Bill Haley & the Comets (FD-133, Avalon rival-twin)
FD-133 · George Hunter, Jerry Wainwright
San Francisco
The Drifters
The Flamin’ Groovies
Friday, August 16, 1968, the Avalon Ballroom opened a three-night stand that reads like a deliberate argument about where rock and roll came from. Chet Helms booked Bill Haley and the Comets — the man who had put "Rock Around the Clock" into the world fourteen years earlier, when most of the Avalon's dancers were small children — over the Drifters and, at the bottom, the Flamin' Groovies, a San Francisco band young enough to be the grandchildren of the bill they were opening.
The poster is FD-133, credited to Jerry Wainwright and George Hunter, with Vulcan lights; Wolfgang's brackets the run August 16 through 18. Hunter is the more familiar name — he founded the Charlatans in 1964, the band generally reckoned the first of San Francisco's psychedelic groups, and the Victorian-and-Old-West styling he developed with his bandmate Mike Ferguson helped set the visual tone of the emerging scene. Finding him credited on a Bill Haley poster is its own small piece of the story.
A mile away that same night, Bill Graham opened his own weekend at Fillmore West with Creedence Clearwater Revival on BG-133. The two rooms had chosen opposite bets for the same Friday: the Avalon on rock and roll's origins, the Fillmore on a Bay Area band about to break nationally. That rivalry, run at this distance and this pitch, is the whole engine of 1968 in the city.
Research Sources
FD-133 NARRATIVES REWRITTEN + FACT-CHECKED at human gate 2026-08-11. The run wrote ONE day-level narrative covering BOTH venues and copied it onto the BG-133 and FD-133 rows, so each poster page told the other poster's story. Split: BG-133 (hero) keeps the Fillmore-side text; FD-133 got its own Avalon-side story per night. Biographical claims added in the rewrite were then independently verified, and one was WRONG: - DRIFTERS: a draft said the 1968 group was "several lineups removed" from the "Under the Boardwalk" band. FALSE. Johnny Moore sang that 1964 lead (stepping in the day after Rudy Lewis died) AND was in the mid-1968 touring lineup (Moore/Sheppard/Fredericks/Turner, per Marv Goldberg's R&B Notebooks). Corrected. The "Save the Last Dance for Me" (1960, Ben E. King) break IS real and is what the text now says. Also dropped an unsupported "third incarnation" ordinal -- no source supports a clean count; ~60 musicians passed through the Treadwell line with rival Drifters groups touring simultaneously. - GEORGE HUNTER: founder of the Charlatans (1964) CONFIRMED, and confirmed the SAME person as the Family Dog poster artist (V&A collections record + RR Auction both credit "George Hunter of The Charlatans"). But "invented the look of the SF scene" was OVERSTATED and is now "helped set the visual tone", with co-credit to Mike Ferguson, whose Victoriana is inseparable from Hunter's Old West interest in every source. - FLAMIN' GROOVIES: formed 1965 (predating the Grateful Dead), and by Aug 1968 had released ONLY the self-pressed Sneakers 10-inch EP on their own Snazz label -- no label deal, no LP (Supersnazz came Sept 1969; Shake Some Action 1976). All confirmed. The punk/power-pop influence claim is strong critical consensus rather than analytically demonstrated, so it is attributed to critics rather than asserted in our own voice.
Verification Notes
Antagonist (2026-08-10 headless run): corroboration via check-claims on vetted sources. FD-133 Avalon Aug 16-18 = Bill Haley & the Comets/Drifters/Flamin' Groovies, Wainwright & Hunter, Vulcan Lights. VERIFIED wolfgangs+classicposters. (Antagonist correction: artist is Wainwright & Hunter, not Hunter alone.)
Were You There?
Do you have memories of this show, or an original FD-133 poster? On This Day in Art Rock History celebrates the people who lived through the psychedelic era. Your stories and collections matter to this archive.
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