It's a point we've tackled before, but it's one worth remembering. It's very easy to make "weird" music when the groundwork for what constitutes "weird" has already been done. It's not quite so easy being the band who decide to go "out there" in the first place. Congratulations then to San Francisco's Fifty Foot Hose – Nancy Blossom (vocals), David Blossom (guitar/piano), Larry Evans (guitar/ vocals), Terry Hansley (bass), Kim Kimsey (drums) and founder Louis "Cork" Marcheschi – who were one of the most radical groups of the psychedelic era, and whose experimentalism still has the power to shock and surprise even now.
While a hundred other bands pulled on beads and candy-striped pants and grew their hair, Fifty Foot Hose just got more and more odd. Marcheschi was a blues aficionado who built a synthesiser from material he found and scavenged. He constructed his own theremin, hooked up a saw blade to a microphone and ran the whole lot alongside a Hohner Echolette machine. The music he went onto make is, well, have a listen – it is utterly, utterly beautiful. And completely crazy. Signed to Limelight – then an off-shoot of Mercury, a label whose only other band was the studio-bound Sound of Feeling – Fifty Foot Hose recorded and released this one album, Cauldron, in 1967, which blended jazz, rock, soul, psychedelia and heavyweight electronics to startling effect.
Red the Sign Post is impossibly heavy acid-rock, Opus 777 is a fantastically brief DMT-like trip into a furious netherworld, Fly Free is pitched somewhere between Fairport Convention (whom they toured with) and the Doors, while God Bless the Child takes Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr's standard and rubs it up against whistling, space-jazz oddness. Most disturbing of all, though, are Bad Trip's two and a half minutes of hell and the head-wrecking tape-manipulation genius of the title track, which has to be heard to be believed. What's particularly striking about Cauldron is its serious intent, an intent which meant it was largely ignored upon release in December 1967. "It was a pretty conservative time" Marcheschi later noted, somewhat ruefully.
An interesting side-fact: the band split in 1969 when most of them upped and joined the cast of the musical Hair. Marcheschi didn't, he became an environmental sculptor ("working with man-made lightning", obvs). He briefly relaunched FFH in 1990 with a new line-up, and now is a fine (and public) artist. Happily, he still lives in San Francisco and, by the look of his website, appears to be enjoying life greatly. At last, some good news about a true pioneer.
