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And the band is called... what?

Pall Rabbit, which enjoyed a run as house band at Austin’s popular Action Club in 1970 and ’71, recorded with Sonobeat at the beginning of its career in spring 1970. Because the band formed in January or February ’70, and its earliest paying gigs occurred in March, we place the Sonobeat sessions in May or June ’70.

Unfortunately, the Sonobeat archives contain no information about the band’s personnel, the tracks recorded, or the session location, except to indicate that the recorded material is a monaural artist demo mix. Although Pall Rabbit’s sessions were tracked on Sonobeat’s half-inch 4-track Scully 280, and possibly its half-inch 4-track Stemco 500-4 as well, there are no stereo mixes in the Sonobeat archives. We make an educated guess, based on other contemporaneous Sonobeat recording sessions, that Pall Rabbit recorded at Sonobeat’s home-based Western Hills Drive studio in northwest Austin, although it’s also possible that Sonobeat recorded the band’s instrumental backing tracks at the First Cumberland Presbyterian Church’s basketball court-sized auditorium, where it had recorded Plymouth Rock in fall 1969.

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So many personnel changes

As luck would have it, drummer and Sonobeat friend Tommy Taylor – who currently plays with many Austin bands – and Bob Trenchard, Pall Rabbit’s bassist on the Sonobeat sessions, recalled for us that Pall Rabbit consisted of Trenchard, Ronnie Hudgins, Chuck Greenwood, Steve Grimmit, and Steve Simon. Bob recalled the band underwent substantial personnel changes soon after recording with Sonobeat: Clay Hemphill replaced Simon, Joe Don Davidson replaced Greenwood, and Kukla Kaigler replaced Grimmit. Even Austin guitar legend Eric Johnson did a short stint in the band. Greenwood played in Georgetown Medical Band before he co-founded (and named) Pall Rabbit (which simply means “dead rabbit”, and, no, we don’t know how or why he came up with that name), and Hudgins also joined Pall Rabbit after a stint in Georgetown Medical Band. Trenchard worked with Sonobeat on its first Mariani recordings in early ’69. Even through the many personnel changes, Pall Rabbit remained headquartered in Austin but played gigs throughout Texas, taking second place in the 1971 KEYS Radio Battle of the Bands in Corpus Christi, Texas, and performing a New Years Eve 1970 dance party at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas. The band finally broke up at the end of summer ’71.

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Paul Rabbit’s Sonobeat demo consisted of Bob Trenchard’s song The Ship and Chuck Greenwood’s Shores of Treachery, which were thematically linked.

Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. ordered a 10" acetate disc made from the Pall Rabbit monoaural mix, which he submitted to Clive Davis, then head of Columbia Records, but Columbia didn’t buy the master for reasons not documented in the Sonobeat archives, and Pall Rabbit’s Sonobeat recordings remain unreleased.

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