By the time the Jimi Hendrix Experience reached the last night of its Fillmore Auditorium stand on Sunday, June 25, 1967, the bill on the poster had stopped describing the show. Clifford Charles Seeley's BG-69 had been printed before the run even opened - before the Experience set fire to a guitar, and to its own American reputation, at Monterey on June 18 - and it named Jefferson Airplane on top, with Gabor Szabo and a still-obscure "Jimi Hendrix" beneath. Six nights later the room had outgrown the paper on its own wall.

By the closing night, Jefferson Airplane had dropped off their own headlining run. The most careful account, from the researcher Corry Arnold, is hedged - someone in the Airplane was sick, he writes, and they missed possibly all but the opening night, with Big Brother and the Holding Company stepping into their slot. (Janis Joplin, herself just back from Monterey, on a bill she wasn't booked for.) There is a more romantic version, traceable to Bill Graham's own telling - that Hendrix simply took the town by storm on opening night and the Airplane, rattled, asked to be moved down the bill. Arnold flatly calls the related story that Jorma Kaukonen was intimidated by Hendrix "apocryphal, if unlikely." Both versions circulate; only one of them is flattering, which is usually a clue.

What is not in dispute is that June 25 was a Hendrix double-header. That same afternoon, before the Fillmore doors opened, the Experience played a free set in the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park - about forty-five minutes off the back of a flatbed truck, with the pioneering all-female San Francisco band the Ace of Cups supporting, for a few hundred people who happened to be there. Then they walked into the Fillmore and did it again, two sets that evening, for Bill Graham.

No setlist survives for any of it, and the backstage anecdotes that cling to the night are best left as anecdotes. What survives is the shape of the thing: a poster already overtaken by events, a headliner quietly gone from the closing card, and a guitarist who, a week after Monterey, was too big for the room he'd been booked into as an unknown. The art on the wall said one thing; the week said another. That gap - between what was advertised and what actually happened - is most of what makes this particular Sunday worth remembering.