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How about a little (pre)punk?

In August 1975, Sonobeat producer Bill Josey Sr. began recording sessions with proto-punk band Nasty Habit at Sonobeat’s Blue Hole Sounds studios. In mid-1973, Bill relocated Sonobeat’s studios from Austin, Texas, to the outskirts of Liberty Hill, about 30 miles north of Austin in the Hill CountryThe Texas ”Hill Country” is that portion of Central Texas sitting on the Edwards Plateau and featuring beautiful rolling hills and grasslands. The 31,000 square mile region is considered the geographic border between the American Southeast and Southwest.. There, Bill’s Blue Hole Sounds, named for a popular local swimming hole and situated on a dozen wooded acres, offered a peaceful, attractive alternative to musicians looking for a unique recording environment. And that’s where Bill recorded Nasty Habit.

Nasty Habit was founded in 1974 by Stanley Gilbert, Gary Dry, and Jesse Sublett, classmates at Southwest Texas State UniversitySouthwest Texas State University was renamed Texas State University in 2013. in San Marcos, Texas. San Marcos is just down Interstate 35 from Austin and about 70 miles south of Liberty Hill. Even though it was a haul for Nasty Habit to cart its equipment to Blue Hole Sounds, the idyllic setting was alluring. After the first August session with the band, Bill planned to release a stereo 45 RPM single by the group – Does Your Mother Know (written by Stanley) backed with Listen (written by Stanley and Gary) – but the single was never released for reasons not documented in the Sonobeat archives. When we caught up with Stanley in 2013, he recalled that additional songs, including two Nils Lofgren covers, also were recorded during the same sessions in August and September of ’75, but we haven’t found those tracks in the Sonobeat master tape archives. In 2014, when we connected with Gary at the Lavender Hill Express reunion performance at Gueros in South Austin, we found that, indeed, Nasty Habit had recorded six songs with Bill at Blue Hole Sounds, four of which are missing from the archives. In fact, Gary handed us a private edition CD the band put together in 2013 that contains the four missing songs recorded at Blue Hole Sounds: band member Alan Lee Lisenheimer’s Playin’ the Easy Way and Texas Boogie and Lofgren’s Beggars Day and What About Me. Oh, and the Nasty Habit that recorded with Sonobeat in 1975 is not the same band as the 1980s big hair Nasty Habit from central New York or, for that matter, any number of other bands that have called themselves “Nasty Habit”.

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Jesse Sublett played with Nasty Habit for only a short time, although he performed on the August sessions at Blue Hole Sounds. Craig Toungate joined the group in September as lead singer and recorded some of the vocal tracks. The sound bites we present below feature Gary’s lead vocals and Stanley’s harmonies.

Jesse moved on to become a seminal influence in Austin’s punk rock era, co-founding the rock-blues band Jellyroll and the punk bands the Violators and the Skunks. He’s also a best-selling author of novels and non-fiction works. Soon after the final Sonobeat sessions, Stanley and band manager Bill Brinkley recast Nasty Habit as a hard rock trio, renaming the band Truck and performing throughout Texas. Truck played its last gigs at Austin’s iconic Armadillo World Headquarters in 1980.

Sonobeat’s Nasty Habit work tape box mentions that Apple Tree is at the head of the tape. Apple Tree not only isn’t a Nasty Habit song but it’s mislabelled on the tape box: in fact, the track that’s labelled Apple Tree is a take of Tom Penick’s This Old Cowboy. From 1974 to ’76, Tom assisted Bill Josey around Blue Hole Sounds, helping set up and run recording sessions and assisting on the Nasty Habit sessions.

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