Changing directions

In June '70 Rim 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 Rim and his new bride moved to Houston in September, Bill Josey Sr. took over Sonobeat as a sole proprietorship, although Rim continued to assist in recording and mixing sessions on his occasional visits back to Austin during fall and winter '70 and spring and summer '71.

During autumn '70, Bill Sr. shipped advance pressings of Mariani's Perpetuum Mobile album to Sonobeat's contacts at United Artists Records in Los Angeles as well as to A&R 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 he was negotiating with Columbia, Bill Sr. pressed 100 copies of a non-commercial demo album for composer Roy Headrick's catalog of songs and shipped copies to A&R executives at the major labels just as he'd done with the Herman Nelson and Bill Wilson song demo albums in 1969. The Headrick demo had been recorded in '67 but had been put aside for Sonobeat to focus on commercial recordings. Rediscovering Headrick's material in 1970, Bill Sr. was impressed that it contained several promising tunes. Headrick's was last in the series of Songs from the Catalog of Sonosong Music Company demo albums that Sonobeat issued. Meanwhile, the negotiations for Mariani's album with Columbia dragged on until an impasse on terms brought the discussions to an end. So, 1970 was decidedly quiet for Sonobeat. The label's only release during the year was the Mariani single, Re-Birth Day.

Cassette label of the 2nd, unreleased Afro-Caravan album

Bill Sr. began 1971 on an up beat by recording a second Afro-jazz album with Wali and the Afro-Caravan. The album included a dramatic 19 minute, 3-song suite entitled Shades of Africa, as well as an extended remake of Afro-Twist, which had been the B side of the Afro-Caravan's 1968 Sonobeat single. Bill offered Liberty/UA the album, since its subsidiary Solid State Records had released the Afro-Caravan's first Sonobeat album, Home Lost and Found (The Natural Sound). When Liberty/UA passed and no other national jazz label expressed interest, Bill Sr. put the album aside, intending to release it on the Sonobeat label later in the year, but album remains unreleased to this day.

At the same time he was shopping the second Afro-Caravan album to the majors, Bill Sr. was renewing his efforts to develop the next "super group" that could attract a lucrative national record label deal for Sonobeat. In spring '71, he produced five tracks with a reincarnation of the Sweetarts known as Fast Cotton. Bill Sr. and group founder Ernie Gammage selected two tracks for release as a Sonobeat single, but Fast Cotton broke up before the master tape could be sent to the pressing plant. Photos from the Fast Cotton sessions at Sonobeat's Western Hills Drive studio are posted at the Sweetarts' retrospective web site.

An exciting opportunity for Sonobeat arose at about the same time Bill Sr. was finishing up his sessions with Fast Cotton. An embryonic group headed by avant-garde Austin musician Bill Miller came to Josey's attention through John Ike Walton, the 13th Floor Elevators' original drummer who was friendly with both Miller and Josey. An earlier incarnation of Miller's group had 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 Sr. had 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, Josey felt the material had great potential. Tommy Hall had given the Elevators an otherworldly sound with his electric jug, and Miller gave his group an equally ethereal sound with his electric autoharp, which provided a challenge to successfully record. Josey spent months working with Miller's group and even called in Sonosong composer and resident mystic Herman M. Nelson to help with lyrics for some of the group's songs.

The Josey home in northwest Austin that doubled as Sonobeat's first permanent recording studio

If 1970 was a transitional year for Sonobeat, in which Sonobeat focused its energies and resources on building Mariani as a "super group", 1971 represented a year that began with new and exciting opportunities, like the promising Bill Miller group. But the year was divided by a divorce that forced the Josey family out of the Western Hills Drive home. In the middle of his work producing the Miller sessions, Bill Sr. was forced to move his personal residence and relocate the Sonobeat studios. He found rental space on the ground floor of the KVET building on North Lamar and quickly outfitted a spartan studio where he finished recording the Miller group, which by that time had assumed the name The Daily Planet. The sessions -- begun at the Western Hills Drive studio and completed at the new North Lamar studio -- yielded a highly programmatic album entitled Cold Sun. By mid-'71, Josey was no longer using expensive advance pressings to circulate demos to the national record labels but, instead, mailed out inexpensive audiocassette copies. He sent cassettes of the Cold Sun album to his regular major label contacts and again found interest at Columbia, but discussions dragged on and after several frustrating months fizzled out, leaving Josey with a breakthrough album but inadequate resources to release it on the Sonobeat label.

Sonobeat leased ground floor space in the KVET building in 1971

Sonobeat's move to studios on the ground floor of the KVET Radio building provided a new challenge: two radio stations occupied the second floor. Fortunately, KVET was a daytime-only AM station, but its sister station, KASE-FM, was a 24-hour-a-day fine music station. To prevent Sonobeat's recording activities from disturbing the stations' activities, Josey was forced to limit recording sessions to between dusk and dawn, although he could use the studio during daytime hours for mix-down purposes. To muffle loud guitar amps, Josey built 5-sided baffles lined with insulation into which he stuffed the amp speaker boxes. Josey also began to experiment with quadraphonic recording techniques, choosing the CBS/Sony SQ format that produced quad/stereo/mono-compatible master tapes. He also added a Dolby type B tape noise-reduction system.

Perhaps the combined frustration of the change in his personal circumstances, the challenges and expenses of outfitting and operating his new studio, and the inability to sell a Sonobeat album to a national label led Josey to begin accepting custom recording work to help defray his expenses. This meant that Josey would simply act as a recording engineer for artists who were willing to pay an hourly studio rate at the Sonobeat studios and, thus, Sonobeat would have no rights in the resulting recordings. At the same time, though, Josey continued to seek out promising new artists for potential release on the Sonobeat label or to offer to the major labels.

Although Sonobeat's activities as a label had suffered dramatically in '70, Josey found an interesting opportunity soon after relocating the studios to the KVET building. Sessions with Austin gospel group The Royal Lights Singers yielded two singles for the Sonobeat label. As it turned out, only one of The Royal Lights Singers' singles was commercially released and was the only Sonobeat release in 1971. The single may have earned back its production and manufacturing costs, but certainly didn't contribute significantly to Sonobeat's income in '71, so Josey shifted his efforts exclusively on custom work and development of artists he could present to national labels.

Other groups Josey recorded in '71 include Synthesis and Base, both recording original songs that were never released because Josey couldn't find a national label willing to purchase the master tapes. Bill Sr. experimented heavily with his quad recording techniques on the Base sessions, building a custom quad mixer based on plans drawn up by Bill Jr.

Sonobeat's tough times escalated in 1972: Josey offered out the North Lamar studios almost exclusively for custom work and issued no releases on the Sonobeat label, although country-folk artist Cody Hubach, who had recorded an unreleased single with Sonobeat in '69, returned to record a full album, which also went unreleased. Only two other groups recorded potential Sonobeat releases in '72: Genesee and Tommy Hill & the Country Music Revue. The personal and professional disappointments of the three preceding years had finally taken their toll, and Josey had no choice but to focus on custom work, for which he charged an hourly studio rate, to make ends meet. Something had to change, and 1973 would be the year that happened.

Next: Renewed momentum