August 11, 1968 was a Sunday, and it closed out six nights at the Fillmore West on a single poster — one of Lee Conklin's hand drawings, the motif he returned to again and again, with fingers and palms folding into landscape. The sheet is BG-132, and part of what makes it worth looking at is how much work one image was asked to do.

The run was really two runs. The Chambers Brothers headlined August 6th, 7th and 8th, with the Charlatans and Queen Lily Soap beneath them. Then the bill turned over: Eric Burdon and the Animals took the last three nights, August 9th through the 11th, with Blood, Sweat & Tears second and the Gypsy Wizard Band opening. The Holy See ran lights across all six. Conklin drew one picture to carry both halves, which is a small argument about what a week at the Fillmore West actually was — not six shows but one event with a change of cast.

The band in the middle of that Sunday bill was in a strange condition. Blood, Sweat & Tears had been Al Kooper's idea, and Kooper was gone. He had walked out in April, four months before this show, after his bandmates pushed for a stronger lead singer than he was. The record that would turn the group into a chart fixture — the self-titled second album with "Spinning Wheel" and "You've Made Me So Very Happy" — was still months from release. So on the second-billed slot of a closing night, Blood, Sweat & Tears were a band that had lost its architect and had not yet become the thing most people remember. Exactly who was singing for them at the Fillmore West that night is something I cannot establish. David Clayton-Thomas was eventually recruited as Kooper's replacement, but no source I can find pins the date he joined closely enough to place him on this stage on August 11th, and I would rather leave the question open than answer it confidently and wrongly.

Above them, Eric Burdon was several years and one full reinvention past "House of the Rising Sun," fronting a version of the Animals that had relocated to California and gone psychedelic. Below them, the Gypsy Wizard Band opened three nights and left almost no trace.

Nothing dramatic is recorded about the closing night. No one was arrested, no one collapsed, no famous guest sat in. It was the sixth night of a six-night poster, the last of Burdon's three, and then the hall went dark and the next sheet went up. That is what most nights were.