On September 7, 1967 — a Thursday — the Fillmore Auditorium opened what the poster itself called the "Opening of the Fall Weekend Series": BG-82, Jim Blashfield's design, with the Byrds headlining over the Loading Zone and the LDM Spiritual Band, Holy See on lights (wolfgangs.com BG082; gdao.org — the latter a candidate source pending vetting). It ran Thursday through Saturday, September 7–9.

The Byrds in September 1967 were a band mid-transformation. David Crosby was on his way out — he'd be gone within weeks — and *Younger Than Yesterday* had come out earlier that year; this Fillmore stand catches them just before the lineup fractured and Gram Parsons-era country turn was still more than a year off. Roger McGuinn's twelve-string Rickenbacker over a San Francisco ballroom crowd is a nice collision of LA folk-rock and the Fillmore's psychedelic house style.

Two other Septembers stack onto this calendar day. In 1968, this was the third and final night of Chuck Berry / Steve Miller / Kensington Market at the Fillmore West (BG-135, Lee Conklin — see September 5). And in 1969 it was the fourth night of Santana / Sea Train / Yusef Lateef at the Fillmore West (BG-190, David Singer — see September 4). Same early-September weekend, three different years, three different Fillmores.

What the Byrds actually were in September 1967 is worth being precise about, because the band that played the Fillmore that weekend existed for only a few more weeks. David Crosby had spent the summer making himself impossible — the Monterey Pop set two months earlier where he lectured the crowd about the Kennedy assassination between songs, the sessions where he pushed material the others would not record. By late October he had been bought out of the group. Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman drove to his house and told him he was finished. So the trio of McGuinn, Crosby and Hillman on the Fillmore stage those three nights is a lineup with an expiry date already set, playing songs — "Eight Miles High," "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star," the Dylan covers that had made them famous three years earlier — that had already outlasted the arrangement that produced them.

The Loading Zone, second on the bill, were an Oakland band built around organ and horns and Linda Tillery's voice, one of the East Bay groups Graham used steadily and history has largely mislaid. The LDM Spiritual Band opened.

The poster is Jim Blashfield's, the same designer who had carried Cream through the back half of their run on BG-80 a week earlier. And it announces, in its own words, the "Opening of the Fall Weekend Series" — the third time in this single calendar week that a Fillmore sheet declares a fall season beginning, alongside Lee Conklin's skulls for Chuck Berry in 1968 and David Singer's hand-in-the-grass for Santana in 1969. Three Septembers, three artists, three completely different visual languages, and the same institutional impulse underneath: summer is over, the room is serious again, here is the season.