The poster Greg Irons drew for the Fillmore Auditorium run beginning Tuesday, June 27, 1967 was his first for Bill Graham - the start of a short, distinctive stretch of work for the house. The bill it advertised was its own kind of collision: Chuck Berry, one of the architects of rock and roll, headlining over Eric Burdon and the Animals and the Steve Miller Blues Band, deep in the Summer of Love, about ten days after Monterey Pop.

The detail that makes the week is what happened behind Berry. He had come without a band, and the young Steve Miller Blues Band was enlisted to back him through his sets. Out of those nights came Live at the Fillmore Auditorium, released on Mercury that October - Chuck Berry's live record, and effectively the first appearance on record of what would become the Steve Miller Band. It's worth being precise about the timing: the album was recorded later in the run, on the night of June 30, not on this opening Tuesday. June 27 is where the engagement started, not where the tape rolled.

Eric Burdon's Animals sat in the middle of the bill, fresh from their own Monterey set a week and a half earlier. (A myth that has attached itself to this run - that it was Burdon's first trip to America - is simply wrong; the Animals had toured the States the previous summer, in 1966.) Whether the three acts rotated their running order across the six nights isn't documented; what's certain is the billing order on Irons's poster, with Berry on top.

There's a story that Irons drew BG-70 overnight, a rush job - it's repeated often enough, but I haven't found it in a source that would carry weight, so take it as lore rather than fact. What isn't lore is the shape of the booking: a founding figure of the music, propped up by a San Francisco blues band a decade his junior, making a record that would outlast the week. The Fillmore did this kind of thing - put the past and the present on the same stage and let them work it out - better than anywhere.