Friday, September 6, 1968 was night two of the Fillmore West's fall-season opener: Chuck Berry, the Steve Miller Band and Kensington Market, under Lee Conklin's skulls on BG-135.

Kensington Market, third-billed, were a Toronto band named for the market district in their own city, signed to Warner Brothers and touring their first record — one of the many Canadian groups that came down the West Coast circuit in the late sixties and went home again. Steve Miller in the middle was three days from headlining the Avalon on his own, and had three albums out inside eighteen months.

And Chuck Berry on top, opening Graham's season. He had been recording for thirteen years, had served twenty months in federal prison on a Mann Act conviction most accounts treat as racially motivated, and by 1968 toured near-continuously with hired backing bands who were expected to know the songs — which they always did, because his songs were the common vocabulary every bar band in America learned first.

Conklin's poster went up over all of it: five skulls, a shrouded figure crouched in a flowerbed, and FALL SERIES BEGINS across the top in lettering you have to untangle.