On the night of July 2, 1969, Johnny Winter stood at the exact hinge of his career on the Fillmore West stage, the middle night of a three-night run (July 1-3) with Lonnie Mack and Rockin' Foo, lit by the Brotherhood of Light. Five months earlier the cross-eyed albino blues guitarist from Beaumont, Texas had signed to Columbia Records in a deal whose reported advance -- figures range around $600,000, described at the time as the largest in the industry -- made him the most-hyped new guitarist in America before most people had heard a note. The hype had a specific origin: a December 1968 Rolling Stone piece on the Texas music scene that singled him out, read by New York club owner Steve Paul, who flew to Texas and became his manager.

There is a quiet symmetry in the bill. Lonnie Mack -- the elder guitar hero of "Memphis" and "Wham!," whose instrumental sound predated the psychedelic era -- had himself just been revived by a late-1968 Rolling Stone rave that prompted Elektra to reissue his catalog. Two guitarists, a half-generation apart, both lifted onto the same Bill Graham stage by the same young magazine within months of each other. Rockin' Foo, the opener, was a California band whose obscurity has one strange footnote: their album art was drawn by a pre-fame Phil Hartman.

Winter was six weeks from Woodstock. The self-titled Columbia debut was fresh in the racks. What survives best of this specific night is not the music but the artifact: the poster David Singer designed for the run, BG-180, with its famous "Two-Lips / Tulips" visual pun -- a piece deliberately unrelated to the blues being played beneath it. As with so many Fillmore nights, the poster outlived the performance, and it is the poster, not any setlist, that lets us date the evening at all.