Fifty Foot Hose were one of the most experimental bands of the 1960s, one of the first to employ electronics and to bridge Red Crayola, Captain Beefheart, Grateful Dead and Edgar Varese.

They were formed in San Francisco at the time of acid-rock and of the hippies when most of the local bands were already abandoning the experiments and were returning to country-rock. David Blossom (guitar) and his wife Nancy (vocals), on the other hand, made the bizarre Cauldron (Limelight, 1968 � Weasel Disc), whose cacophonous and chaotic sound, using electronics and �homemade� instruments, drew as much from the experiments of the Grateful Dead as from the avant-garde of John Cage and Edgar Var�se. The long Fantasy dominates, a ten-minute apocalyptic freak-out worthy of Captain Beefheart and Red Crayola (Texas), but even the shorter pieces If Not This Time and Red The Signpost showcase a rambunctious and atonal sound. Cauldron is a wild collage of voices, percussion and noises. The second album, I�ve Paid My Dues, recorded in 1970, was never released.

Picking up that thread with hindsight (in this case, 30 years later), Sing Like Scaffold (Weasel Disc, 1998) presents an avant-garde composer (Marcheschi) who gives the younger post-rock generations a resounding lesson. It is perhaps the first and only case of a comeback that equals the debut album.

Ingredients (Del Val, 1997) compiles unreleased tracks, notably the 13-minute The War is Over (recorded in 1966) and the 12-minute Desire (recorded in 1967). It also includes the single released when they were still called Ethix, Bad Trip.

Bad Trips (Modern Harmonic, 2019) compiles again Bad Trip and the 12-minute Desire.