By the middle of July 1966, the Fillmore Auditorium had a band that was becoming its own. Where BG-14, BG-15 and BG-16 had imported their headliners -- the Independence Ball's touring acts, the Turtles up from Los Angeles, the Mindbenders over from England -- BG-17 turned to the house. Jefferson Airplane headlined the Fillmore in mid-July 1966, the city's own rising band playing the city's own room, and the poster Bill Graham numbered seventeen records the night.

It is worth being exact about who the Airplane were that month, because hindsight has quietly rewritten the band. In July 1966 Jefferson Airplane's singer was Signe Toly Anderson, not Grace Slick. Slick was still fronting the Great Society -- she would not join the Airplane until the autumn -- so the band that headlined BG-17 was the first-album Airplane, the one whose debut LP "Jefferson Airplane Takes Off" was released that August. "Somebody to Love" and "White Rabbit," the songs that would make the band a national name, were a year and a Grace Slick away. The group that took the Fillmore stage in mid-July 1966 was a local favourite on the verge, not yet the platinum act of 1967.

Billed beneath them, per the catalog record, were the Grateful Dead. It is the kind of pairing that the decades quietly invert: in mid-July 1966 the Dead were a scuffling, unsigned band still looking for an identity, and on this card they were the support act, not the headliner -- the Airplane were the bigger local draw, and the bill says so plainly. Reading it in period order is the small corrective the chronicle exists for: the Airplane on top, the Dead underneath, both of them a year or more short of the fame that now makes us want to flip the order.

The poster is the work of Wes Wilson, Graham's house designer through the whole early numbered run, the man whose flame-lettering was, week by week across the summer of 1966, teaching San Francisco what a rock poster could look like. BG-17 sits in the unbroken sequence -- 14, 15, 16, 17 -- of Wilson Fillmore cards, the magenta-and-orange vocabulary tightening toward the full melting style he would arrive at within months.

What this page does not pin down is the exact night or the run length. The catalog sequence places BG-17 firmly in mid-July 1966, right after the early-July Turtles and Mindbenders bookings, and the record dates it around July 15; whether it was a single Friday or a Friday-through-Sunday weekend run is not asserted here, and the date is flagged approximate accordingly. What is solid is the shape of the night: Jefferson Airplane, Signe Anderson still at the microphone, headlining their home room over the Grateful Dead, under a Wes Wilson poster, in the summer the San Francisco Sound was inventing itself -- and a few months before the band's own story changed forever.