October 20, 1967 — "Ohm" — Van Morrison, the Daily Flash, and Hair opened a Friday-through-Sunday weekend at the Avalon Ballroom, the second of two consecutive Family Dog engagements Van Morrison played that October. The poster is FD-88, designed by Wes Wilson and nicknamed for the Sanskrit Aum hidden in its imagery; the light show was the North American Ibis Alchemical Company (per chickenonaunicycle and wolfgangs, with the catalog data corroborated by museum and auction records).

Morrison was twenty-two and between selves. He had walked away from Them, the Belfast R&B band he had fronted through "Gloria" and "Here Comes the Night," and come to America under the wing of the producer Bert Berns. "Brown Eyed Girl," cut for Berns's Bang label, had been a top-ten U.S. hit that summer — the commercial reason Morrison's name sat at the top of a Wes Wilson poster. But the record that would define him, the hushed and formless "Astral Weeks," was still a year off (recorded and released in 1968). The Avalon weekend catches him at the hinge: still, on paper, a pop-single artist; already, in temperament, the album auteur he was about to become. No setlist survives for the Avalon nights, so what he actually played across the weekend is unknown.

This was the **San Francisco** leg of a two-weekend Family Dog run, and it is worth keeping distinct from its twin. The weekend before, Morrison had played the Family Dog's **Denver** room (the chronicle's FDD-6, ~October 13–14, 1967) — a different venue, a different catalog line, a Mouse-and-Kelley poster. Both weekends were backed by the same support act, and both are real; they are not the same show and must not be merged. The Daily Flash came west with him to the Avalon as they had to Denver.

The **Daily Flash** were Seattle's contribution to the bill — a folk-rock-into-psychedelia band (Steve Lalor, Doug Hastings, Don MacAllister, Jon Keliehor) who had been a Pacific-Northwest fixture since 1965 and had been tapped to back Morrison on this short West-Coast tour (per Wikipedia and regional archives). Their guitarist Doug Hastings would, not long after, do a brief stint in Buffalo Springfield standing in for Neil Young — a small thread tying this Seattle band into the larger California story.

The third name on Wilson's poster, **Hair**, needs a careful hand, because it is easy to get wrong in two directions. First: it is a band, not the musical — the stage show "Hair" opened off-Broadway that same month, but the act on the Avalon bill is unrelated. Second: beyond that, the documentation thins fast. The surviving accounts (secondary, and tracing back to the singer Jeannie Piersol's own recollections) describe Hair as a San Francisco ballroom band grown out of an earlier group called the Yellow Brick Road, renamed when Darby Slick — the guitarist who wrote "Somebody to Love" for his sister-in-law Grace Slick's Great Society — came into its orbit. That much places Hair squarely in the Jefferson Airplane / Great Society family tree, which is a lovely deep-cut. But no primary source names Hair's lineup, and at least one widely repeated "lineup" for the band is a confusion with the Chicago session players on Piersol's later solo records — so this page names no members. Hair is a billed San Francisco act of the Yellow Brick Road / Darby Slick circle, and the honest account stops there.

The art is the anchor. Wilson's FD-88 is a late Family Dog poster from him — within a few months of his famous break with Bill Graham — and it carries his signature melting, amorphous lettering wrapped around a bearded man's face, the Aum symbol set into the forehead, the whole thing keyed to the era's turn toward Eastern spirituality. (The poster image itself is held in the classicposters/FAMSF catalog, unreachable in a headless pass; the day ships text-first, its facts drawn from the show-lists, Wolfgang's, and museum/auction records rather than from the scan.)

Read as a bill, the Friday night is a small map of where the music was in late 1967: an Irish ex-R&B singer reinventing himself as an album artist, a Seattle folk-rock band passing through, and a lightly documented local group with a bloodline straight back to the Airplane — three very different acts stacked on one Wes Wilson "Ohm" poster for one Avalon weekend.