By the high summer of 1966 the Avalon Ballroom had become the Family Dog's church of sound and light, and on the weekend of June 24th and 25th, Chet Helms hung a poster on the city that would outlive almost everything it advertised. The bill was Big Brother and the Holding Company — fronted by a Texas transplant named Janis Joplin, then only weeks into her tenure with the band — with Quicksilver Messenger Service in support and Bill Ham working the liquid lights.

The image was a theft, and a knowing one. Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley lifted "Le Zouave," the bearded, pipe-and-paper mascot of Zig-Zag rolling papers, and set him glowing against the Family Dog's lettering. To most of San Francisco he was just an old tobacco trademark; to the longhairs filing into the Avalon he was an inside joke about what those papers were really rolling — a wink the straight world wouldn't catch. It was Mouse and Kelley's first poster designed together (Mouse had drawn the previous one, FD-13, alone), and it launched one of the most consequential partnerships in poster art — the same hands that would later give the Grateful Dead their skull and roses.

The Zig-Zag Man became, by most accounts, the most beloved and most copied poster of the whole Family Dog series — popular enough to be among the first ever bootlegged. A perfect artifact of its moment: appropriated, beloved, pirated, and reclaimed.