On Thursday, June 23, 1966, Bill Graham brought Them — the raw, blues-soaked band fronted by a twenty-year-old Van Morrison — to the Fillmore Auditorium in what is recorded as the group's first San Francisco appearance. The booking was unusual: a single weeknight show, slotted in because Graham's weekend was already committed to Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and the comedian Lenny Bruce.

The poster, BG-12 in Graham's numbered Fillmore series, advertised Them with Grace Slick's pre-Airplane band the Great Society and the New Tweedy Brothers, a Haight-Ashbury outfit. It was the work of Wes Wilson, Graham's house artist of the moment — his molten, hand-drawn lettering here in vivid pink and green, the typography he was inventing in real time and that would come to define the San Francisco sound visually.

The show sits at a poignant hinge. This American run was among the last with Morrison before the band fractured — over money, by most accounts, with members' visas expiring soon after the tour — and he began the solo career that produced Astral Weeks and Moondance. Their catalog already held the garage standard "Gloria"; during Them's concurrent Los Angeles residency the young Doors opened for them and carried that song into their own set — one of the small, traceable transmissions by which the British R&B underground seeded American rock.