The year started off well enough

With Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Jr.’s departure in September 1970, Bill Josey Sr. began operating Sonobeat solo. Sonobeat Recording Company, incorporated in March 1969, officially dissolved on April 9, 1971, and became Bill Sr.’s sole proprietorship. Bill began 1971 on an up beat by recording potential, but unreleased singles with two hot new Austin rock bands, Genesee and Phoenix, and a second Afro-jazz album with Wali and the Afro-Caravan. The Afro-Caravan’s second album included a dramatic 19 minute, three-song suite entitled Shades of Africa and an extended remake of Afro-Twist, the “B” side of the group’s 1968 Sonobeat 45 RPM stereo single release. Bill offered Wali’s new album to Liberty/UA, since Liberty’s subsidiary Solid State Records had purchased and distributed the Afro-Caravan’s first Sonobeat album, Home Lost and Found (The Natural Sound), a year earlier. When Liberty/UA passed and no other national label expressed interest, Bill put the album aside, briefly considering releasing it on the Sonobeat Records label later in the year, but the album remains unreleased even in 2025.

---

---

At the same time he was shopping the second Afro-Caravan album to major labels, Bill was renewing efforts to develop the next “super group” that might attract a lucrative national record label deal for Sonobeat. In spring, he produced five tracks with a reincarnation and enlargement of the Sweetarts, that had changed its name to Fast Cotton. Bill and band founder and front-man Ernie Gammage selected two tracks for release as a Sonobeat 45 RPM single, but Fast Cotton broke up before the master tape was ready to send to the pressing plant. Ironically, the timing of the band’s breakup was a blessing, since had the breakup occurred shortly after releasing its single, without the band available to promote the release, it almost certainly would have been a commercial failure. Although Bill expended his time and energy recording Fast Cotton, at least he didn’t spend money topress, release, and promote the single.

---

---

James Polk also returned in 1971 to record tracks for a potential jazz-funk album as a follow-on to his 1969 Sonobeat 45 RPM stereo single Stick-To-It-Tive-Ness, but, like the second Afro-Caravan album, Sonobeat was unable to interest any national labels in Polk’s new material. By 1971, Bill had determined that it was too difficult for a small regional label, like Sonobeat, to release albums, which cost more to record, manufacture, package, market, and distribute, so he focused his album energies on potential licensing deals with national labels.

---

A transitional and trying mid-year

The Bill Miller Group continued sessions with Sonobeat on and off through the first half of 1971, and Bill Sr. even called in Sonosong composer and resident mystic Herman Nelson to help with lyrics for some of the group’s material.

Much like 1970, a transitional year for Sonobeat, in which its energies and resources were focused on building Mariani as a “super group”, 1971 represented still another transitional year that seemed to offer new and promising opportunities with Wali and the Afro-Caravan, Fast Cotton, and the Bill Miller Group. But 1971 was divided by a divorce that forced the Josey family out of the Western Hills Drive home, shutting down Sonobeat’s mini-studio housed there. In the middle of his work – and breaking the momentum of – producing the final Bill Miller sessions, Bill Sr. moved his personal residence and relocated the Sonobeat studios. He found commercial space on the ground floor of the KVET radio station building at 705 North Lamar, just south of downtown Austin, where he quickly outfitted a spartan studio and finished recording the Miller group, which by then had assumed the name The Daily Planet (a nod to the fictional newspaper where Superman, in his secret identity as Clark Kent, worked as a reporter). The sessions yielded a highly programmatic album going by the working title Cold SunThe term refers to The Faint Young Sun, or cold sun, paradox, a scientific enigma that questions how primordial earth could have liquid water and support life when the sun’s output was only 70% of what it now is. Today, the term also refers to a musical style melding hardcore punk, electronic music, djent, metalcore, and nu metalcore, all of which could describe the Bill Miller Group’s sound long before the term was coined..

By 1971, Bill was no longer using expensive vinyl albums to circulate Sonobeat demos to national record labels but, instead, mailed out inexpensive audiocassette copies. He sent audiocassettes of the Cold Sun album to his regular major label contacts, finding interest at Columbia, but discussions there dragged on and after several frustrating months fizzle out, leaving Bill with a breakthrough album but inadequate resources to release it himself on Sonobeat Records.

---

---

Not a great ending to the year

Sonobeat’s move from the Western Hills Drive studio to the KVET Building provided a new challenge: two radio stations occupied the building’s second floor, one of which was directly above Sonobeat’s studio space. Fortunately, one of the two, KVET, was a daytime-only AM station, but its sister station, KASE-FM, was a 24-hour-a-day fine music station. To prevent Sonobeat’s recording activities from disturbing the stations’ broadcast activities, Bill was forced to limit recording sessions to between dusk and dawn, although he used the studio during daytime hours for vocal overdub and mix-down sessions which were quiet enough to not disturb the radio stations’ operations. And, to muffle loud guitar amps, Bill built five-sided baffles lined with spun fiberglass insulation into which he stuffed, inward facing, the amp speaker boxes of the bands he recorded, miking the speakers through a small hole cut into the back of each baffle. Bill also began to experiment with quadraphonic recording techniques, choosing the CBS/Sony SQ format that was capable of encoding four-channel recordings into quad, stereo, and mono-compatible phonograph records.

---

---

Perhaps the combined frustration of the change in his personal circumstances, the challenges and expenses of outfitting and operating his new studio in the KVET Building, and the lack of a Sonobeat album sale to a national label led Bill to begin accepting custom recording work to help defray his monthly expenses. This meant he was simply providing studio facilities and acting as a recording engineer for artists who were willing to pay hourly fees and, in those instances, Sonobeat retained no rights in the resulting recordings But at the same time, Bill continued to seek out and produce recordings with promising new artists for potential release on the Sonobeat label or as demos to shop to the major national labels.

Although Sonobeat’s activities as a label dropped off beginning in ’70, Bill found an interesting opportunity soon after relocating the studios to the KVET Building. Sessions with Austin gospel group The Royal Light Singers yielded two singles for the Sonobeat label. As it turns out, though, only one of The Royal Light Singers’ singles appeared to get a commercial release and was the only confirmed Sonobeat Records release in 1971. The second Royal Light Singers single likely was pressed solely for the gospel group to self-distribute at its live performances. The singles earned back their production and manufacturing costs, but certainly didn’t contribute much to Sonobeat’s bottom line in ’71.

Other groups Bill developed in ’71 included progressive rock trio Synthesis and country-rockers Kingfish, both acts recording original songs that were never released because Bill couldn’t find a national label willing to purchase the master tapes. Worse still, Kingfish broke up before Bill had an opportunity to release a single by the band on the Sonobeat Records label. The year ended without any financial successes for Sonobeat.

---