BG-29 — "The Sound" — September 23, 1966 at Winterland: the night Bill Graham first booked the four-thousand-seat ice rink at Post and Steiner that would become his flagship room for the next dozen years. The Friday-night opener of a four-weekend run advertising Jefferson Airplane, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and Muddy Waters across Winterland (Sept 23-24, Sept 30-Oct 1) and the Fillmore Auditorium (Sept 25 and Oct 2 Sunday afternoons), with a Wes Wilson poster — the curving female nude wreathed in the Wilson script that had become his signature in 1966 — that would itself become one of the most reproduced single sheets of the psychedelic era.

The lineup matters. Jefferson Airplane in late September 1966 was a band in the last weeks of its first life. Signe Anderson, the original female vocalist, was on her way out (her last show with the band was October 15 at the Fillmore). Grace Slick — recruited from the Great Society, where she had written the songs that became "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" — would join in October. The Sept 23-Oct 2 run is therefore the pre-Slick Airplane near its terminus: the band as Bay Area folk-rockers about to become national psychedelic icons, captured in transit. (Per the Rock Prosopography Airplane chronology and the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation show archive.)

The blues bills are the other half of the story. Bill Graham had been programming Chicago electric blues into Fillmore weekends throughout 1966 — Lightnin' Hopkins in August, Otis Rush, B.B. King later — but BG-29 brings two acts of canonical weight to the same bill. Muddy Waters, fifty-three, the headwaters of the Chicago electric sound; the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar and Mark Naftalin on keys, the white Chicago band that had electrified Dylan at Newport the prior summer. Graham would later credit Bloomfield with persuading him to systematically book the elder blues acts whose audiences were segregated away from rock crowds (per the Bill Graham promoter Wikipedia article). BG-29 is one of the early experiments in that policy.

Production logistics. Wilson printed the first printing in three ink colors — black (OP-1), magenta (OP-2), and purple (OP-3) — with a 1986 fourth print (per classicposters.com BG-29 catalog and dking-gallery.com). Each Type-1 measures approximately 13.5 x 24.5 inches; the magenta variant is the rarer of the three originals. The Bindweed Press did most of Bill Graham's poster work in this period; the Sound poster's curving lettering set the template Wilson would carry through BG-30 (Yardbirds) and beyond.

Then the riots. On the second weekend of the run — September 30 and October 1 — civil unrest broke out in the Fillmore district following an officer-involved shooting nearby. According to Rock Prosopography 101's careful Airplane performance chronology, the Saturday October 1 Winterland show was relocated to the Fillmore Auditorium because of the riots, drawing only a few hundred people. The Sunday October 2 Fillmore afternoon show went ahead as advertised. The poster was already printed; the schedule on the sheet outpaced the schedule of the city. This is one of the rare BG-series posters whose shows did not entirely match the sheet's promise — the cancellation/relocation went undocumented on the artifact, and the historical record (Rock Prosopography, the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation entry for Winterland Sept 23 1966) is what reconstructs the discrepancy now.

The chronicle for September 23 itself is therefore tighter than the poster suggests. That Friday night went ahead at Winterland: pre-Slick Airplane, Butterfield with Bloomfield, Muddy Waters, in front of an audience of dancers in Bill Graham's first booking at the room that would later host the Last Waltz, every Grateful Dead New Year's run from 1971 onward, and the Sex Pistols' final show. The night sits at the intersection of three biographies — Graham's, the Airplane's, the Chicago blues' — and was preserved on the Wes Wilson sheet whose cancellation note never made it to the lithography stone.

Source: classicposters.com BG-29/29-1 entry, billgrahamfoundation.org Winterland Sept 23 1966 show entry, rockprosopography101.blogspot.com October-December 1966 Jefferson Airplane performance list, Wikipedia Bill Graham (promoter) article, dking-gallery.com BG-29 store listings, recordmecca.com BG-29 archive.