL SERIES BEGINS — Conklin's skulls, Chuck Berry at the top of the bill. One year apart, the same phrase, the same hall: one drawn entirely by hand in black ink, the other assembled from photographs in flat color. The Fillmore West's seasons were becoming institutional, and the art on the walls was changing from something made with a pen into something made with scissors.