First incarnation

Formed in spring 1968, New Atlantis’ original members were Jim Mings (an Austin guitar legend), Mike Reid (piano and Hammond B3, who contributed to Sonobeat’s Base sessions), Jay Meade (drums; he, too, contributed to the Base sessions), and Danny Galindo (bass; formerly of The 13th Floor Elevators, and, yes, still another contributor to Sonobeat’s Base sessions). All were former members of some of Austin’s best progressive rock bands of the era. This first incarnation of New Atlantis was so good that the band took first runner up honors, out of a field of 50 competitors, in the 1968 Austin Aqua Festival Battle of the Bands, second only to first place winner, the Sweetarts, who recorded Sonobeat’s first commercial release in 1967.

This first version of the band, which we’ll refer to as New Atlantis I, recorded five tracks for Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Rim Kelley“Rim Kelley” was the pseudonym used by Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Jr. as a radio deejay in Austin, Texas, during the 1960s and as a Sonobeat producer from 1967 to 1970. in October 1968. Sonobeat rented 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 as a remote recording studio, since at the time Sonobeat’s facilities were too small to accommodate anything larger than a trio. The Vulcan’s vast dance floor and booming acoustics were perfect for recording loud rock bands. Vocal overdubs were recorded at Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr.’s home-based studio in northwest Austin a week after The Vulcan session.

New Atlantis tracked a loose jam of its original instrumental, The Shadow Knows, during the October ’68 session at The Vulcan, setting the stage for the band’s spectacular cover of Fire, on which producer Rim Kelley used his homemade, top secret Sonotone Black Box ↓ to anthropomorphize Jim Ming’s scorching lead guitar. Rim wanted to release a single with New Atlantis’ original I Got the Feelin’ as the “A” side and Fire as the “B” side, so Bill Sr. circulated the tape to his major label contacts seeking a national release; although the Sonobeat archives shed no further light on the outcome, it’s clear that there were no takers. What’s not clear is why Sonobeat didn’t release the single on its own label.

For our sound bites below, in 2018, the 50th anniversary of the initial New Atlantis recording sessions, Sonobeat Historical Archives remastered I Got the Feelin’ and remixed and remastered Song for Suzanne. When we pulled the original half-inch 4-track session masters from the archives in February 2018, we couldn’t locate I Got the Feelin’ but found clean 4-track session masters of Song for Suzanne and Fire. Surprisingly, the Sonotone Black Box effect on Fire was missing, leading us to conclude that the effect was added “live” during mix-down to the 2-track stereo master. We also present excerpts from Fire demonstrating the nuances the Black Box imparted to different sections of the recording.

Master tape box for New Atlantis I’s The Shadow Knows mix-down

Master tape box for the New Atlantis I sessions

Master tape box for New Atlantis’ cover of Fire

Proposed New Atlantis single that was never released

Resurfacing

A second incarnation of New Atlantis, which we’ll call New Atlantis II, returned to record with Sonobeat in August 1969, shortly after taking second place in the 1969 Austin Aqua Festival Battle of the Bands (Shepherds Bush took first place). The New Atlantis II session lineup featured holdovers Jay Meade and Danny Galindo along with new band members Donnie Erickson on lead guitar (Donnie was 13th Floor Elevators front man Roky Erickson’s brother) and guitarist Bob Galindo (Danny’s brother), who replaced Jim Mings and Mike Reid, respectively. Again, familiar faces to Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Rim Kelley. The August ’69 backing track sessions were recorded at the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church’s auditorium at 6800 Woodrow Avenue in northwest Austin, and vocal and guitar overdubs were recorded at Sonobeat’s home-based studio on Western Hills Drive, also in northwest Austin.

This second round of New Atlantis sessions featured no originals, focusing instead on solid covers of She’s a Country Girl, B.B. King’s blues-rock classic, and World in a Jug, the “B” side of Canned Heat’s 1967 single Rollin’ and Tumblin’. Bob Galindo recalls that New Atlantis II also recorded covers of If I Were a Carpenter and Red Balloon, both songs composed and originally recorded by Tim Hardin, but we’ve never found either of those tracks in the Sonobeat archives.

New Atlantis II master tape box

Newspaper ad for New Atlantis and Shiva’s Headband, openers for The Steve Miller Band

The New Atlantis I and II recordings are examples of a great band populated – not once, but twice – by some of Austin’s most talented and imaginative musicians stretching creatively. We’re pleased to present sound bites from power ballads Song for Suzanne (a/k/a I Know You So Well) and I Got the Feelin’, the hard rocker Trouble in My Heart, and the loose instrumental jam The Shadow Knows, all from the 1968 New Atlantis I Sonobeat sessions. The first two songs are Jim Mings compositions, on which he also sang lead. In 2018, we remixed Song for Suzanne from the original 4-track session tracking master and remastered I Got the Feelin’ from the original 2-track stereo mix-down. We’re not sure who composed or belted out Trouble in My Heart. We were disappointed to find the 1969 2-track stereo mix-down of New Atlantis II's upbeat version of She’s a Country Girl, on which Donnie Erickson sings lead, has deteriorated to the point that it’s no longer playable, so in 2008 we made a new stereo mix from the original half-inch 4-track session tracking master.

The Sonotone Black Box

By the end of 1968, at not quite two years old, Sonobeat had acquired enough experience to begin experimenting with new recording techniques that would complement the new sounds that progressive Central Texas bands, like New Atlantis, were developing. In that pursuit, producer Rim Kelley built a bizarre sound processing device – that Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. dubbed the “Sonotone Black Box” – and used it to turn Jim Mings’ lead guitar into a fire-breathing Chimera in New Atlantis I’s inspired and incandescent interpretation of Fire.

Whenever questioned about the Black Box, neither Bill Sr. nor Rim ever revealed its inner secrets, so the enigmatic device gained a bit of a reputation around Austin. Oddly enough, though, for all its notoriety, Sonobeat never used the Black Box on any of its commercial releases.

An analog ancestor of today’s digital vocoders, the Black Box accepted two inputs – usually a guitar and “something else”, often a microphone – from which it created one morphed output. Back in the 1960s, the Black Box’s sound was nothing short of sonic sorcery. For New Atlantis I’s recording of Fire, the Black Box inputs were lead guitar, tapped at its amp speaker, and a variable sine wave audio oscillatorAn audio oscillator produces frequencies – in the form of sine, square, or triangle waves – within the audio frequency range of about 16 Hz to 20 kHz. A variable audio oscillator has a rheostat that adjusts the wave’s output in realtime throughout the audio frequency spectrum. – a simple pure audio tone generator – “played” in sync with the guitar. The results ranged from low growl – created with low frequencies on the sine wave oscillator – to screaming banshee – created with higher frequencies. The Black Box was a surprisingly simple ring modulator that used just two small audio transformers and four diodes, that Rim built from a schematic he found in an issue of Popular Electronics magazine. Like most magic, it was all about misdirection, which, after all, is why it was packaged in a sealed black box...

In addition to the Black Box-ified lead guitar, the track showcases many other recording and mixing techniques Sonobeat was beginning to use in 1968, all of which now have become commonplace or even recording clichés, but in the late '60s are cutting edge: the kit was covered with six mikes, including one above and behind drummer Jay Meade to add an aural illusion of spacial breadth and depth; Mike Reid’s Hammond B3 organ Leslie speaker box was double miked – one on the treble rotor and one on the bass rotor – and mixed to a wide stereo spread; the vocals were compressed to the point of occasional audible pumping; Danny Galindo’s bass guitar was plugged directly into the mixing console (a technique commonly called “direct injection”, since it completely bypasses the guitar amp and speaker box) for complete isolation from the other instruments; and the entire mix was equalized across nine frequency bands to thicken it into a wall of sound. The original session take goes on for almost seven minutes and was edited to just under five minutes for the trial mix. Both the recordings and mix were made in the wee early morning hours, a time that is itself magical to musicians, producers, and recording engineers, and the perfect time to apply the sonic sorcery of the Sonotone Black Box.

Black Box exterior

Black Box guts

Black Box guts closeup

Black Box ring modulator circuit diagram