Home » Events » Acid Test 50th Year Anniversary with the Night Beats, The Fifty Foot Hose, & Strangers Family Band | 21+ – The Acid Test SF

Acid Test 50th Year Anniversary with the Night Beats, The Fifty Foot Hose, & Strangers Family Band | 21+ – The Acid Test SF

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Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/07/2015 - 11/08/2015
8:00 PM - 2:00 AM

Location
Roccapulco

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Can YOU pass the Acid Test? A psychedelic happening featuring lights and sounds celebrating the 50th anniversary of the very first Acid Test!

Performing Live

Night Beats are an American Psychedelic, Garage and Soul group based out of Seattle, Washington. Night Beats incorporate sounds of early R&B, Texas Psychedelic Rock, UK Blues, Folk and Soul.
Named as an homage to Sam Cooke’s Magnum Opus, The Night Beats were founded by Danny Lee “Blackwell” in 2009 as a two-piece when drummer James Traeger moved from Austin, TX to Seattle, WA. The band was signed by Chicago’s Trouble in Mind Records (Ty Segall, Fresh and Only’s, Fuzz, etc) within weeks of self-releasing their debut EP: The H-Bomb. In June of 2011 – Trouble In Mind released the band’s first full length record, “The Night Beats.” In support of the record, the band toured extensively around the world, alongside such artists as The Black Angels, Roky Erickson, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Strange Boys, Black Lips and The Growlers. The Night Beats’ second record – “Sonic Bloom” – was released in 2013 on Reverberation Appreciation Society which helped to bring the band to new audiences, resulting in tours in South Africa, Israel, and Australia.

Danny Lee has been involved with numerous other acts ranging from providing guitar and arrangement for Soul acts Ronnie Spector and Curtis Harding to Psychedelic giants The Black Angels (evening forming his own group with Angel’s Christian Bland called The UFO Club) to punk acts Hunx and his Punx.

Fifty Foot Hose were one of the most radical groups of the psychedelic era, whose experimentalism still has the power to shock and surprise even now. Formed in San Francisco in the late 60s, along with contemporaries like the United States of America, they sought to fuse the contemporary sounds of rock with electronic instruments and avant-garde compositional ideas. Founder, Cork Marcheschi was a blues aficionado who built a synthesizer from material he found and scavenged. He constructed his own theremin, hooked up a saw blade to a microphone and ran the whole lot through a Hohner Echolette machine. The music they went onto make is utterly, utterly beautiful. And completely crazy.

Fifty Foot Hose recorded and released one album, Cauldron, in 1968, 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, while God Bless the Child takes Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr’s standard and rubs it up against whistling, space-jazz oddness. Cauldron was an admirably risk-taking effort but, ultimately, a pretty uncommercial one. Although the group had a small but intense following in San Francisco and also toured with other acts including Blue Cheer, Chuck Berry and Fairport Convention, the album sold few copies at the time. Interest in the group resurfaced in the 1990s, however, as they became recognized as precursors to the electronic rock sounds of groups like Pere Ubu and Throbbing Gristle.

In 1994, Marcheschi reformed the group for live performances in San Francisco, with a new set of musicians. Fifty Foot Hose comprised Marcheschi (on echolette, twin audio generators, squeaky stick, white noise generator, theremin, spark gap, and saw blades), Walter Funk III (jokers Ulysses and Cupid constructed by Fred ‘Spaceman’ Long, Bug (Tom Nunn), vocoder, Hologlyphic Funkaliser and other electronix), Reid Johnston (guitube, guitar, tools, horns, harmonium, hardware, bikewheel), Lenny Bove (bass, electronics, vocals), Eliza Perry (vocals), and Dean Cook (drums).

The Acid Test are delighted to announce that this line up will be reuniting for the Acid Test 50th Anniversary, and will be playing the album Cauldron in its entirety, in addition to new material they’ve been working on for an album scheduled for release in 2016.

Freedom! Freedom! Freeeeedom! Freedom of SOUNDS. Freedom of expression. Freedom in music. The world needs freedom. The world needs progression. The world needs SOUNDS!

The SOUNDS are rooted in the biblical era of the Middle East and tribal African societies, yet extend to the space tones of planets in distant galaxies. 2015, a New Space Age has begun. A spiritual jazz group has begun their tour of Mars. They begin at the Panton-inspired Lagoon Club. Lucite capsules! Egg chairs! The Lagoon Club is the most far out club in the Milk Way. As the set begins a local alien has decided to sit in and bring native Martian instruments. “Bleep! Bip! Bop!” the Martian instrument rings, as if the SOUNDS of a modular synthesizer have been sent through the galaxy. The Saxophone answers with a screeching Roscoe Mitchell-esque solo. Far out SOUNDS! A progression of music! An evolution of composition! Freedom of SOUNDS!

Strangers Family Band originally formed in Orlando, Florida in 2007 by guitarist/keyboardist Ric Seltzer, brother and bassist Scott Seltzer, and drummer Juan Londono. The band relocated to Los Angeles in 2010 and currently resides in East Los Angeles. The group has released several EPs, and a full length album in 2012 with Xemu Records. There have been over 50 members in the group throughout its tenure. The group currently features the original 3 members, along with saxophonist Garrett Wayne Walters and saxophonist/percussionist Michael Cruiser De Vera. The group looks to release their second full length album and continue to tour the ballrooms of Mars in 2015.

Spinning Obscure Original 45s

  • The Acid Test DJ’s
  • Al Lover

Liquid light projections by Mad Alchemy

Psychedelic poster exhibition and sale by SF Rock Posters & Collectibles

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