The Fillmore in San Francisco is a historic music venue, named after its original location at the intersection of Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard. Known as the Fillmore Auditorium in the mid-1960s, concert promoter Bill Graham began a series of concerts featuring bands from the counterculture of the time. In 1968, due to his spiralling success, he moved to a larger venue which he named Fillmore West. Having closed in 1971, and after extensive repair work to fix earthquake damage, Graham's venue was revived when Live Nation reopened the original Fillmore venue in 1994.

San Francisco in the mid-1960s was the hub of the LSD and Hippie scene and the cultural and political rebellion of 1967's Summer of Love. The resulting influence of these factors on the artists of the area created the fantastic psychedelic posters of the Fillmore. Art dealer Jacaeber Kastor said of the posters, "They couldn't just tell you the information about the show. They had to tell you what kind of people you might meet, what kind of far out trip you might have or perhaps even reveal the mysteries of the universe. Wow. Quantum mechanics, visual mudwrestling, Acid test pop quiz on a phone pole!"

The artist of this poster, Lee Conklin, was a security guard in Los Angeles when he began to notice Wes Wilson's Fillmore poster art appearing in magazines such as Time; at which point he decided to move to San Francisco in order to pursue his dream of making a living from his artistic work. He approached Graham and was commissioned there and then, producing a large body of work over the years of 1968 and 1969. His designs featured birds, cats, lions and dogs and particularly human figures or faces, hands and other limbs, often intertwined and growing out of each other. He was dedicated to hand drawing, and put to paper the most literal psychedelic inspiration of any of the Fillmore artists. "I made it my mission to translate my psychedelic experience onto paper. The afterglow was always the most creative time for me."

This poster advertised two concerts. The first was headlined by Big Brother and the Holding Company, a seminal San Francisco psychedelic rock band featuring Janis Joplin on vocals. The second concert was headlined by Sly and the Family Stone, a rock, funk and soul band pivotal in the development of soul, funk and psychedelia. They were one of the first integrated multi-gender bands to chart in America and were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993.