Bill Haley & the Comets (FD-133)
FD-133 · George Hunter, Jerry Wainwright
San Francisco
The Drifters
The Flamin’ Groovies
Saturday, August 17, 1968 was the middle night of the Avalon's FD-133 stand: Bill Haley and the Comets headlining, the Drifters second, the Flamin' Groovies opening, under Jerry Wainwright and George Hunter's poster with Vulcan on lights.
The Drifters in the middle of that bill are worth a moment, because the easy version of their story is wrong. By 1968 they were a touring act with nothing to promote — no recording sessions at all that year, and a chart career that was finished. The name had passed through so many hands that a clean count of lineups is genuinely impossible; something like sixty musicians have moved through the Treadwell line, with rival Drifters groups working at the same time. But the connection to the records was not as broken as that suggests. Johnny Moore was on that stage, and Moore had sung lead on "Under the Boardwalk" in 1964, stepping in the day after Rudy Lewis died. What was long gone was the "Save the Last Dance for Me" band — that was Ben E. King's lineup, eight years earlier.
Across town, Creedence held the middle night of their own stand at Fillmore West. Neither room could have known which of its acts the decade would end up remembering.
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 Aug 16-18 night 2. VERIFIED wolfgangs.
Were You There?
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