Lee Conklin drew the poster that opened Bill Graham's fall season, and he drew it in skulls. Five of them float in the upper half of BG-135, worked in the same dense pen-and-ink hatching as his lion of the week before, and below them a shrouded, long-limbed figure crouches over a field of flowers rendered with botanical precision. Across the top, in lettering that has to be untangled rather than read: FALL SERIES BEGINS. The dates sit in the two upper corners — SEPT 5 6 7 — and the bill runs down the middle. CHUCK BERRY. STEVE MILLER BAND. KENSINGTON MARKET. At the bottom, a banner: FILLMORE WEST, MARKET AND VAN NESS.

Thursday, September 5, 1968 was opening night.

Chuck Berry at the Fillmore West is one of those bookings that says more about the room than about the headliner. Berry was forty-one years old that autumn and had been making records for thirteen years; "Maybellene" was from 1955, "Johnny B. Goode" from 1958. Nearly every band on the San Francisco circuit had learned his songs before they learned anything else — the guitar figures that open half the psychedelic repertoire are his, slowed down and stretched out. By 1968 he was touring constantly, often with pickup bands, playing the same songs to audiences half his age who treated him as either a museum piece or a founder depending on the night.

Graham booked him as a founder. The Fillmore West's fall series opened with the man whose vocabulary the rest of the bill was speaking.

Second-billed was the Steve Miller Band, four days after they had closed the Avalon on the FD-78 "Angel" poster a year earlier and now a considerably bigger draw — *Children of the Future* had come out that spring. Third was Kensington Market, a Toronto group signed to Warner Bros. and touring on their first record, one of the many Canadian and East Coast acts Graham fed through the hall on the way up or the way through.

The Fall Series framing on the poster is worth noticing. By September 1968 Graham was running the Fillmore West as a season rather than a series of weekends — announcing a fall, printing it on the sheet, giving the room the shape of a concert hall instead of a dance. The Avalon never quite did that. It is one of the small structural differences that explains why one operation lasted and the other did not.

And Conklin's skulls, three weeks before Halloween and two weeks after his lion, are a reminder that the poster artists were not decorating. They were given a bill and a set of dates and they made whatever they wanted, and what Conklin wanted for the opening of the fall season was five skulls and a shrouded thing in a flowerbed.