The weekend of September 22, 1967 gave San Francisco two Family Dog bills a thousand miles apart, and the one that stayed home is the anchor for this day: at the Avalon Ballroom, Chet Helms's Family Dog opened a three-night stand — Friday through Sunday, September 22–24 — with the Charlatans and Buddy Guy, under a poster catalogued FD-83. (Its companion night in Denver, the Grateful Dead's Colorado debut on the same FD-82 weekend, opens the following day's page.)

The FD-83 poster is the work of Robert Fried (1937–1975), one of the quieter talents of the ballroom era, whose densely layered, painterly sheets never achieved the brand recognition of a Mouse and Kelley or a Wes Wilson but repay a long look. The bill is a study in the scene's two founding currents meeting on one stage. The Charlatans were, by most accounts, the band that started it all — the group whose 1965 residency at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada, and whose "Seed" handbill are often cited as the visual and cultural spark of the whole San Francisco poster-and-ballroom phenomenon. By September 1967 they were elder statesmen of a scene barely two years old, a little eclipsed by the louder bands they had helped make possible, playing their home turf at the Avalon. Beneath them was Buddy Guy — the electric Chicago bluesman whose ferocity on the guitar was, directly or at one remove, the source code for half the players in the room. The light show was the North American Ibis Alchemical Company (per Third Mind Books and the auction record), a fixture of the Avalon's Family Dog nights.

The pairing is the whole point, and it is the same point the Avalon kept making all through 1966 and 1967: put the Chicago blues in front of the Haight, and let the young bands stand next to the source. Buddy Guy at the Avalon in 1967 is the kind of booking that looks, in retrospect, like a seminar — the students on top by billing, the master beneath, everyone in the same room learning from everyone else.

Robert Fried's FD-83 survives across the collector market and in museum hands, and the imagery is well documented even where a specific archive's page was unreachable on the day of this run: Wolfgang's search did not resolve for FD-82/FD-83 this pass, so a Wolfgang's-tier confirmation is recorded as an honest gap, but rockposters, Heritage, and the V&A independently cover both sheets. The Charlatans/Buddy Guy weekend is corroborated by the COAU Family Dog list and the poster catalogs; the run's Friday-through-Sunday span (September 22–24) is on the poster itself.

The rest of the date is the usual scene texture. In 1965 Lightnin' Hopkins was closing out a Matrix week; in 1966 the Second Coming were finishing a residency at the same club; in 1968 the Avalon's FD-138 Steve Miller / Muddy Waters weekend reached its last night on the 22nd. None of these carry a fresh poster the way FD-83 does, and so the Charlatans and Buddy Guy at the Avalon hold the day.