On Friday, September 16, 1966, the Family Dog opened a two-night stand at the Avalon Ballroom — the Grateful Dead over Oxford Circle, September 16–17 — and hung in the window the poster that would outlive every other artifact on this page. FD-26 is the "Skeleton & Roses" card, Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley's, and it is the first appearance of the image that became the Grateful Dead's permanent face (bill, dates, and the Mouse/Kelley attribution per coau, corroborated by SFMOMA's catalog record for the poster, accession 95.479, and by rockposters). Everything the band would later be recognized by across five decades of merchandise and bootleg spines starts on a Family Dog handbill for a Friday-and-Saturday in a room on Sutter Street.

The image was not invented so much as found, and the finding is well documented. Mouse and Kelley worked the shelves of the San Francisco Public Library for source material, and what they pulled here was an Edmund J. Sullivan illustration from a 1913 edition of *The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám* — a skeleton crowned with roses, gathering more. They lifted it, set it under their own lettering, and handed the band an emblem. It is worth being precise about the layers of authorship, because the poster is routinely described as though Mouse drew the skeleton: the central figure is Sullivan's, from 1913; the poster — the adaptation, the type, the object — is Mouse and Kelley's, from 1966. The Curtis-photograph borrowing behind FD-25 six days earlier on this same window's September 10 page was the same working method, one week apart. That's not a coincidence to note in passing; that *was* the method.

The recordings are where this night needs its hedge. Two semi-bootleg LPs from the early 1970s, *Vintage Dead* and *Historic Dead*, are built from Avalon tape generally attributed to this stand — but "generally attributed" is the honest register. The material is agreed to be Avalon, late 1966; the specific assignment to September 16 is traditional rather than settled, and the archives that hold the tape hedge it themselves. So: a documented show, a famous poster, and a body of recorded music that is *probably* this night and shouldn't be asserted as certainly this night.

The same evening, a mile east, Bill Graham was doing something at the Fillmore Auditorium that had nothing to do with rock economics. On September 16, 1966 the bill was the Byrds with Wildflower, and between the sets the house staged "The Dutchman" — the LeRoi Jones play, by the writer who would later take the name Amiri Baraka (bill and the play credit per coau, which files the night as P-3). A one-act about a white woman and a Black man on a New York subway car, ending in a killing, performed in a ballroom between sets by a folk-rock band with a hit: it is the single best piece of evidence on this whole week's calendar that Graham's early Fillmore was still operating on Mime Troupe logic, a benefit-hall booker's instincts rather than a promoter's. Note the catalog oddity too, since it trips people up — this night carries a P-series designation, not a BG number.

A year on, September 16, 1967 was a Saturday and the map was crowded. The Fillmore Auditorium closed out BG-83 — Jim Blashfield's poster, the Electric Flag with Mother Earth and the LDM Spiritual Band — on the last of its September 14–16 nights. The Avalon had FD-81, Moscoso's "Mist Dance," at night two of the Youngbloods / Other Half / Mad River run. And out at the Family Dog's Denver hall on West Evans, FD-D2 was mid-run as well. Meanwhile the Straight Theater had the Steve Miller Blues Band back, this time with Notes from the Underground and Billy Roberts — the previous night's Sopwith Camel swapped out, Roberts held over, "Hey Joe" still listed on the bill as though it were an act rather than his song (Straight bill per coau; the Fillmore and Avalon runs per coau and wolfgangs). Four halls, four bills, one Saturday.

The earliest entry on this date is also the quietest and, in hindsight, the most consequential. On Thursday, September 16, 1965 the Matrix had Jefferson Airplane with JC Burris — the Airplane in their house-band months at the club Marty Balin had opened barely a month before, playing a Thursday and then a Friday to whoever was in the room (per coau). This is a full year before the Dead's skeleton went up at the Avalon. Same date on the calendar, and the distance between the two is the distance between a folk club with a residency and a ballroom scene with its own iconography.

(1966: the Byrds and a LeRoi Jones play at the Fillmore, and The Second Coming working a two-night Matrix stand alongside. 1967: BG-83 closing, FD-81 at night two, FD-D2 running in Denver, the Straight going strong. 1969: Fillmore West ran a Tuesday Night Jam/Audition — Graham's open-audition night, a real listing but not an event to build a page around; and the Family Dog on the Great Highway had Orion and Devil's Kitchen with the film "In Search of America," filed under a date-stamp code rather than a true catalog number. 1968: no corroborated San Francisco ballroom bill surfaces on this date in the reachable record — an honest gap, not a silence worth filling.)