This is the one that started it all — the first psychedelic concert poster.

In the summer of 1965, five young musicians who called themselves the Amazing Charlatans loaded into a refurbished saloon in the old Comstock silver town of Virginia City, Nevada. The Red Dog Saloon was a long way from San Francisco, but what happened there over the next six weeks would echo back across the Sierra and set the entire scene in motion.

The poster came before the music. Band leader George Hunter and keyboardist Mike Ferguson designed it in advance to announce the residency — Hunter drawing the ornate, 19th-century-inspired lettering that spelled out THE AMAZING CHARLATANS, Ferguson rendering the intricate portraits of the five members ringing the page. It is a strange, beautiful, hand-drawn thing, equal parts Victorian handbill and something nobody had a name for yet. Collectors would later call it simply "The Seed," for everything that grew from it.

There are two versions, and the difference is the story. The first printing, in blue ink, advertised the band playing June 1 through 15, 1965. But the opening was pushed back, and a second poster had to be drawn — the same artwork in black ink, now reading "Opening June 21." This is the blue one. The original. The announcement of a show that, on the date it promised, had not yet happened.

The Charlatans took LSD immediately before their first performance at the Red Dog — which is why they are remembered as the first rock band to play live on acid, and why the residency is so often marked as the true beginning of psychedelic rock as a lived culture rather than just a sound. The music itself was closer to jug-band and good-time string music than the feedback-drenched improvisation that would later define acid rock; the revolution here was in the spirit, the look, and the moment.

There was a third thing the Red Dog set loose, beyond the poster and the music: the light. Bill Ham — working with Bob Cohen out of an abandoned Virginia City train station — built an automated light panel for the residency, colored lights shifting behind frosted Plexiglas in time with the sound. It was the beginning of what Ham would refine into the liquid light show, oil and dye and water swirled live on the lens of an overhead projector and thrown across the walls and the band. He is widely regarded as the originator of the psychedelic light show, and it started here. When Chet Helms saw what Ham was doing at the Red Dog, he brought him back to San Francisco to light the Avalon Ballroom — and the look of the entire ballroom era followed him out the door. The poster, the band, and the lights: three things that walked out of one saloon in the Nevada desert and became a movement.

What the Charlatans started at the Red Dog, others would carry into the Fillmore and the Avalon. The swirling, vibrating letterforms that became the signature psychedelic style arrived a year later, in the hands of artists like Wes Wilson. But the aspiration — that a concert poster could be a piece of art, that an announcement could be a manifesto — was already here, in blue ink, promising a show from the first of June.