Artists

It's approaching the end of 1967. Sonobeat has enjoyed moderate success with its first three stereo 45 RPM releases earlier in its first year of operation: Sweetarts (rock), Lee Arlano Trio (jazz), and Don Dean (pop). But Sonobeat co-founders Bill Josey Sr. and Rim Kelley (the pseudonym Bill Josey Jr. uses as a deejay and record producer) really want to find another great Austin rock band to record. The year before, in 1966, two of Austin's hottest club bands, The Wig and the Baby Cakes, have broken up, and former members from each have coalesced into a new unit. During one of the band's first practice sessions, keyboardist Johnny Schwertner sees a TV listing for the old gangster movie The Lavender Hill Mob and thinks of using the name but replacing "Mob" with "Express" to sound more contemporary. All the band members immediately agree, so Lavender Hill Express is born (the band is unrelated to the Clefs of Lavender Hill, a Miami, Florida, band that forms in 1966 and breaks up in 1968). Bill Sr. and Rim spend evenings and weekends tracking hot bands performing around Austin and catch Lavender Hill Express a couple of times in late '66 and early '67 at Jade Room. The band is managed by Sonobeat friend Mike Lucas, program director and afternoon deejay at Austin's then-top rock 'n' roll AM radio station KNOW, who makes introductions. Soon thereafter, Lavender Hill Express begins a one-year multi-record relationship with Sonobeat Records. They write most of the material they play at clubs, so they're the perfect group to record new material for Sonobeat and to feed Sonobeat's publishing company, Sonosong Music.

The first of LHE's Sonobeat releases is guitarist Layton DePenning's up-tempo Visions, a pop-rock tour-de-force with a catchy hook and strong vocal harmonies. The flip side is keyboardist Johnny Schwertner's ballad Trying To Live A Life, on which Johnny also provides lead vocal. In '67, Sonobeat has no recording studio facilities, so it rents night clubs during off hours and carts in its portable gear for recording sessions. Only months before, Sonobeat records its first single, by the Sweetarts, at Swingers Club in north Austin; there Sonobeat returns for Lavender Hill Express' session. The resulting instrumental backing tracks are solid, but producer Rim Kelley thinks a string arrangement will add a contemporary sound, a trend popularized by The Beatles, Mamas and Papas, and Motown artists. Sonobeat hires local arranger/conductor Richard Green, who contracts a string quartet – two violins, a viola, and a cello – composed of members of the Austin Symphony Orchestra for the overdub session. Green also plays harpsichord alongside the string quartet. The string and harpsichord overdub session, held at the KAZZ-FM studios in downtown Austin, is scheduled for November 25, 1967, giving Richard about a month to pencil out arrangements for both tunes. The vocal overdubs are recorded a day after the strings are recorded, also at the KAZZ studios, and on December 6th Bill Sr. drives the final mixes to Houston, Texas, for mastering and pressing by Houston Records, Inc. The process of recording the multi-layered single is documented in a Sonobeat special feature. Lavender Hill Express' first single barely makes it out in '67, hitting Austin record stores only days before Christmas. It sells well enough for a second pressing in February '68, at which time the band makes a promotional appearance at a record-signing event at G.C. Murphy, one of Austin's leading discount record retailers in the '60s. Collectors easily can tell whether they have a copy from the first pressing or the second pressing: the first pressing uses Sonobeat's yellow label background and the second marks the first appearance of Sonobeat's blue-gray label background. The February 3, 1968, edition of Cash Box names Visions a Best Bet.

Lavender Hill Express immediately benefits from airplay that Visions gets on Texas radio stations. Layton DePenning recalls that the release of the single legitimizes the band, providing opportunities to open for the Beach Boys, Lovin' Spoonful, Animals, Strawberry Alarm Clock, Buffalo Springfield, and amost every other national act that comes through Austin in the months following the single's release.

When it comes time to record Lavender Hill's next single, Sonobeat co-founder Bill Josey Sr. wants to take a turn at producing. Sessions with LHE are scheduled in mid-March 1968. The fiercely driving Watch Out! by drummer Rusty Wier is selected as the "A" side. The "B" side is lead guitarist Leonard Arnold's Country Music's Here To Stay, foreshadowing Austin's progressive country movement that will begin in the early '70s and in which four of LHE's members, including Leonard, will figure prominently. Guest musician Jim Brown is brought in to play steel guitar on Country Music's Here To Stay.

This go-round, the basic tracks for Watch Out and Country Music's Here To Stay are recorded at Austin's hottest music venue, Vulcan Gas CompanyThe Vulcan is Austin's first successful hippie music hall, opening in 1967 in an old warehouse at 316 Congress Avenue and closing in 1970. in downtown Austin. The sessions are recorded during off-hours hours in the Vulcan's empty auditorium-sized dance hall. The reverb on Rusty Wier's rim shot, used as punctuation in the chorus of Watch Out!, is created by placing a mike at the far end of the hall; the mike is turned on just as Rusty strikes his snare to capture the Vulcan's booming acoustics. With the Vulcan sessions completed, back at Sonobeat's then-new home-based Western Hills Drive studio in northwest Austin, engineer Rim Kelley heavily "flanges""Flanging" is a sweeping audio frequency comb filter created by playing two identical tapes on synchronized tape decks and recording the combined output onto another tape deck while lightly and alternately dragging a thumb on the outer flange of each tape reel during playback; the resulting slight frequency offsets create a swooshing sound. Modern digital audio workstations create a similar effect with the turn of a knob. the instrumental track for Watch Out! before the lead guitar and vocals are overdubbed. Although the basic instrumental track is flanged throughout, the effect is timed to create a particularly dramatic swoosh on the snare reverb. Rim recalls that the inspiration for adding the flanging effect to Watch Out! is The Small Face's 1967 hit Itchycoo Park, itself heavily flanged between verses. Sonobeat's second Lavender Hill Express single gets a regional release in June '68 and receives a Newcomer Pick in the July 20, 1968, issue of Cash Box Magazine.

The third and final Lavender Hill Express single for Sonobeat, recorded in September 1968 and released the following month, is Outside My Window, Layton DePenning's experimental song with highly visual lyrics and a jam-like progression. Sonobeat returns to Vulcan Gas Company to record the tune's instrumental backing track, and additional instruments and vocals are overdubbed at Sonobeat's home-based Western Hills Drive studio. Outside My Window runs seven and a half minutes but is faded at 3:45 for the single. Layton's tune is backed with Rusty Wier's acoustic guitar and electric bass ballad Silly Rhymes, recorded entirely at the Western Hills Drive studio and one of the first sessions in which Sonobeat uses its new Scully half-inch 4-track tape deck. Rim, who produced the first Lavender Hill Express single, wants to bring arranger Richard Green back to add a string section to Silly Rhymes, but Sonobeat's heavy 1968 recording and release schedule, which stretches its resources to the limit, make the strings an unaffordable luxury. Finally, in 2009, using a digital music workstation, Rim adds a light dusting of glockenspiel and strings, more or less as he remembers envisioning back in 1968, to a 2008 digital transfer of the track, a snippet of which you can hear below. Meanwhile, Outside My Window becomes the only single Sonobeat releases in two versions; the alternate version – distributed only to radio station deejays – offers the commercial stereo mix (for FM stations) on one side and a special monaural mix (for AM stations) on the other. This version isn't sold to the public. The single picks up a Best Bet review in the December 7, 1968, issue of Cash Box Magazine.

A third song going by the working title Trouble, written and with lead vocal by Rusty Wier, also is recorded alongside Outside My Window at the Vulcan and is intended as the first of several additional tunes that eventually will round out a 10- to 12-track album, which is prematurely reported in the October 25, 1968, issue of The Armored Sentinel, the official newspaper of Fort Hood Army base in Temple, Texas, about 70 miles north of Austin. The paper reports "Austin rock group Lavender Hill Express is putting the finishing touches on their new album which they're hoping to have released before the new year. They are much in demand in Texas for personal appearances and the album could be their springboard to national recognition". But the additional tracks are never recorded and the album is never finished, so Trouble is shelved.

Visions is packaged in a single-sided black and white picture sleeve, but Bill Sr. pulls out all the stops for Watch Out!, which is released in a double-sided, two-color picture sleeve so that stores can rack the single in both the rock and the country sections, depending on which side of the sleeve faces out. Rim designs the sleeves for both singles using photos supplied by the band. By the time Outside My Window is released, LHE is well established, so the single wears only a generic paper sleeve.

Only three months after release of its third Sonobeat single, Lavender Hill Express performs on January 21, 1969, at one of six simultaneous inaugural balls held in Austin for newly-elected Texas governor Preston Smith and Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes. LHE's performance is at the Commodore Perry Hotel in downtown Austin.

Lavender Hill Express is considered Sonobeat's first super group, and all of LHE's singles are big hits by Sonobeat standards. It's no wonder. In 1967 and '68, LHE is composed of some of Austin's most talented and formidable rock musicians: Layton DePenning and Leonard Arnold had been founding members of the Baby Cakes, managed by Mike Lucas. Rusty Wier and Jess Yaryan were founding members of The Wig, perhaps Austin's hottest band in the mid-'60s, managed by Rim's friend Paul Harrison, an afternoon deejay at KNOW-AM radio. Johnny Schwertner had been in The Reasons Why, a popular Central Texas band based in Temple. Johnny leaves LHE to co-found Plymouth Rock, which records a single with Sonobeat in 1969. Gary P. Nunn, who will become a significant figure in Austin's cosmic country movement, joins LHE as Johnny Schwertner's replacement on keyboards after Sonobeat's recordings and later will become a founding member of Jerry Jeff Walker's Lost Gonzo Band. Gary's song London Homesick Blues is picked as the theme for Austin City Limits and attains iconic stature. Gary is inducted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2001. Post-LHE, Jess switches from music to management, taking the reigns at Austin's Saxon Pub, and Rusty and Layton are joined by ex-Plymouth Rock guitarist John Inmon to form the trio Rusty, Layton & John. Eventually, Rusty, Layton, and John, along with Leonard Arnold, go on to become influential musicians in Austin's cosmic country movement in the '70s. Rusty enjoys a successful career based in Austin, with many solo albums to his credit and a hit tune of his own, Don't It Make You Want to Dance (Bonnie Raitt's 1980 cover, part of the Urban Cowboy motion picture soundtrack, hits #1 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart). Inducted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame in 2001, Rusty succumbs to cancer on October 9, 2009. Band manager Paul Harrison dies of natural causes on December 2, 2012. Leonard Arnold co-founds Austin progressive rock band Phoenix, later performs in Austin country-rock band Blue Steel, and eventually moves to Nashville, where he performs with Vince Gill and dozens of other country greats. Leonard succumbs to cancer in September 2015. Layton DePenning returns to Sonobeat in 1971 as a founding member of Genesee and later does a stint with B. W. Stevenson. Layton is a founding member of present day Austin country-rock bands Denim and Sons of Slim, and operates a recording studio just south of Austin in Buda, Texas.

Lavender Hill Express holds the record for the most singles – three – that Sonobeat releases by the same artist. A super group in every way, the collective talents of the band's members as songwriters, singers, and musicians are self-evident in its Sonobeat legacy and in the remarkable musical careers each enjoys in the years following LHE.

In June 2014, Sonobeat Historical Archives begins digital restoration and remastering of LHE's material, with a digital reissue via the iTunes and Amazon Music stores hitting on July 22, 2014. The long-shelved song Trouble is included as a bonus track, fulfilling The Armored Sentinel's prophecy of an impending album, albeit 46 years later. The surviving members of LHE support the digital reissue with a reunion performance at the Saxon Pub in Austin (Rusty Wier's son Bon takes his late dad's seat at the drums and on vocals) on July 26, 2014. Bonus: the Sweetarts reunion lineup makes a special guest appearance with LHE at the Saxon to celebrate both bands' 2014 digital reissues.

In 2017, we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Sonobeat's vinyl release of LHE's Visions with a sparkling new remastered digital edition, available on Apple Music and the iTune Store in an Apple Digital Master version and on more than a dozen other digital download and streaming services around the world.

LHE's Watch Out, released by Sonobeat on vinyl in June 1968, celebrates its 50th anniversary in June 2018, with a freshly-remastered edition, available on digital download and streaming websites around the world and available on Apple Music and iTunes in a spectacular Apple Digital Master version. More about these 50th anniversary editions:

Visions 50th Anniversary Edition Watch Out 50th Anniversary Edition

In April 2023, Sonobeat Historical Archives embarks on an experiment with partner Wonderfulsounds in the U.K., authorizing a limited edition vinyl press-run of Lavender Hill Express's Silly Rhymes, available only to members of Wondefulsound's Singles Club. Wonderfulsound's 7" reissue spotlights for a brand new audience of discerning audiophiles Rusty Wier's acoustic ballad, originally released by Sonobeat in 1968 as the "B" side of LHE's Outside My Window. We'll see if this experiment merits further vinyl reissues of Sonobeat's classic 45 RPM stereo singles.