Saturday, September 7, 1968 closed the Fillmore West's fall-series opener — the third and last night of Chuck Berry, the Steve Miller Band and Kensington Market on Lee Conklin's BG-135.

Conklin drew the season's opening in skulls. Five of them float in the upper half of the sheet, worked in the same dense pen-and-ink hatching as the lion he had made for BG-134 two weeks earlier, and beneath them a shrouded, long-limbed figure crouches over a field of flowers rendered with botanical care. Across the top, in lettering that has to be untangled rather than read: FALL SERIES BEGINS.

That phrase is the thread worth following. It appears on BG-82 in September 1967 ("Opening of the Fall Weekend Series," Blashfield's autumnal Byrds sheet), here in September 1968, and again on BG-190 in September 1969 for Santana. Three consecutive Septembers, three artists, three unrelated visual languages — hand-drawn psychedelia, pen-and-ink skulls, photographic collage — carrying the same institutional announcement. Graham was running a season, and the posters marked it the way a concert hall marks a subscription series.

Berry closing it is the other half of the point. Forty-one years old, thirteen years past "Maybellene," touring with pickup bands, opening the fall for a room full of people whose groups had learned his songs first.