Consummate showmanship

So, how did Paul New and The Crew come to The Club Seville? In the 1950s, Don Dean worked for Paul’s father at the Ambassador Hotel, home of the world famous Cocoanut Grove nightclub, in Los Angeles, where Paul grew up in the laps of Hollywood celebrities Harry Belefonte, Harry James, Betty Grable, Don Knotts, Steve Allen, Eddie Fisher, and more. After graduation in 1957 from Hollywood High School (where one of his classmates was TV and recording star Ricky Nelson), Paul attended Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles for two years on a baseball scholarship before transferring to St. Louis University in Missouri to finish his Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Hotel, Motel, and Restaurant Management. In 1961, he formed his first band, Paul New and The Crew, playing its first gig at the Van Orman Hotel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Foregoing his dream to become a professional baseball player, later in 1961, Paul returned, band in tow, to Los Angeles to fine tune his musical career on the L.A. club circuit and on touristy Catalina Island, just off the L.A. coast (you know, “26 miles across the sea, Santa Catalina is a-waitin’ for me...”, the Four Preps 1958 hit). Paul’s act developed into more than just dinner and dance music; he interweaved a bit of stand-up comedy and put on a musical-variety floorshow that by the mid-’60s Los Angeles newspaper critics called “blockbuster entertainment”. So, it was no surprise that when Paul began his U.S. coast-to-coast tour Don Dean booked him into The Club Seville. Don had known Paul since he was a kid. Paul’s first appearance at The Club Seville was in September 1966 and was so well received by the club’s patrons that he played at least four return engagements over the following two years.

Paul New and the Crew on stage

The Sonobeat sessions and the “almost” stereo single release

Enter Sonobeat, formed in Austin in May 1967. Although Paul New and The Crew made at least two return engagements to The Club Seville after Sonobeat was founded, it was on the band’s final stop in Austin, in March 1968, that Bill Sr. set up a recording session with Paul. The Club Seville’s Embassy Room served as Sonobeat’s remote recording studio, where Paul completed three tracks: a cover of Don Ho’s Hawaiian hit All That’s Left Is the Lemon Tree, an original instrumental called Balboa inspired by the Southern California beachside resort that Paul frequented as a child, and Johnson City Rag, also an original and a parody of the pop standard Johnson Rag. At the time Paul wrote Johnson City Rag, Johnson City, about 50 miles west of Austin, was home to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s sprawling ranch. The instrumental backing tracks for All That’s Left Is the Lemon Tree and Johnson City Rag and the instrumental were recorded on March 7th, and Paul’s vocal overdubs were recorded the following day.

Sonobeat co-founder 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. engineered the Paul New sessions on Sonobeat’s Ampex 350 and 354 tape decks. Bill Sr. selected All That’s Left Is the Lemon Tree and Balboa for release as Sonobeat stereo 45 RPM single PV-s114/I-s114, sending the master tape to record pressing plant Sidney J. Wakefield & Company in Phoenix, Arizona, where lacquer masters were cut, disk pressing plates manufactured, and a dozen vinyl test pressings made and delivered to Sonobeat. But the single was never commercially released for reasons undocumented in the Sonobeat archives and now unrecalled. There’s no other information about the sessions nor the names of Paul’s bandmates (although we’ve been able to discern Paul’s sax player and drummer on the Sonobeat tracks through internet research) in Sonobeat’s archives.

Throughout his decades-long career, Paul has been a musical “jack of all trades”, playing guitar, trumpet, vibes, banjo, trombone, ukulele, mandolin, and keyboards, but he’s been publicly quoted as saying keyboards are his favorite. Paul has lived on Catalina Island, Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and Seal Beach, California. He performs under the stage name Paul New Stewart and continues to post new recordings on ReverbNation.

The Paul New and the Crew session master tape

The final “release version” of the proposed Paul New single