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We’re not sure of much here

We’re losing track of time. It was somewhere between June and September 1971 when singer-songwriter Bob Brown recorded with Sonobeat for a second time. Bob was previously a guitarist in The Conqueroo, one of Austin’s best known and loved bands of the 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 Armadillo World HeadquartersThe successor to The Vulcan Gas Company, opening in 1970. era of the ’60s and early ’70s. Throughout its life, The Conqueroo was an eclectic band, performing a psychedelic fusion of jazz, rock, folk, and blues, and its 1968 45 RPM stereo single 1 to 3, written by Bob and recorded at The Vulcan, was one of Sonobeat’s all-time best-sellers.

To our surprise, Bob Brown showed up again, recording a session for Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. in 1971. The session was mysteriously identified in the Sonobeat archives as “Kingfish (Bob Brown)”. We took this to indicate that Bob was the leader of the band and, indeed, after auditioning the Kingfish master tape, we confirmed that the Bob Brown in Kingfish was the same Bob Brown of The Conqueroo fame. We dug further into Austin newspaper archives and found that Kingfish performed at various Austin nightclubs for only about a three month span, and by September ’71, Bob, along with former Whistler member Bob Dorman, had formed Moon Pie. In fact, this research is how we were able to bracket the time frame during which Kingfish recorded with Sonobeat.

The Kingfish half-inch 4-track master tape, which is sequenced onto a reel also containing tracks by The David Flack Quorum, includes nine tracks: five vocals (all featuring Bob on lead) and four instrumentals, although it’s not clear whether any or all of the instrumentals are musical beds for vocals that were never overdubbed. The tracks were recorded at Sonobeat’s studio in the KVET Building on North Lamar in Austin. Unfortunately, the names of the songs, composers, and other musicians in the band are not documented in the Sonobeat archives, but we believe some if not all songs are Bob Brown originals, since 1 to 3, the “B” side of Sonobeat’s Conqueroo single, was his composition.

With Kingfish, Bob briefly explored a musical genre into which The Conqueroo had occasionally cautiously dipped: country-rock. There are no stereo mix-downs of the Kingfish material in the Sonobeat library, although the master was recorded on Sonobeat’s half-inch 4-track Scully 280 tape deck, so in 2014 we made new stereo mixes from which the excerpts below are taken.

Sorry to say, that’s all she wrote.

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