On Thursday, September 19, 1968, the Fillmore West lit up for the first of three nights — through Saturday the 21st — under a Bill Graham bill numbered BG-137 in the house series. The headliner was Albert King, the towering left-handed Flying-V bluesman whose "Born Under a Bad Sign" had, the year before, rewired the vocabulary of a generation of rock guitarists. Below him came Creedence Clearwater Revival, and opening, the short-lived blues-rock outfit Black Pearl. The Brotherhood of Light ran the liquid projections. It was a characteristic Graham juxtaposition: the real thing on top, the students of the real thing beneath.

The poster is one of the more quietly famous objects of the era. Rick Griffin — by 1968 arguably the most draftsmanlike of the "Big Five" San Francisco poster artists — turned in a "Bull's Eye" design built, unusually, in landscape format and lifted, with a straight face, from the packaging of Laughing Cow cheese. Griffin's recurring motifs are all present if you look: the concentric target, the tendriled lettering. Cataloged as BG-137 in Eric King's standard guide, the original printing measures roughly 14 by 22 inches; strong copies still trade in the mid-hundreds of dollars, and Wolfgang's issued a small coated-stock reprint in 2021. Wolfgang's, the Rock Poster Society, and independent auction records agree on the catalog number, venue, artist, bill order, and the September 19 head date.

The date sits cleanly inside a documented weekly rhythm at the hall. The week before, BG-136 (Sept 12–14) had paired Big Brother and the Holding Company with Santana and a very young Chicago, also under a Griffin poster. The week after, BG-138 (Sept 26–28) gave the stage to the Bloomfield–Kooper "Super Session" touring unit with It's a Beautiful Day, drawn by Lee Conklin; and BG-139 (Oct 3–5) brought Canned Heat and Gordon Lightfoot. Thursday-to-Saturday, poster by poster, the Fillmore West's late-1968 calendar is unusually well-preserved, and BG-137 falls exactly where the sequence says it should. The single soft spot is the precise length of the engagement — Wolfgang's foregrounds only the 19th — so the run is best stated as a three-night stand, September 19–21, opening on the anchor date (the COAU cache carries the full 19–21 span).

What makes the night worth remembering is less what CCR was than what it was about to become. By September 1968 Creedence were still, principally, an East Bay band who had spent years as the Golliwogs before John Fogerty's reinvention. Their self-titled debut on Fantasy had appeared only months earlier, and its long, churning cover of Dale Hawkins's "Suzie Q" — broken first on San Francisco's free-form KMPX before it ever charted — had given them their first genuine hit and a growing local reputation. It is worth resisting hindsight here: the CCR of this poster had not yet released "Proud Mary" (that would come with "Bayou Country" in January 1969), had not yet become the most reliable singles band in America, and were, on this bill, the middle act under a blues legend. To call this their "breakout" would be to read 1969 backward into 1968. Better to say they arrived at the Fillmore West as a band the Bay Area had begun to notice — one album deep, one hit deep — and left the stage to a headliner who embodied the tradition Fogerty was busy compressing into three-minute swamp-rock singles.

The other rooms were quiet by comparison that Thursday: Sopwith Camel were mid-residency at the Matrix in 1967 on this date, the Second Coming a year before that, and Jefferson Airplane back at the Matrix in their founding 1965 run — all real, all unpostered club nights that belong to the record as scene color rather than anchors.