Testing, testing

In spring 1967, the Joseys were in the process of cobbling together recording equipment to launch Sonobeat Recording Company and Sonobeat Records. KAZZ-FM, where they both worked, provided access to Ampex 2-track tape decks and half a dozen ElectroVoice 665 dynamic microphones but didn’t have a portable stereo audio mixer, so the Josey’s enlisted KAZZ’s chief engineer, Bill Curtis, to build one. The Curtis mixer was housed in a small wood box with a metal faceplate on which were mounted volume and pan controls for six microphone and line-level inputs. The XLR microphone and quarter-inch line input and output sockets were mounted on the back and sides of the box. Inside the mixer box was a tangle of bare wires, transistors, capacitors, and resistors. Bill Curtis literally soldered the components together “in the air” and left them dangling “under the hood”. By late June, the Joseys were ready to try out the mixer, and John Earley was ready to offer up Leo and the Prophets as the first guinea pig.

Prophets’ guitarist Dan Hickman recalled the first recording session was held at either the Ozone Forest nightclub at 34th and Guadalupe in downtown Austin, where the Prophets served as house band, or Lake Austin Inn, where the band regularly performed. Rim, who engineered the session with Bill Curtis, recalls the session was held in the parking lot of the Lake Austin Inn on a warm summer night. A scribbled note on one tape box in the Sonobeat archives indicates the session was recorded at the Lake Austin Inn. But, even more definitively, a June 30, 1967, Austin Statesman newspaper ad for Lake Austin Inn confirms the recording date as Saturday, July 1, 1967, from 9pm to 1am. The ad also indicated that the public was invited, so the session qualifies as Sonobeat’s first “live” recording. Three days after that first session, Rim hosted an Independence Day street dance at Austin’s Zilker Park for which Leo and the Prophets provided the live entertainment.

The Joseys recorded the Prophets on the Ampex 354 quarter-inch two-track tape deck borrowed from KAZZ, which Bill Sr. mounted in a frame made of 2"x4" wood studs to make it portable. The session yielded two untitled tracks that were thin, distorted, and marred by audience background noise, a combination of poorly placed microphones, the lack of metering on the mixer to monitor volume peaks resulting in mixer overload, and Rim’s recording inexperience. Although the quality of the recordings was disappointing, Bill Sr. and Rim liked the Prophets’ material and wanted to work with the band again, but first they needed to give Bill Curtis time to rework the circuitry in the homebrew mixer to eliminate the distortion.

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The real sessions

The follow-up session with the Prophets was delayed until July 11th to give Bill Curtis time to refine the mixer’s circuitry. The Joseys scheduled the second session during afternoon hours at Swingers Club in north Austin with no audience present. That session yielded the instrumental backing tracks for Flowers on the Hill, Ozone Forest, and Prophecy of Love, all Prophets originals. As an aside, the day after the Leo and the Prophets July 11th session, the Joseys held their first recording session with jazz combo Lee Arlano Trio at The Club Seville in downtown Austin, continuing their stress testing of the Bill Curtis portable mixer.

Only one Leo and the Prophets track, Flowers on the Hill, was completed with vocal overdubs, in a session on July 16th at the KAZZ studios in downtown Austin. Although Flowers on the Hill had potential as the “A” side of a commercial single release, both the band and the Joseys believed neither of the other two tracks would make a good “B” side. The band never came up with a second commercially-viable song for the “B” side and missed an opportunity to be Sonobeat’s first commercial release. In fact, the Prophets ended up a one-hit-wonder with Tilt-A-Whirl, now considered a Texas garage rock classic. The band had a little over a one-year lifespan, beginning in 1966 as a retooling of Austin band J.C. and the Boys by Leo Ellis, who had played guitar in several Austin jazz combos and fronted his own jazz trio before turning to the then-current and hot psychedelic trend pioneered by the 13th Floor Elevators. He reputedly was a fan of Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, a collection of fables told in both prose and poetry, which was likely the basis for the band’s name.

Travis Ellis reportedly died in the late ’60s or early ’70s, possibly of complications related to diabetes. Rod Haywood succumbed to the extremely rare Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease on February 29, 2024.

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