Sonobeat’s busiest year

At the beginning of January 1968, KAZZ-FMKAZZ-FM was the second FM station licensed to the Austin, Texas, market, commencing broadcast in October 1957 on 95.5 MHz. Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Bill Josey Jr. both worked at KAZZ from fall 1964 to January 1968, Bill Sr. initially serving as commercial sales manager and then as station manager and Bill Jr., using the air name “Rim Kelley”, as a deejay and later as program director. KAZZ was sold to country station KOKE-AM in January 1968, its staff pink-slipped and its call letters changed to KOKE-FM. KAZZ’s frequency, 95.5 MHz, is now assigned to KKMJ-FM in Austin., where Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Bill Josey Jr. worked, shut down, leaving the Joseys without the Ampex 350 and 354 2-track tape decks that they had been borrowing from the radio station for Sonobeat recording sessions. But Bill Sr. was able to buy KAZZ’s Ampex 354 and a smattering of ElectroVoice 665 microphones from the station’s new owner, country station KOKE, and rented an Ampex 350 on a month-to-month basis from Andy Porter (who owned Austin’s New Orleans Old World Night Club) while he looked for a used Ampex deck to purchase.

Entering ’68, at barely half a year old, Sonobeat had four 45 RPM stereo single releases under its belt. Houston Records, Inc., had manufactured all four of the ’67 releases, but Bill Sr. was displeased with the quality of its stereo lacquer mastering, which Houston Records outsourced, and pressing, so he switched both mastering and pressing to high-end Sidney J. Wakefield & Company (which was generally known in the industry as Wakefield Pressings) in Phoenix, Arizona. Like Houston Records’ mastering supplier Location Recording Services in Burbank, California, Wakefield cut lacquers at half-speed (for better stereo separation, improved frequency range, and less distortion) but Wakefield used the newest, state-of-the-art Scully cutting lathes for mastering and superior quality Keysor-Century vinyl on its presses. Wakefield was known for manufacturing high quality, quiet, flat records. With Sonobeat’s second release of ’68, The Thingies’ Mass Confusion backed with Rainy Sunday Morning, the Josey’s noticed a marked improvement in the stereo separation and fidelity and reduced surface noise in the Wakefield pressings. Not surprisingly, Wakefield also was more expensive than Houston Records, but the Joseys believed higher quality was more important than cost to assure Sonobeat’s future growth.

1968 was Sonobeat’s busiest year, capped at the end with a surprising inflection point. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The Joseys seemed to jump from one recording session to the next. Sessions included Shiva’s Headband, The Conqueroo, The Thingies, Paul New and the Crew, Johnny Winter, Bach-Yen, The Ray Campi Establishment, Allen Damron, Jim Chesnut, Ronnie and the West Winds, Fran Nelson, Lavender Hill Express, The Afro-Caravan, New Atlantis, and a non-commercial song demo album for Sonosong composer Herman Nelson. Sonobeat changed the color of its 45 RPM center label to make the background pattern less dominant, and the release of Johnny Winter’s single marked the first appearance of Sonobeat’s stylized “S” logo on a 45 RPM single sleeve; however, the “S” logo was never used on Sonobeat’s center labels themselves or on any album jacket. Things were busy enough by mid-’68 for Sonobeat to create a two-color letterhead, on which the “S” logo appeared.

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Marketing and promotion

Sonobeat continued the low-cost viral marketing campaigns it began in 1967 for its first four releases, submitting promo copies of each new release to local and regional newspapers, key radio stations around the country, and the national music trade journals Billboard and Cash Box. Sonobeat began to receive attention in print, including an expansive article in the April ’68 edition of Go Central Texas magazine and a positive Cash Box review of its second Lavender Hill Express single, Watch Out!. Of course, word of mouth remained a key element in Sonobeat’s marketing efforts in and around Austin.

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Expansion and new equipment

Following KAZZ’s shut-down, Bill Jr. continued working in Austin radio through the remainder of ’68, initially taking the weekend midnight-6 a.m. deejay slot on top 40 station KNOW-AM beginning in March while also taking a full course load as a Radio-TV-Film major at The University of Texas. Juggling classes, weekend all-nighters at KNOW, and recording sessions were unsustainable, so at the end of July Bill Jr. segued from KNOW to a part time weekday afternoon job – freeing his evenings for studying and recording sessions – as a newscaster at KOKE AM-FM, a position he held until fall ’69.

Meanwhile, in May 1968, the Josey family moved into an expansive split level home on Western Hills Drive in northwest Austin. In July, the Joseys converted the large bedroom-bath suite on the lower level, adjacent to the garage at the back of the house, into an isolated and self-contained mini recording studio. With a “home base” for the first time, Sonobeat began investing in new recording equipment. In August, Sonobeat acquired a new Scully 280 half-inch 4-track tape deck, an investment of about $7,500 (more than $68,000 in 2025 dollars), and a refurbished Ampex AG-350 solid state quarter-inch 2-track tape deck to replace the rented Ampex 354. The high-end Scully represented a major technological leap for Sonobeat, providing the means to achieve more sophisticated, layered recordings, and the AG-350 gave Sonobeat a reliable professional deck for 2-track stereo mix-downs.

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It was at KOKE that Bill Jr. discovered a unique trade journal that the station’s chief engineer received, db: The Sound Engineering Magazine. The journal became a source of inspiration for Bill Jr. to design and, with Bill Sr., build a new portable stereo mixer and a steel plate reverb (the reverb’s 5 foot by 9 foot steel frame was welded together by singer-songwriter Cody Hubach, who also recorded an unreleased single and album for Sonobeat). Perhaps influenced by TV commercials showing a suitcase run over by a truck and surviving, the new mixer was housed in a Samsonite suitcase with a removable lid. The battery-powered mixer included ten input channels, each with an independent stereo panner, and used homemade printed circuit boards inspired by schematics Bill Jr. found in db and Popular Electronics magazines. Although we can’t find documentation in the Sonobeat archives of the costs to build the mixer and reverb, we estimate materials at $3,500 to $5,000 in 2025 dollars. Cody contributed his labor at no cost, as did the Joseys.

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The steel plate reverb was housed in the Western Hills Drive home’s garage, where Bill Sr. also built a drum and vocal isolation booth facing into the studio suite, separating the two with a double-pane glass window. Near the end of the year, Sonobeat purchased its second half-inch 4-track recorder, this one from Stemco Electronics. The Stemco deck was a refurbished Ampex transport with Stemco’s proprietary solid state electronics modules, setting the still-fledgling company back $6,500. Alongside the Stemco, Sonobeat acquired a Gately Electronics PM-1 6-channel stereo mixer housed in an attaché case for portability (an additional $700 investment), a Fairchild Lumiten 663ST stereo optical compressor (a $150 investment), and a Blonder-Tongue Audio Baton 9-band graphic equalizer (a $200 investment), making 1968 a year of big spends on equipment (about $15,500, more than $141,000 in 2025 dollars). Want to build your own steel plate reverb? Here are plans for a reverb similar to, but smaller than, Sonobeat’s.

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A big break

An important door opened for Sonobeat in early December, when Johnny Winter was spotlighted in a Rolling Stone magazine article about hot Texas musicians. Johnny’s album, The Progressive Blues Experiment, that Sonobeat recorded at The Vulcan Gas CompanyThe Vulcan was Austin’s first successful hippie music hall, opening in 1967 in an old warehouse at 316 Congress Avenue and closing in 1970. Its better known successor was Armadillo World Headquarters. and intended to release on its own label, suddenly became a hot commodity. Sonobeat struck a deal to sell the album to Los Angeles-based Liberty Records. Receiving contracts from Liberty the week following Christmas, the Joseys reviewed the documents and negotiated out the agreement via a series of phone calls. The deal was signed in mid-January, and the Joseys prepared to drive the Johnny Winter master tapes to Liberty’s headquarters in Los Angeles.

The Johnny Winter album sale to Liberty was the most-significant inflection point in Sonobeat’s history, and, all in all, 1968 marked Sonobeat’s best year with its commercial releases at a high water mark: eleven singles, the label’s first album release, an album sale to a national label, and its first composer song demo album.

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