Starting the year with a bang

At the beginning of 1970, Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Bill Josey Jr. designed and built a state-of-the-art 16-input, 4-channel, 3-section mixing console and mounted Sonobeat’s array of 2-track and 4-track tape decks, stereo compressor, graphic equalizer, monitor amp, and patch bay into a wheeled rack fitted into a wide closet in their Austin, Texas, Western Hills Drive mini-studio. Singer-songwriter and metal sculptor Cody Hubach welded the equipment rack together. With the addition of an upright piano, Sonobeat’s Western Hills Drive home-based studio was finally well-outfitted not just for overdub and mixing sessions but for full-fledged recording sessions with small ensembles. The Joseys finished building the main mixing console unit, portable enough to transport in the bed of a pick-up truck, just in time for their landmark March 1970 Mariani sessions, for which the basic instrumental tracks were recorded outdoors on a 100 acre ranch near McDade, Texas, about 30 miles northeast of Austin. However, even with the Western Hills Drive studio completed, to avoid disturbing the quiet neighborhood with late night recording sessions Sonobeat continued to rent other venues to record the basic instrumental tracks for rock bands, returning often to 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. in downtown Austin, until it closed in summer 1970, and the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church auditorium in northwest Austin. The Western Hills Drive studio ended up used primarily for vocal and instrument overdubs and the occasional daytime, acoustic-only sessions.

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Mid-year movement

In June ’70 Bill Jr. married and prepared for a move to Houston to begin law school in September. He spent the final six weeks of summer ’70 at an Army Reserve Officer Training Corp camp in Kansas. When Bill Jr. and his new bride moved to Houston in September, Bill Sr. was left to run Sonobeat solo, although Bill Jr. assisted in mixing sessions on his frequent visits back to Austin during fall and winter ’70 and spring and summer ’71.

During 1970, Bill Sr. added additional distributors to Sonobeat’s network of indy rack jobbers that sold Sonobeat’s singles into retail record outlets and to jukebox operators. One notable addition was Trend Recording and Distribution Group based in Atlanta, Georgia, that had a national reach.

During autumn ’70, Bill Sr. shipped advance pressings of Mariani’s Perpetuum Mobile album, which Sonobeat had completed earlier in the year. Bill Sr. circulated the album to his executive contacts at United Artists Records in Los Angeles as well as to A&RArtist & Repertoire (A&R) executives at record labels recruit and manage a roster of artists, connecting them to new songs and overseeing their recording and promotional activities. executives at other major labels, including Columbia Records in New York. Columbia expressed interest and opened negotiations to acquire the masters.

At the same time Bill Sr. was negotiating with Columbia, he had 100 copies of a non-commercial demo album pressed to promote composer Roy Headrick’s catalog of original songs. Sonobeat recorded Headrick’s song demos a year earlier but put them aside almost as soon as completed to focus on commercial releases. Reconsidering Headrick’s material in 1970, Bill Sr. felt there were several promising tunes among the baker’s dozen in Roy’s catalog and shipped copies of the demo album to A&R executives at the major labels just as he’d done in 1969 with the Herman Nelson and Bill Wilson song demo albums. Roy was the last of the three composers featured in Sonobeat’s Songs from the Catalog of Sonosong Music Company demo albums that Sonobeat issued to promote its growing music publishing catalog, but Roy’s wasn’t the last demo album Sonobeat issued: a third Herman Nelson demo album, circulated only on inexpensive audio cassettes, would be issued in 1973.

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Finishing up the year

Meanwhile, negotiations for Mariani’s album with Columbia dragged on until an impasse on terms brought the discussions to an end. So, 1970 was decidedly disappointing for Sonobeat. The label’s only release during the year was the Mariani single, Memories Lost and Found. Bill Sr. filled some of his extra time in the final months of the year with custom recording work for California band Wildfire, that had relocated to Austin the year before. But there was one bright spot arriving in November: an embryonic group headed by avant-garde Austin musician Bill Miller came to Bill Josey’s attention through John Ike Walton, The 13th Floor Elevators’ original drummer who was friendly with both Bills (we’ll refer to Bill Miller as “Miller” and to Bill Josey as “Bill”). An earlier incarnation of Miller’s group performed in Austin under the name Amethyst but was in the process of recasting itself as successor to the psychedelic throne once held by the Elevators, who had been through one too many drug busts (Bill testified as a character witness for Elevators’ front-man Roky Erickson at the band’s 1966 drug trial). After recording a long demo tape with Miller singing his catalog of original songs, Bill felt the material had great potential. Tommy Hall gave the Elevators an otherworldly sound with his amplified jug, and Miller gave his group an equally ethereal sound with his electric autoharp, which provided a challenge to successfully record. Bill began what would become a series of marathon sessions well into mid-1971 working with Miller’s group.

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