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Who were these guys?

In February 1973, Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. recorded Vita at Sonobeat’s studios in the KVET building in Austin. The group tracked four songs for Sonobeat, all originals: Think What You Want, Santa Ana Freeway, Song for Jericho, and The Parasite. The band gave off a Latino-jazz-rock vibe accentuated by a prominent and persistent hand drum. Vita’s master tape box lists instrumentation for the sessions as drums and percussion, electric bass, acoustic guitar, organ, electric piano, lead guitar, and hand drum, leading us to believe the group consisted of at least five and perhaps six musicians; however, the band’s personnel are not named anywhere in the archives.

When Vita arrived at Sonobeat, Bill had been experimenting with quadraphonic recording techniques, which emulate sound coming from 360° around the listener like current home theater surround systems. For his early experiments, he assembled the studio group Base in 1972, but these early Base recordings weren’t made specifically for commercial release. Vita appears to have been the first group Bill recorded in quad with commercial exploitation as the primary goal.

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Bill submitted a demo tape of all four Vita songs to his friend Ron Bledsoe at Columbia Records in Nashville, adding a note indicating the band had enough original material to record not one, but two albums. He also indicated his desire to record the group in a quadraphonic/stereo/monaural-compatible format. Columbia and Sony jointly owned an encoding/decoding technology for one of the many competing surrounding sound formats in the early ’70s, SQ, so Columbia Records seemed a natural fit for a Vita quad album. Bill described the band as “a popular group in Austin” and “from Austin”, but the title of and lyric references in the band’s song Santa Ana Freeway – the stretch of Interstate 5 that flows from Los Angeles to the Disneyland area in Anaheim – make us think the band may have originated in California. But that”s sheer speculation.

Columbia passed on the opportunity to release Vita’s material, and perhaps that was enough for Bill to put Vita’s tapes aside and abandon plans to complete an album with the group since we find no further Vita recordings in the Sonobeat archives. Like many other artists who recorded with Sonobeat, the archives don’t indicate why Vita’s recordings were never released on the Sonobeat label itself.

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Our online research has never turned up any information about an Austin band called Vita. No newspaper ads for Vita performances, no newspaper articles, no photos. The group is one of the more mysterious acts that Sonobeat recorded.

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