Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page

Here is a rare first-printing San Francisco concert poster for the Yardbirds and Country Joe and the Fish playing at the Fillmore Auditorium for just "One Sunday Afternoon," October 23, 1966. While this looks like a classic early 1966 Wes Wilson poster, it was actually designed by John H. Myers, using a Gered Mankowitz photo of the '66 Yardbirds with both Beck and Page. Mankowitz was the first official photographer for the Rolling Stones.

In the Fall of 1966 live rock and roll was still a cottage industry and Bill Graham was running shows on Friday and Saturday nights, but the Sunday shows were Matinees, running from 2pm-7pm, typically advertising “kiddies free!” This wasn’t phased out until May 1967 when the hordes of young people began arriving for the Summer of Love. The Yardbirds appearance was part of a weekend previously advertised in a poster known as “Beardless Jerry” for shows with the Grateful Dead, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Loading Zone. The Yardbirds Sunday show was in rather small type and people might miss it so Bill Graham must have hurried this poster into production.

It's not often one sees both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in a Yardbirds' photo, The two guitar gods only shared the stage for a few months before Beck split, fed up with the low pay and grueling traveling conditions on the tour, and this was in that little window. The dual-guitar attack must have been something to behold. The group was touring in support of its highest-charting studio album, Roger The Engineer, and coming off their Top 20 single, Over Under Sideways Down.

The Yardbirds opened for the Rolling Stones' 1966 3-week UK tour in late September/early October  and then headed back to the US for this show at the Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco, and then a slot on American Bandstand host Dick Clark's "Caravan of Stars" tour, which they joined in Texas. After a few shows with the Caravan, Beck stormed out and headed back to San Francisco and Mary Hughes. The band, still in Texas, continued on the Dick Clark tour as a quartet, with Page as the sole lead guitarist.

The only studio productions including both Beck and Page were the rocking “Stroll On” in  Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up and the avant-garde psychedelic rock single, “Happening Ten Years Time Ago.” (with future Led Zeppelin mate John Paul Jones on bass), which the band recorded in July and September 1966.