Friday, August 18, 1967 was the second night of a four-night Quicksilver Messenger Service stand at the Avalon Ballroom, with Melvin Q and the Other Half warming up.

Quicksilver in the summer of 1967 were the great unrecorded San Francisco band. The Airplane had two albums out, the Dead had one, Big Brother had one — Quicksilver had signed to Capitol and would not release anything until the following spring. What they had instead was a live reputation, built in exactly this room, on John Cipollina's vibrato-heavy guitar and a two-guitar interplay with Gary Duncan that people came back for. Booking them for four nights at the Avalon was Chet Helms betting on a band the record shops could not yet sell.

The poster is FD-76, by Jack Hatfield, who made very few concert posters in his career — his known handful includes FD-87, BG-103, BG-104, and the Magic Mountain piece. This one is a blue-on-white line drawing of two figures beneath a canopy of foliage, printed on white index stock, closer to an engraving than to the poster-shop psychedelia around it.