On the night of Wednesday, June 18, 1969, The Who were at the middle of a three-night Fillmore West stand (June 17-19) - and they were doing something almost no American audience had yet seen: performing most of Tommy, their just-released rock opera, in a live touring version that ran close to an hour. The album had come out the previous month (May 1969), and the Fillmore West nights fell early in the tour that would carry the piece from rock ballrooms to opera houses. Bill Graham's Fillmore West - the former Carousel Ballroom at Market and South Van Ness, which Graham had taken over in July 1968 and renamed - was the right room for it: big enough for the spectacle, intimate enough that Pete Townshend's windmilling and Roger Daltrey's microphone-lassoing landed as physical events, not distant gestures. (After the Who's three nights, the same week's poster carried a separate bill - Santana, the Impressions, Ike & Tina Turner, Blues Image - into June 20-22; the run was not all Who.)

The run's poster, BG-178 (with a companion postcard BG-179), marks a turning point in the Bill Graham series for a reason that has nothing to do with The Who: it was the debut Fillmore poster of David Singer, the collage artist who would go on to design more posters in the numbered Bill Graham series than anyone else. Singer's arrival signals the late-'60s shift in the poster idiom - away from the hand-drawn, lettering-as-image psychedelia of Wes Wilson and the Mouse/Kelley Avalon school, toward photomontage and cooler, more graphic compositions. A Brotherhood of Light light show shared the bill.

The Who nights' support was, in the Fillmore manner, willfully eclectic - Woody Herman & His Orchestra (Graham loved to put a big band on a rock bill) and A.B. Skhy. The exact-date confirmation for June 18 comes from a show-level entry on setlist.fm for The Who at Fillmore West, June 18, 1969 (user-contributed, but corroborated by the poster's printed June 17-19 Who dates and the Tommy-tour record).