On This Day in Art Rock History

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SAN FRANCISCO · THE PSYCHEDELIC ERA · 1960s

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BG-89

October 19, 1967
BG-89

BG-89 · Bonnie MacLean

Catalog Number
BG-89
Series
Bill Graham
Venue
Fillmore Auditorium
San Francisco
Date
October 19, 1967
Poster Artists
Performers
Eric Burdon and the Animals
Mother Earth
Hour Glass

October 19, 1967 — Eric Burdon and the Animals, Mother Earth, and Hour Glass opened a three-night stand at the Fillmore Auditorium, the Thursday-through-Saturday weekend that Bill Graham built around the former Animals frontman's new American band. The poster is BG-89, drawn by Bonnie MacLean — the Fillmore's in-house artist through much of 1967, and one of the very few women whose lettering defined the look of the Graham dance-concert series (per chickenonaunicycle and wolfgangs).

By the autumn of 1967 Eric Burdon was on his second life. The Animals — the Newcastle R&B band that had turned "The House of the Rising Sun" into a transatlantic number one in 1964 — had fractured, and Burdon had reassembled the name in California as "Eric Burdon and the Animals," a psychedelic outfit with little personnel overlap with the Newcastle original. The reinvention was total enough that the band's 1967 records ("Winds of Change," "San Franciscan Nights") read less like British Invasion R&B than like a convert's love letter to exactly the scene he was now playing in. Burdon had been at Monterey Pop that June; by October he was headlining the room that, more than any other, had given the San Francisco sound its stage.

The bill beneath him is the reason this night rewards a second look. **Mother Earth** was the San Francisco blues band fronted by Tracy Nelson, newly arrived from the Midwest and about to cut "Living with the Animals" for Mercury — a strong, blues-rooted second act that fit Graham's taste for pairing the ballroom's psychedelia with real blues chops. And third on the bill, almost buried in MacLean's lettering, was **Hour Glass** — the Los Angeles band that was, at that moment, the professional home of two young brothers from Florida named **Duane and Gregg Allman** (per wolfgangs; the Allman connection is well documented). Hour Glass were signed to Liberty and being steered toward a soft-pop sound the brothers hated; within a year the band would collapse, Duane would find his way to session work at Muscle Shoals, and by 1969 the Allman Brothers Band would exist. On October 19, 1967, the two of them were a support act at the bottom of a Fillmore poster — a detail invisible to the crowd that night and irresistible in hindsight.

The weekday matters, and it is worth stating plainly because the trade records are not always careful with it: October 19, 1967 was a **Thursday**, and the run went Thursday–Saturday, October 19–21 (the weekday computes cleanly, and chickenonaunicycle lists all three dates). That makes the 19th the engagement's opening night — this day's anchor, not a continuation of something earlier in the week. One cataloguing note carried forward for the human: at least one museum record (the V&A) files BG-89 under "Fillmore West," which is an anachronism — Fillmore West did not open until the summer of 1968. In October 1967 the venue was still the original **Fillmore Auditorium** at Geary and Fillmore. The poster and the COAU show-list both place the run there.

Bonnie MacLean's BG-89 belongs to the stretch after Wes Wilson's acrimonious 1967 split from Graham, when MacLean — Graham's partner, and until then often an uncredited hand — stepped into the lead-artist role for the Fillmore series. Her posters from this period carry a figurative, almost stained-glass formality next to Wilson's molten lettering, and BG-89 sits squarely in that run. (The poster image itself lives in the classicposters/FAMSF catalog, which a headless pass cannot reach; this day ships text-first, with the catalog facts — number, designer, bill, dates — corroborated across chickenonaunicycle, wolfgangs, and museum records rather than from the image.)

What this Thursday really marks is a convergence the room's dancers could not have read off the marquee: an English blues-shouter remaking himself as a San Francisco psychedelic act, a Midwestern blues singer at the start of a Bay Area career, and two unknown Florida brothers one band and two years short of inventing Southern rock — stacked, in that order, on a single Bonnie MacLean poster for one October weekend at the Fillmore.

Verification Notes

RESEARCHED+ANTAGONIZED 2026-10-12 (headless). Eric Burdon & the Animals / Mother Earth / Hour Glass, Fillmore AUDITORIUM, Oct 19-21 1967 (Thu-Sat). check-claims OK (chickenonaunicycle+wolfgangs). ANCHOR CALL: chosen OVER BG-196 (Joe Cocker, Fillmore West, Oct 16-19 1969) because BG-89 ANCHORS Oct 19 (opening Thursday) whereas BG-196 anchors Oct 16 (Oct 19 is its closing tail). Designer Bonnie MacLean (post-Wilson-split Fillmore artist). Hour Glass = Duane & Gregg Allman's pre-Allman-Brothers band (verified). DATA-HYGIENE: V&A record mislabels venue 'Fillmore West' -- anachronism (Fillmore West opened mid-1968); correct venue is Fillmore Auditorium. Bill pinned to the 3-night run, not per-night. Browser-only (classicposters/famsf) for the poster image.

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