For six nights, July 4-9, 1967 -- the heart of the Summer of Love -- Bill Graham stacked the Fillmore Auditorium with a bill that was an argument in itself: Bo Diddley on top, then Big Brother and the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, then Quicksilver Messenger Service, then the Delta patriarch Big Joe Williams. It was Graham's thesis in one poster -- book the blues and R&B originators above the rising psychedelic bands, and make the young audiences filing in learn where the music came from. Bo Diddley, then thirty-eight, whose percussive beat is a cornerstone of rock, had a brand-new record out that month; Big Joe Williams, sixty-three, played a homemade nine-string guitar and had written "Baby, Please Don't Go" back in 1935.

Big Brother was sixteen days past Monterey Pop, where Janis's "Ball and Chain" had stunned the festival -- a set so overwhelming the band was invited back a second day on the condition it be filmed, and that filmed performance made her a star. But on this Independence Day they were still a rising local act on a tiny Mainstream Records deal, their debut not yet charting, Albert Grossman and the Columbia deal still months away. Post-Monterey buzz, pre-fame.

The poster, BG-71, is by Bonnie MacLean -- two towering figures seen from below in reds and olive greens on black. MacLean had married Graham three weeks earlier, and had just inherited the role of house designer from Wes Wilson, who quit that May in a dispute over poster royalties, drawing a snake with a dollar sign in its mouth on his final Fillmore poster before Graham let him go. BG-71 sits squarely in MacLean's early solo run -- Wilson's Art Nouveau lettering evolving toward her own stained-glass figures.