A first taste of radio broadcasting

In 1963 and ’64, future Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. was general sales manager at KILE radio on the Texas Gulf Coast resort island of Galveston. Most Friday evenings, after work, he drove four hours to spend the weekend with his family at home in Austin, some 215 miles away. And after Sunday supper, he drove back to Galveston to start his work week on Monday. During the work week, Bill stayed in a rented room in a small Galveston boarding house. As KILE’s general sales manager, Bill commanded a small ad sales team who solicited Galveston and nearby Gulf Coast businesses – such as restaurants, grocery stores, movie theaters, and car dealerships – to buy commercial spots on the radio station. Bill personally handled national accounts – such as Coca-Cola and auto brands – and supervised KILE’s deejays when they recorded commercials for local and regional advertisers. In a short period of time, he was schooled in how radio stations operate, the kinds of staff and deejays they need, how they’re managed, and how they program music, news, sports, and commercials.

In ’63-’64, Bill Sr.’s son, Bill Jr., was a senior at Austin’s Travis High School. On a spring weekend at home, Bill Sr. suggested that over the summer, Bill Jr. also learn the ropes of radio broadcasting by interning at KILE. On the day following Bill Jr.’s May 27th graduation, he packed up and headed to Houston, Texas, with Bill Sr. for a quick stop at the Federal Communications Commission’s regional bureau, where Bill Jr. took and passed the exam for the Third Class Radiotelephone Operator license required of most radio station on-air staff. With that necessary task complete, the pair headed on to Galveston, an hour’s drive from Houston. In Galveston, Bill Jr. also took a room in the boarding house, down the hall from Bill Sr.’s. The boarding house was a ten minute walk to KILE, which was located in a strip mall facing one of Galveston’s popular beaches. Floor to ceiling windows gave passers-by a direct view into the station’s control room, where they could watch the deejays and newscasters at work. After a few days acclimating to the toasty Gulf Coast weather, on June 5th, Bill Jr. started an intensive two-month internship at the station, learning how to record commercials in the KILE production room, ripping and reading news from the AP and UPI teletype machines, and, eventually, earning the crack-of-dawn deejay shift on Saturdays and Sundays, although that assignment lasted less than a month before he had to return to Austin to start college classes at The University of Texas. The deejay staff at KILE all used fictitious on-air names, largely to protect their identities from the occasional stalker fan, and encouraged Bill Jr. to create one. The afternoon drive-time deejay used Roland Holmes, a pun on the commuter term “rolling home”. To create his air name, Rim threw slips of paper bearing surnames he liked into a hat. The name he pulled out, “Kelley” was stuck in the rim of the hat; thus, “Rim Kelley” became his air name. Before Bill Jr. returned to Austin to start college, Bill Sr. had him record a short demo reel that he could use to apply for a deejay job back home.

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Landing an Austin radio job

As he started the fall semester as a drama major at The University of Texas, Bill Jr. applied for a weekend deejay position at Austin’s top 40 AM station, KNOW, and at a couple of other AM stations that played popular music. He was turned down by all as too inexperienced, a legitimate shortcoming. But how do you get experience when you have almost no experience? With radio now in his blood, Bill Jr. switched majors early in the fall semester, dropping drama in favor of radio-TV-film. At about the same time, tiny KAZZ-FM, recently purchased by Austin restaurateur Monroe Lopez, hired Gib Devine as its new general manager. Immediately, Gib changed the station’s music format from its jazz and big band origins to a “block programming” format in which different genres of music were featured to appeal to different audience segments during different day parts. Spanish language music opened KAZZ’s broadcast day at 6am, followed by pop standards (by artists such as Mantovani, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald), then light classical music, Broadway musical cast albums, more pop standards, and finally folk and jazz segments in the late evening before the station signed off the air at midnight. The block programming format gave Bill Sr. an idea: Bill Jr. could propose adding a top 40 music block to the late-afternoon schedule that would appeal to college and high school students returning from class and who wanted to study (or just goof off) to the current rock ’n’ roll hits. The sales pitch was that it would give KAZZ a new and different set of local advertisers to sell commercial spots to. Rim submitted his demo reel to Gib Devine, who agreed to give a top 40 block a shot from 4pm to 6pm weekdays and on Saturday mornings. That got Bill Jr. on the air in Austin radio, but it had taken until October ’64.

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Bill Sr. returns to Austin

Within a week after Bill Jr. began classes at The University of Texas, Bill Sr., finally exhausted from the weekly back-and-forth trips between Austin and Galveston, took a position on the ad sales staff at Austin’s KTBC AM-FM, beginning the new job in mid-September. At KTBC only two months, and seeing opportunities and challenges with KAZZ-FM’s block programming, he convinced Gib Devine, who had been serving as KAZZ’s general manager and commercial sales manager, to hire him on a draw against commission basis as KAZZ’s sales manager and one-man ad sales department. Gib had been looking to downsize his role at KAZZ because he also operated a separate business producing Spanish-language educational filmstrips and tapes, so Bill Sr.’s proposal was too appealing to pass over. By early 1965, Gib had ceded the station manager job to Bill Sr. as well. As both station manager and commercial sales manager, Bill Sr. seized upon the idea of selling half-hour blocks of live remote broadcasts to various Austin nightclubs. Early adopters of the live remote broadcasts were Austin’s brand new folk cabaret, The 11th Door, and The New Orleans Old World Night Club that featured pop jazz piano stylings by Ernie Mae Miller in its cellar and rock bands upstairs. By early 1966, KAZZ was carrying four to five live remote broadcasts each week. A KAZZ deejay hosted each of the broadcasts, Bill Jr. (as Rim Kelley) hosting the majority of the rock acts, sometimes two or three a week, and Bill Sr. hosting Friday and Saturday broadcasts from The Club Seville, which featured only jazz and pop acts.

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A family affair

At the end of August 1966, 13-year-old Jack Josey, Bill Sr.’s youngest son, joined the KAZZ deejay staff with his own Saturday morning top 40 program. Jack’s new program even got a call-out in Wray Weddell’s Austin column on the front page of the August 16, 1966, edition of The Austin Statesman newspaper, in which Jack was acknowledged as the youngest deejay in Texas. Because Bill Sr., Bill Jr. (as Rim Kelley), and Jack all worked at KAZZ, many thought the Joseys owned the station, but, of course, they didn’t. Until the station was sold to KOKE-AM, Austin’s #1 country music station, in December 1967, and shut down in January 1968 to retool as KOKE-FM, the station was owned by Monroe Lopez.

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Live remote broadcasts launch a record company

Live remote broadcasts from Austin nightclubs turned into one of KAZZ’s success stories. It expanded the station’s audience, brought in more advertising revenue, and distinguished the station from others in the Austin market. And it introduced Bill Sr. and Bill Jr. to dozens of Austin musical acts, from solo folk singers to jazz combos to rock bands, and, as importantly, to their managers. It also introduced the Joseys to the owners and managers of a dozen Austin nightclubs, and those connections played an important role when they started Sonobeat Recording Company in 1967, when they had no recording studio of their own. The dance floors, during off-hours, of many nightclubs served as makeshift recording studios for Sonobeat. Were it not for the KAZZ live remote broadcasts, it’s almost certain Sonobeat never would have been conceived, much less launched, since the broadcasts inspired the Joseys to find a unique way to tap into the burgeoning Austin music scene. The result was parent Sonobeat Recording Company, founded in May 1967 and also serving as the “studio” arm of the company; Sonobeat Records, the record label itself; and Sonosong Music, the company’s music publishing arm that built and exploited a catalog of original songs recorded by the musicians on Sonobeat’s roster. That’s the KAZZ-Sonobeat connection in the proverbial nutshell.

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The KAZZ-Sonobeat Connection

Our next feature, coming in January 2025, is the story of Austin’s KAZZ-FM from its birth in 1957 to its demise ten years later with its sale to KOKE-AM. It was an amazing decade of radio innovations at a tiny but influential radio station.