Lee Conklin's BG-126 spelled "Fillmore" in an organic, surreal pen-and-ink dreamscape, and it covered a full week at the original Fillmore Auditorium - June 25 through 30, 1968 - in two distinct halves, the way Bill Graham's bigger weeks often ran. The first half, roughly Tuesday through Thursday, belonged to Albert King, the Loading Zone, and Rain. The second half, Friday through the closing Sunday, brought Ten Years After, Canned Heat, and Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, with the Holy See light show across the run. So the bill for Sunday, June 30 - closing night - was Ten Years After on top, Alvin Lee's British blues-rock band, with Canned Heat's boogie and Dan Hicks's Charlatans-descended Western swing beneath. The Loading Zone, sometimes attached to this date in summaries, had played earlier in the week and was not on the Sunday bill.

It is tempting to call this the last night of the original Fillmore, and almost everyone does - but the clean version of that story doesn't survive a look at the catalog. The last engagement at the original Fillmore Auditorium was actually the next one: BG-127, the Creedence Clearwater Revival and Steppenwolf run that opened in early July and is widely catalogued as the venue's final show. Days into it, on July 5, 1968, Graham opened the new hall - Fillmore West, the renamed Carousel Ballroom a mile away at Market and Van Ness - and moved his operation across town. So the honest framing for June 30 is narrower and still meaningful: it was the close of one of the last full week-long runs billed and held at the original Fillmore Auditorium before the move. The building didn't go dark that Sunday, but the era it belonged to was within days of ending.

Conklin was Graham's house artist through 1968 and into 1969 - some thirty-one designs before Graham shifted to David Singer - and BG-126 is the kind of piece that earned him the role, the lettering doing the work the lineup couldn't, turning a split-week blues-and-boogie bill into something that looks, on the wall, like a single dream. The acts were strong and the room was about to change underneath them. That's the note this closing Sunday actually holds: not a finale, but a hinge.