Bill Graham called it the Independence Ball, and the name was printed right on the poster - it is the Grateful Dead's own archivists who still use it today, because the most famous thing to come out of the weekend was a tape. Wes Wilson drew BG-14 in purple and magenta, the lettering still a step short of the full melting psychedelia he'd arrive at within months, for a three-night Fillmore Auditorium run over the July 4th weekend of 1966: Friday July 1 through Sunday July 3.

The opening night, Friday, July 1, was headlined by Quicksilver Messenger Service, with Big Brother and the Holding Company - Janis Joplin and all - billed beneath them as support, and a band called the Jaywalkers third. It is worth sitting with that order for a second, because it's the kind of thing the decades quietly rewrite: in July 1966, on a Friday in San Francisco, Janis Joplin was the second act, and Quicksilver were the bigger draw. The run's other nights only deepen the effect - Saturday brought the Great! Society with Grace Slick, Sopwith Camel, and the Charlatans; Sunday brought the Grateful Dead, Love with Arthur Lee, and a "Group B" whose identity no source has recovered. Nearly everyone across the three days would be more famous later than they were that weekend.

The Sunday is the night history remembers, because Owsley "Bear" Stanley recorded the Grateful Dead's set and it eventually surfaced on the band's official releases - the earliest complete Dead show ever put out - which is why "the Independence Ball" reads, now, as a Grateful Dead event. The Dead headlined that Sunday over Love, though they were a scuffling, unsigned act in July 1966, still looking for an identity; it would be a mistake to let their later fame reorganize the rest of the weekend's bills in our heads.

The only recording from the entire run is that Sunday Dead set, and those songs belong to Sunday. Nothing documents the Friday opening beyond the poster itself - which is exactly why the poster is the story. What belongs to July 1 is the bill in period order, and the small, clarifying shock of reading it that way: Quicksilver headlining, Janis supporting, a forgotten band called the Jaywalkers at the bottom of the card, on the first night of Bill Graham's Independence Ball.