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Recording an Austin ’60s legend

In late 1967, the Third Great Awakening, as philosophers now call it – but that the hippie underground called the age of aquarius – arrived in Austin, Texas, in all its rainbow colors. What with the liberal University of Texas, a growing hippie culture, the psychedelic sounds of The 13th Floor Elevators, The Rag underground newspaper, sit-ins, love-ins, the counterculture takeover of the annual Eeyore’s Birthday Party at Austin’s Eastwoods Park, and the happenin’ psychedelic scene at 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., it’s no wonder Sonobeat had recorded so many Austin-based progressive rock bands during 1967 and ’68. Sonobeat first recorded Vulcan Gas Company favorite Shiva’s Headband in December 1967 but producers 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. weren’t pleased with the recordings.

Moving on to February 1968, Sonobeat started over with Shiva’s Headband at The Vulcan. The February ’68 tracks, Kaleidoscoptic and There’s No Tears, were completed with vocal overdubs and scheduled as Sonobeat’s third rock release, but this go-round, the band wasn’t pleased with the recordings: the rhythm and bass guitars, along with band founder Spencer Perkins’ electric violin, were “tapped’ at their amp outputs and run directly into Sonobeat’s mixer rather than miked in front of the amps’s speaker boxes. Early in its lifecycle, when it had only a 6-input mixer and too few quality microphones to cover the speaker boxes of every amplified instrument in a band, Sonobeat had no choice but to use the tapping technique (ironically used regularly now in recording studios everywhere and called “direct injection”). But tapping an amplified instrument sounds markedly different than miking the instrument’s speaker box, and Shiva’s Headband really wanted a “miked” sound, which wasn’t possible with the recording equipment Sonobeat then had.

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Band founder Spenser Perskin wanted to re-record the songs somewhere other than The Vulcan Gas Company, which he thought gave the drum kit and vocals too boomy a sound. When another session couldn’t be scheduled quickly enough, Spencer agreed to reconsidered release of the February ’68 tracks, so Bill Sr. sent the master tape off to Houston Records, where a handful of vinyl 45 RPM test discs were pressed. After the band listened to the test pressing, they reaffirmed their displeasure with the recording, so the release was abandoned and The Conqueroo’s single, I’ve Got Time, which had been slated to follow Shiva’s in release suddenly moved up to take the slot that had been reserved for Shiva’s Headband’s single. The handful of Shiva’s test pressings were delivered to Sonobeat with blank white labels on which Bill Sr. wrote basic information for archival purposes. To the best of our knowledge, none of the test pressings has ever been discovered circulating “in the wild”.

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Spenser Perskin and his wife, Susan, founded Shiva’s Headband in Austin in 1967. At the time, the band included Shawn Siegel, Kenny Parker, Bob Tom Reed, and Jerry Barnett. In 1968, Shiva’s took over from The Conqueroo as official house band of The Vulcan Gas Company. Shiva’s performed on an all-star program at the Texas Pop Festival during Labor Day weekend in 1969. The band went on to record an album for Capitol Records, Take Me to the Mountains, that became a cult classic of the ’60s psychedelic music era. Shiva’s Headband and its manager Eddie Wilson helped finance the launch in 1970 of The Vulcan’s successor in Austin, Armadillo World Headquarters, and the band, along with Hub City Movers, and Whistler, headlined the Armadillo’s opening on August 7th and 8th, 1970, but by then, Shiva’s personnel had shifted dramatically, with only Spencer and Shawn remaining from the lineup Sonobeat recorded in 1967 and ’68. Over the years, the band shared the stage with Canned Heat, Steppenwolf, ZZ Top, and dozens of top name acts passing through Austin in the ’60s and ’70s. The band even had a bit part (playing, ironically, a country-western band) in the Ryan O’Neal comedy feature The Thief Who Came to Dinner, shot in Houston in 1972. Spenser has kept various versions of the band alive and performing in and around Austin since the ’60s, but today’s version is called Shiva’s Headband Experience. In 1999, Spenser was named “Austin’s Oldest Hippie” during the annual Eeyore’s Birthday Party at Austin’s Eastwoods Park.

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