June 21, 1965 is the night the music actually started. The Charlatans had been billed at the Red Dog Saloon in Virginia City, Nevada since the first of the month — but the opening was pushed back nearly three weeks, and it wasn't until this Monday that the band finally took the stage in the restored Old West room a hundred miles from San Francisco. (The famous poster that announced the residency — "The Seed," the one that promised a show before it existed — has its own story on the [June 15 page](../day/06-15.html); the corrected-date reprint, catalogued AOR-2.1, is the one that reads "Opening June 21." This is the day it names.)

What opened that night was less a rock concert than a happening with a house band. George Hunter, Mike Wilhelm, Richard Olsen, Mike Ferguson, and Dan Hicks played jug-band and good-time string music in Edwardian Old West costume — closer to a string-band revue than to the feedback and freeform jamming "acid rock" would later mean. The Charlatans are nonetheless remembered as the first rock band to play live on LSD, and the residency settled into a rhythm that summer: Tuesday through Sunday, four sets a night, in a room run by and for the people who would become the scene. Bill Ham's automated light panel pulsed behind them — the first stirrings of the liquid light show he would carry to the Avalon.

None of it looked like a beginning at the time; it looked like a strange, costumed gig in a desert saloon. But the Red Dog crowd carried the look, the sound, the lights, and the idea of the poster-as-manifesto back over the Sierra that fall, where Red Dog regulars Luria Castell, Ellen Harman, and Alton Kelley founded the Family Dog (Chet Helms took the name over in early 1966 and ran the Avalon). The residency itself ended in August when the saloon's troubles caught up with it. June 21 is the unremarkable-looking Monday on which all of that quietly began.