On the weekend of October 13–15, 1967, the Avalon Ballroom hung a poster that behaved like a playing card. Jack Hatfield's design for Family Dog show number eighty-seven — catalogued **FD-87** and known to collectors as **"King of Spades"** — set a lion into the frame of a royal court card, the event particulars arranged around it like the pips and borders of a deck. It is a quieter, more graphic image than the molten lettering Wes Wilson or Victor Moscoso were producing down the same hallway of the Family Dog catalog, and that restraint is part of what makes it worth pausing over: Hatfield is one of the lesser-known hands in the Avalon's poster corpus, a name that appears a handful of times rather than on every other week's handbill. The Albuquerque Museum, which keeps a dedicated record for him, and ConcertPosterGallery both credit the "King of Spades" to Hatfield without hesitation, and his wider output — a 1967 Quicksilver Messenger Service poster, a pair of Fillmore pieces in 1968 — confirms a real working artist rather than a catalog typo.

The bill the card advertised is, in hindsight, almost absurdly loaded. Headlining was **Buddy Guy**, the Chicago blues guitarist, his name set at the top of the card — a reminder that Chet Helms's Avalon, for all its psychedelic reputation, kept booking the Black blues and R&B musicians the San Francisco bands had learned from. Beneath him came **Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band**, and beneath them **Blue Cheer**. In October 1967, that running order made commercial sense in a way it never would again. Both of the acts billed under Buddy Guy were, at that moment, on the near side of their fame.

Blue Cheer, the San Francisco power trio, had not yet recorded the record that would make the argument for them as proto-metal. *Vincebus Eruptum* — with its skull-rattling cover of Eddie Cochran's "Summertime Blues," which would climb to number 14 — was still three months off; it arrived **January 16, 1968** (a date on which Wikipedia, Loudwire, uDiscover and Vintage Guitar all agree). So on this weekend they were a loud local band earning a third-billed slot, not yet the group critics would later credit as among the first heavy-metal albums made. Captain Beefheart was a half-step further along: his debut, *Safe as Milk*, had come out on Bob Krasnow's Buddah label **earlier in 1967** — most sources say September, though, as beefheart.com's own anniversary piece notes, there's evidence the record actually shipped earlier in the year. Either way, the album predated the show; Beefheart arrived at the Avalon with a record in the bins and Ry Cooder's fingerprints recently all over his band.

The weekend also catches Blue Cheer at their busiest. The band was, in effect, double-booked across the two rival San Francisco promoters. While they played the Family Dog's Avalon on this run, they were simultaneously listed on **Bill Graham's BG-88** — Jefferson Airplane and the Charlatans with Blue Cheer, Bonnie MacLean's poster, photographed by Herb Greene — which ran at the Fillmore Auditorium October 11–12 and at Winterland October 13–14. The famsf.org record and ConcertPosterGallery both carry that poster, and the overlap is real: the same band appears on a Helms card and a Graham card for the same mid-October days. It is a small but telling snapshot of how porous and competitive the scene's two poles still were in late 1967, and a standing caution for anyone reconstructing the week — **FD-87 is the Avalon show**, and the Winterland/Fillmore dates belong to a different poster and promoter entirely. (Blue Cheer had also closed the Avalon the previous weekend on **FD-86**, October 6–8, opposite Lee Michaels, per the Family Dog show list.)

What survives best is the object. ConcertPosterGallery grades original **FD-87-OP-1** copies — "Original Pre-Concert First Printing," an offset lithograph roughly 20¼ by 13½ inches — into the high nines, which is to say the card outlived the weekend it was made for. Buddy Guy would go on being Buddy Guy; Beefheart would spiral off toward *Trout Mask Replica*; Blue Cheer would briefly become one of the loudest bands in America and then recede. For three nights in October 1967, a comparatively obscure poster artist put all three of them on a single playing card at the Avalon, and the card is now the most durable evidence that the night happened at all.