Lavender Hill Express, whose three singles on Sonobeat included Visions, Watch Out!, and Outside My Window. The Lee Arlano Trio and The Royal Lights Singers tied for second place, each with two singles. Read more and hear sound bites from all three LHE singles.

Jazz stylists The Lee Arlano Trio. Their 1967 single, There Will Never Be Another You, was Sonobeat's second commercial release; they followed that single with Sonobeat's first album release, in 1968, Jazz to the Third Power, with cover art by Austin icon Jim Franklin. Their last single, School Daze, brought their total number of commercially released tracks to 12. Read more.

First was the Sweetarts, whose single A Picture of Me, was Sonobeat's first commercial release; second was Fast Cotton, whose material was never commercially released by Sonobeat; and third was Base, an experimental studio recording group Ernie headlined in 1973.

The legandary Vulcan Gas Company music hall filled what was, beginning in the 1880s, warehouses of the W.B. Smith dry goods establishment, for which the building itself is named. The W. B. Smith Building, now a Texas landmark, was built over a deep cistern that stored and supplied water for the business. By all accounts, including more than a dozen Sonobeat recordings, the cistern added a remarkable reverb to the acoustics of the Vulcan.

The Sonobeat archives are unclear, but the first recordings were either at The Ozone Forest, a popular Austin night club at 34th and Guadalupe, or at the Lake Austin Inn. The first group Sonobeat recorded, Leo and the Prophets, whose Sonobeat recordings were never released, was the house band at Ozone Forest. Sonobeat co-founder Rim Kelley, who co-engineered the Leo and the Prophets sessions with Bill Curtis, recalls the sessions were recorded in the parking lot at the Lake Austin Inn.

Sonobeat's 6th stereo single, Mass Confusion b/w Rainy Sunday Morning, was recorded at the KAZZ-FM studios in Austin, Texas, late at night (or more accurately, in the wee early morning hours). The band set up its drums and amps in KAZZ's reception room and its speaker boxes in the long hallway down the middle of the 10th floor of the Perry-Brooks Building, that housed KAZZ's studios in downtown Austin. The instrumental tracks were recorded while KAZZ's all night DJ, Stan "the Man" Parks, played several records in a row. The vocals were overdubbed in the long hallway to provide natural reverb. Read more.

Bob Brown wrote and performed 1 to 3, the "B" side of Sonobeat's fifth stereo single release by the Conqueroo, and later performed as headliner in country-rock band Kingfish. Sonobeat's Kingfish recordings were never released (but we offer some enticing sound bites from the Kingfish sessions).

Mariani. The band was organized around spectacular jazz-rock drummer Vince Mariani, who had recorded a pair of drum solos Sonobeat released as a single in 1968. Producers Bill Josey Sr. and Rim Kelley (Bill Josey Jr.) realized that teamed with talented guitarist and bassist, Vince could headline a great progressive rock band. Lightning fast guitarist Eric Johnson was only 15 when Vince invited him to audition for the new band.

Liberty Hill hosted outlaw country music icon Willie Nelson's annual Fourth of July picnic concert in 1975. Popular myth has all of Willie's Fourth of July concerts placed in Liberty Hill, but, in fact, Liberty Hill hosted it only once, but it must have been a doozie. Other venues for Willie's picnic extravaganzas include nearby Dripping Springs, Luckenbach, and even Austin.

In 1976, Helmer Dahl recorded an odd album of polkas and pop standards, all performed on an electric organ and drum machine. Was Helmer Dahl a group or an individual? That, we don't know!