On Wednesday, June 28, 1967, the bill at the Oakland Auditorium ran long, and the handbill - a Don Ryder design in the Art of Rock series - told only part of the story. Across the bay from the Fillmore and the Avalon, the East Bay had its own scene and its own promoter, Bill Quarry, whose "Teens 'N Twenties" dances had grown from a San Leandro skating rink up to rooms this size, and who deliberately commissioned Fillmore-style psychedelic posters from Ryder. This was a Quarry production.

The headliner was the Young Rascals, whose "Groovin'" was the number-one record in the country that week - a touring pop-soul act at the very top of the charts. Beneath them sat a cross-section of the Bay Area's own: Country Joe and the Fish, the Berkeley band whose Vietnam-era "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" made them the East Bay's most pointed psychedelic act, playing what amounted to a hometown gig eleven days after Monterey; Sons of Champlin, the Marin horn-rock outfit; the Los Angeles hitmakers the Grass Roots; and - added at the last minute and printed on nothing - the Grateful Dead, in what was their first appearance at a venue they would eventually play nearly sixty times.

And here is the turn the handbill doesn't show: the Dead were there because Sparrow was not. By the most detailed account, the Grateful Dead filled in for Sparrow, who were billed but appear not to have played. That makes Sparrow the band to linger on - because Sparrow was John Kay's group, and in June 1967 that was still its name. Later the same year - the change was gradual, settling in around the autumn, with Gabriel Mekler suggesting the title from a Hermann Hesse novel - Sparrow would reorganize in Los Angeles as Steppenwolf, and within about a year "Born to Be Wild" would make them famous enough to define a decade's worth of motorcycle montages. The handbill that prints "Sparrow" is a photograph of a name in its last weeks - a band advertised for a Wednesday in Oakland that it seems never to have played, already halfway to becoming someone else.

No setlist survives, and the Art of Rock handbill is thinner-sourced than a Fillmore poster - the kind of East Bay show the San Francisco histories tend to skip. That's most of why it's worth a page. The famous rooms across the bay get remembered; the Wednesday in Oakland, with a chart-topper on top and a vanishing band billed fourth, mostly doesn't.