Sonobeat Artists
Tommy Hill and the Country Music Revue
Rocker goes country
In November 1972, Sonobeat recorded Tommy Hill and the Country Music Revue at Sonobeat’s studios at 705 North Lamar in Austin, Texas. As the band’s name bluntly suggests, the Country Music Revue played a cross-section of then-current and classic country tunes. Before we delve into the band’s sessions, a little backstory on its namesake and leader, Austinite Tommy Joe Hill. Tommy spent his late teens and early 20s playing rhythm guitar in several Austin rock bands, including the ultra-popular ’60s frat party and club band The Baby Cakes (which also featured future Lavender Hill Express and Phoenix lead guitarist Leonard Arnold). A talented guitarist, Tommy was soon wooed to Nashville, signing with Mercury Records. But his heart remained in Austin, so he returned to form the Country Music Revue, which quickly became prominent on the Central Texas country dance hall circuit. Now, back to November ’72: Sonobeat producer Bill Josey Sr. recorded Tommy’s band with a view to capitalizing on the then surging “outlaw” country music movement in Austin. The outlaw, or progressive, country movement was led by Texans Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson. To some extent, Tommy’s material and delivery shared Willie’s outlaw feel.
Tommy’s band went by many names. Coming into 1972, it was known as Tommy Hill and the Misfits. But Tommy started off the Sonobeat recording session by introducing the band as Tommy Hill and his Show Band. He also introduced the musicians who performed with him: Benny McArthur, George Rodriguez, Larry Gentry, Jess DeMaine (who recorded as a solo act with Sonobeat in 1972 and 1973), and Carl Goertz. However, Bill Sr. clearly marked the master tape box holding the band’s recordinga as Tommy Hill and the Country Music Revue and, indeed, no more than a month later, Austin-area nightclub newspaper ads were using the Country Music Revue name, sometimes misspelling Revue as Review. The band played Central Texas nightclubs and honky-tonks, including The Broken Spoke, The Rockin’ M, and Arkie’s Dessau, on a regular weekly schedule and, notably, performed at the 125th anniversary of the founding of Georgetown, Texas, in May 1973.
The band recorded ten tracks for Bill Sr., who sequenced them into a band demo album. Other than the first “intro” song, which was an instrumental jam adding instruments as each band member was introduced, the remaining nine tracks were covers of, among many, Tony Joe White’s 1968 hit Polk Salad Annie, Willie Nelson’s classic Funny How Time Slips Away, and Johnny Bush’s Whiskey River (made famous by Willie Nelson’s cover). Nothing in the Sonobeat archives indicates whether Bill offered the Country Music Revue album to national record labels or whether he intended to release the album on the Sonobeat Records label. Sonobeat’s Country Music Revue recordings remain unreleased.
In the years following the Sonobeat sessions, Tommy continued to perform regularly but also produced for other Central Texas recording artists. As a founder and co-owner of Texas Crude “Crude” in this context refers to crude oil or unrefined petroleum, Texas’ number one export and for which huge drilling rigs litter the Central Texas landscape. Music Publishing Company, Tommy produced hundreds of artist song demos, singles, and albums. Among Tommy’s producing highlights is an album with San Marcos, Texas, native Roy Head (best known for his 1965 national hit, Treat Her Right), released on Tommy’s Texas Crude label; the album also featured performances by many other prominent Central Texas musicians including Stevie Ray Vaughan. Retiring from music publishing, Tommy segued into an acting career, landing roles in several major films and a starring role in the 2008 western Six Gun, released by Lionsgate. He also starred in four short films produced in Austin: 2012’s The Midwife’s Husband, 2014’s Inherit the Truth and Land of Leopold, and 2015’s Paint by Numbers. Tommy played a strong supporting role in Johnny Frank Garrett’s Last Word, a feature film that screened at the 2016’s SXSWSouth By Southwest, also known as “SXSW” or “South By” and whose name was inspired by the Alfred Hitchcock thriller North By Northwest, began in 1987 as a local music festival and since has expanded to cover feature films and interactive media on an international scale. SXSW pretty much takes over Austin during The University of Texas spring break every March., and had a cameo in an episode of the 2017 season of the HBO series The Leftovers. Tommy, now retired and living in Cedar Creek (about 25 miles southeast of Austin), is one of central Texas’ true renaissance men.
Stars of the Revue
- Jess DeMaine (piano, organ, and guitar)
- Larry Gentry (bass)
- Carl Goertz (steel guitar and rhythm guitar )
- Tommy Hill (guitar and vocals)
- Benny McArthur (lead guitar)
- George Rodriguez (drums)
Recording details
Unreleased recordings
- Band introductions and jam
- Boogie Woogie Blues (Albert Ammons)
- Funny How Time Slips Away (Willie Nelson)
- I Ain’t Never (Webb Pierce-Mel Tillis)
- Lonely Women (Make Good Lovers) (Freddie Weller-Spooner Oldham)
- Polk Salad Annie (Tony Joe White)
- She Needs Someone to Hold Her (When She Cries) (Raymond Smith)
- Stoop Down Baby (Robert Willis)
- Who’s Julie (Mel Tillis)
- Whiskey River (Johnny Bush-Paul Stroud)
Produced and engineered by Bill Josey Sr.
Recorded at Sonobeat Studios, 705 North Lamar, Austin, Texas, in November 1972
Recorded using...
- AKG D707E dynamic, ElectroVoice 665 dynamic, ElectroVoice Slimair 636 dynamic, and Sony ECM22 electret condenser microphones
- Scully 280 half-inch 4-track and Stemco 500-4 half-ionch 2-track tape decks
- Custom 16-channel 4-bus mixing console
- Fairchild Lumiten 663ST stereo optical compressor
- Blonder-Tongue Audio Baton 9-band graphic equalizer
- Custom steel plate stereo reverb
- 3M (Scotch) 206 tape stock