Monocled Alchemist

Nuggets from the golden state

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996 | Original release (Limelight 86062, with inner) 12/68 | ‘A more pretentious album I have not heard for some time. The performers in the group are simply not good musicians, and their voices are exceedingly unattractive. They intersperse their songs with little electronic episodes which sound like junior high school students experimenting in the electronic music studio for the first time. The less said about this album the better, but I simply have to warn the listening public that Cauldron is not worth looking at, let alone listening to’ — (Jazz & Pop, May 1970)

Fifty Foot Hose are usually mentioned in the same breath as United States Of America and White Noise, as all three were pioneers of electronic rock music. In reality, however, all were quite different: White Noise were basically electronic engineers and composers experimenting with musical textures, United States was an early progressive rock band using primitive synthesisers as a lead instrument, and Fifty Foot Hose were at heart a conventional heavy psychedelic rock band who added electronic screams and howls onto their songs (which often seem to have nothing to do with the rest of the music).

If this makes them sound straighter and less interesting than their contemporaries, the opposite is true in practice: for me, the weird and unsettling Cauldron is top of the heap for both acid-rock and 60s avant-gardism.

Highpoints include the eerie ‘If Not This Time’, with its forlorn multi-layered vocals, a strange reworking of ‘God Bless The Child’, the ten-minute freakout ‘Fantasy’ and the closing title track, a piece of pure experimentation that presages the work of bands like Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound. Whilst this album certainly isn’t for everyone, those with adventurous ears should agree it’s one of the best releases in this book. (RF)

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996 | “Cauldron” is not a record often mentioned in histories of San Francisco 1960s rock, nor are the Fifty Foot Hose a well-remembered group of the era. But their small contribution to the development of electronic music has had considerable posthumous influence.

Pioneering the use of pre-synthesizer electronics, the Hose were unlike other rock groups of the time that used electronics as a sonic means to an end, such as Silver Apples or the United States Of America. Rather, Fifty Foot Hose was a conscious attempt to weld avant-garde theory and ideas to a contemporary rock beat.

“We were more aligned with the 20th Century avant-garde musicians at Mills College in the East Bay than with the Jefferson Airplane on Haight Street” says Louis ‘Cork’ Marcheschi, the Hose’s electronics ‘player’, founder of the group and by and large, the creative mind behind the outfit.

Marcheschi has as much right to the title ‘renaissance man’ as any one else working in the highly charged creative atmosphere of the 1960s Bay Area, yet his route was surely one of the most circuitous. Growing up in the cosy suburbia of the San Francisco peninsula, from an early age Cork developed a parallel interest in both avant-garde music and ideas, and raw, earthy R&B.

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996

“I remember as a kid watching TV with the family and there was a show featuring the Brussels 1959 World’s Fair. Corbusier had designed the inside-out cow’s stomach building with the 400 speakers, that Edgar Varese had written this piece for. The music completely fascinated me, and I intuitively understood it as a poem.”

At the same time, the youngster was enamoured of the R&B and gospel he heard on local radio stations KDIA and KSOL, and also spent a lot of time hanging out in North Beach, the centre of all things Italian in San Francisco, and still in the throes of the beatnik era.

“I was fourteen years old and I knew something was going on, and even though I didn’t have any comprehension of it, I really liked it, and the whole thing had a real effect.”

Around the time he graduated from high school in 1963, Cork formed garage band the Hide-A-Ways with guitarist Jim Flannery, who taught him to play electric bass. Based in San Mateo, the Hide-A-Ways evolved into the Ethix (originally known as Gene & The Ethics), who worked around the Bay Area constantly in the 1964-66 period, peddling a strict club repertoire:

“We played everything from Lightnin’ Hopkins through to Ray Charles, from cornball shit like ‘Take Me Out To The Ball Game’ and ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’, to entire James Brown medleys”.

The band made two R&B-flavoured singles on the D&A label, ‘Blue Canary’ and ‘Skopull’, and backed MOR singer Rudy Grau on a third. After two years of touring northern California, the Ethix came to an abrupt end in early 1967 when a lucrative engagement in Las Vegas was terminated, because a couple of band members were under age.

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996

Initially, Marcheschi cooled his heels and attended art college, but was in this period that his “very first attempt at experimental and psychotic music” was unleashed onto an unsuspecting public: the notorious ‘Bad Trip’ single, which had actually been recorded at Cork’s mother’s house the year before, by the Ethix line-up that had gone to Las Vegas.

“That was a completely Dada gesture” recalls Cork. “I put (guitarist) Bob Noto in the bathroom, Bob Gibson in the kitchen screaming, and the drummer Gary Doos and myself were in this family room. We just sort of stomped out ‘1-2-3-4’ and played. The band would do things like that for me occasionally; it was a matter of getting people to humour you!”

“The cacophonic results no doubt perplexed the other members of the Ethix, who “had a hell of a time (understanding my avant-garde interest), they didn’t consider it music and they didn’t consider the people who played it musicians. But although that and my club music were separated completely, I enjoyed both of them. I never felt any conflict.”

Whilst scanning the paper for jobs, Marcheschi came across an ad from a company called Robruth Music, looking for musicians and original songs, in order to start a label.

“The guy’s name was Robert Ruthley, a British fellow, who had to be at least 45 by that time. I just called and said I had a couple of original songs. He asked whether they were the type of things that were very contemporary, and I said ‘Absolutely’. I finally ended up playing him that Ethix tape, and I find out while I’m playing it that it all sounds like shit to him. Doesn’t matter if it’s Moby Grape, Jimi Hendrix, or an automobile accident; he’s just a business man trying to capitalise on what was going on in San Francisco.”

Issued on Mary Jane Records, ‘Bad Trip’ (Ruthley’s title) got played once on local underground station KM PX “and that was it. It was one of those things that I just followed through as some kind of amazing musical gesture that can only be done once.”

(The A-side was mastered at 33rpm, but because the single deliberately had no playing speed indicated on the label, most listeners would probably assume the record was meant to play at 45rpm. Therefore we have included it at both speeds. Either version is a good way to clear a house party of last-to-leave stragglers.)

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996

In addition to this interest in Dadaism, Cork had been experimenting further with avant-garde ideas, inspired by Varese, John Cage, Terry Riley, and the musique concrete of George Antheil. And also local synthesiser pioneer Don Buchla of the San Francisco Tape Center, where Cork hung out, fuelling his interest in electronic music. Such experimentation led to the construction of a homespun mix’n’match ‘instrument’ from an exotic list of gadgetry:

“It was based on dual tube-type audio generators, with a Hohner Echolette, a Dearmond combination foot-operated volume/tone control, a 12″ plastic outdoor speaker from a WW2 aircraft carrier mounted horizontally, assorted microphones and fuzzboxes, two theremins – one I built, the other I bought from a man who used it to scare kids on Halloween – a twelve foot long cardboard tube and a five gallon tin container. I had a combination of two or three amps, and a mixer, and I ended up feeding everything through everything else, so I could actually have one tone bend or clip another, or just head on collide and create a third tone, a unique tone.”

Furthermore, Marcheschi had “these ideas I’d been working on in my head for a while” about utilising avant-garde electronics within a rock group format, so it was fortuitous that later that year he linked up with guitarist David Blossom, who shared an interest in expanding electronic music into rock’n’roll.

“Dave was a great guitar player who had been experimenting with extended guitar soloing, feedback etc, and was very much in touch with the emerging psychedelic scene.”

Blossom’s style was influenced by cool modern jazz, and “he was into writing songs in different time signatures with atonal passages and free play”. The guitarist also built new circuitry into his Gretsch Viking in order to stretch the possibilities of his playing. The two had met on a ‘casual’, where as union-licensed musicians they would play one-off jobs at local venues backing other artists.

Blossom brought in his wife Nancy as a distinctive jazz-tinged lead vocalist, whilst Marcheschi hired former playing partners Gary Doos and guitarist Larry Evans. Blues fiend Evans and Blossom were both to provide the initial repertoire, and the newly-christened Fifty Foot Hose set about making their concept reality, imbuing the rock/jazz-influenced material with layers of electronic texture.

“A lot of the stuff I ended up doing was more the arranging and production. I was never so interested in writing songs but really more with the structure of the music.”

Fifty Foot Hose | Cauldron + rare and unissued tracks | (Big Beat) 1996

Doos soon departed, and the group went through a series of drummers, including Ken Campagna and a youngster only remembered as Doug, before settling on another veteran of the Musician’s Union jobs, Kim Kimsey. With Cork concentrating on the ‘instrument’, Terry Hansley was drafted in to play bass.

“From the minute we formed the band, the idea was to get out there, because we all needed to make some money. I figured the only thing we could do was to play all the clubs that I had at one time had a good reputation in (with the Ethix) and burn each one of them; not rip them off, but I knew they wouldn’t like the music anymore, so we’d get paid for one or two nights, and then by the time we’d gone through all of them we’d be working the other sort of place Cie gigs like the Fillmore or Avalon], and that was what happened!”

In this period the Hose also recorded an audition tape at Kimsey’s Haight-Ashbury apartment, from which four tunes are included on this disc. The demo created some interest, which eventually led to a representative from Mercury subsidiary Limelight coming to San Francisco to check out the band. Caught in the signing frenzy that was going on in the Bay Area, the band soon had a deal, although Limelight’s role as an experimental/avant-garde label meant the group maybe did not get the exposure they warranted in rock circles.

Freelance producer Dan Healy, then getting his feet wet in Bay Area studios, was assigned to the band.

Healy: “I liked David’s guitar playing, and Nancy’s singing, and I immediately grasped what I thought Corky was trying to do to bridge his musical ideas with theirs. I dug the combination of the soft jazz approach, with this violent electronic sound.”

The producer took the Hose into Columbus Recording in early 1968, and the band worked hard trying to capture the essence of the project. Much of the time was spent experimenting with sound effects and recording techniques, like putting instruments through an FM transmitter in order to change the quality of sound.

Violent electronic sound

Healy: “Conceptually, that was no different than using a compressor or equalizer. Transmission does a certain David Blossom thing to the modulation of sound, it tends to give it an image that is defined around the outside – like in cartoons, the ‘bubbles’ that people speak in, that kind of thing. In those days there weren’t libraries of sound; instead you literally had to generate devices that could make those sounds. It was a frontier spirit.”

While the group had no problem nailing the basics of the material, the prospect of recording the electronic box of tricks was a little more daunting.

Healy: “I recorded Cork’s instrument both direct and with mikes, but he had to be overdubbed onto the backing tracks, because a lot of the electronic stuff was squirrely and unpredictable during takes. I had a great time with Corky because he was so game, and he understood all that stuff. And people that happened by in the studio were just blown away by what they heard.”

The resultant album “Cauldron” was unique in its experimental approach, yet as cutting-edge relevant as any other band emanating from San Francisco of that time. “Fifty Foot Hose were lumped in with psychedelia, which I never fought, but I always thought of us as based in electronic music, and also art-thought, ideas about time and different kinds of processes on stage.”

Indeed, live, the outfit pushed the sonic and rhythmic possibilities of their material, with elongated electronic pieces, and arrangements that would abruptly fall into a no-time free-play period of indeterminate length, before the tune picked back up. Audiences were often perplexed but never less than impressed, “when we could get one. The music was too strange, even for Bill Graham and Chet Helms. No-one was ever interested in managing or booking the band. We did have a rabid following, small, but they were there.”

Hair

Ultimately, the Hose’s versatility and willingness to push boundaries failed to connect to a larger audience. “Cauldron” confused both the critics – “I don’t know if they are immature or premature” said “Rolling Stone” tastemaker Ralph J Gleason – and the still-provincial attitudes of the average concertgoer, and was not a big seller.

“We just never were cool. The people at the Tape Center weren’t into the rock part, and the people at the Fillmore weren’t into the art part. We were neither fish nor fowl.”

Despite gaining a proficient new bassist in the shape of Robert Goldbeck, the group’s life was doomed by the esoteric nature of its music. What finally killed the band was the San Francisco production of hippie musical “Hair”, where the promise of a regular paycheck lured several members of the band into defection.

“”Hair” offered people a great salary, and we’d been dying financially. I was married and had a kid, Dave had a kid, and in the end I was the only member that didn’t sign on.”

It was a quick and ignominious end to the 18 month old Hose. Cork left the area to become a teacher, and has subsequently become a world famous sculptor, specializing in large-scale public work utilizing neon, plastic and kinetic elements. But he still remains intensely proud of the group’s achievement:

“In the 27 years since the Hose’s demise I’ve never lost interest in music, and several times over the last 15 years I’ve heard echoes of our sound in a lot of alternative musics.”

Pere Ubu, Throbbing Gristle and Chrome are but three outfits to have cited “Cauldron” an influence. Producer Healy, who went on to work with the Grateful Dead, amongst many others, adds “that album never made the mainstream, but it holds a place in the chronology of electronic music. It was obviously before its time.” (ALEC PALAO Co-editor, Cream Puff War Berkeley, California)