Saturday, September 9, 1967 closed the Byrds' three-night Fillmore Auditorium stand with the Loading Zone and the LDM Spiritual Band, on Jim Blashfield's autumnal BG-82.

It is worth noting what "the Fall Weekend Series," announced on this poster, actually signalled. By the autumn of 1967 Graham was running the Fillmore as a season rather than a string of weekends — naming a series, printing it on the sheet, giving the room the shape of a concert hall. The same impulse produced Lee Conklin's skull-covered BG-135 a year later, announcing "Fall Series Begins" for Chuck Berry at the Fillmore West, and David Singer's hand-in-the-grass BG-190 the year after that, carrying the same phrase for Santana. Three consecutive Septembers, three artists working in three completely different visual languages, and the same institutional instinct underneath: summer is over, the room is serious again.

For the Byrds it was very nearly the end of something else. Within six weeks David Crosby was out of the band, and the group that had defined American folk-rock in 1965 spent the following year becoming a different thing entirely — the country turn that produced *Sweetheart of the Rodeo*, with Gram Parsons in the room. The three nights under Blashfield's leaves and pine cones are among the last of the old Byrds.