Base

Sonobeat's quad mixer schematic

In 1972, Sonobeat owner/producer Bill Josey Sr. began experimenting with 4-channel audio recording and mixing techniques, anticipating that American consumers would flock to adopt at least one of the many new quadraphonic playback systems that had been introduced beginning in 1970. The emerging leaders in the quad race were ElectroVoice's EV-4, CBS/Sony's SQ, and Sansui's QS systems. Before 1972, many Sonobeat singles had been recorded on 4-track machines, but none had been recorded or mixed for playback on 4 speakers -- front left, front right, rear left, and rear right -- to create a surround sound experience. Although the Sonobeat logo on the Lee Arlano Trio's Jazz to the Third Power album includes the words "Surrounding Sound", none of Sonobeat's commercial single or album releases actually were mixed or encoded for quadraphonic playback.

To conduct his earliest quadraphonic experiments, Bill organized an elite group of Austin rock musicians into a studio band he called "Base", either a play on "bass", since at least three different bass players performed on the recordings, or a reflection that this core group of musicians represented his "base" for creating a new sound. The 1972 Base sessions were recorded and mixed at the Sonobeat Studios in the KVET building on North Lamar in Austin, Texas.

The June and July '72 Base sessions featured a cast of luminary musicians with whom Bill had worked previously or who were otherwise "friends" of Sonobeat: guitar whiz kid Eric Johnson (Mariani), drummers Bobby Rector (Golden Dawn, a contemporary of the 13th Floor Elevators) and Jay Meade (New Atlantis), and bassists Ronnie Leatherman (13th Floor Elevators), Danny Galindo (13th Floor Elevators and Fast Cotton), and Mike Reid (New Atlantis). Ronnie Leatherman recalls that Stacy Sutherland (a founding member of the Elevators) jammed with Eric Johnson on at least one Base track. After recording several sessions with Base, Bill turned to other projects, only to return to Base a year later with a new mix of musicians, headlined by Sonobeat favorite Ernie Gammage (Sweetarts and Fast Cotton).

Bill Josey's leader tape notes

There are no known stereo mixes -- and none may ever have existed -- of the 1972 Base tracks, which include several freeform jams. Fortunately, the original 4-track session masters have been preserved and served as the source for three of the sound bites we present below, including a track featuring Eric Johnson, who at age 15 recorded for Sonobeat as a founding member of the rock fusion band Mariani. When we began digitizing the 4-track masters, we discovered that Bill wrote track notes on the paper leader tape spliced into the master tape to separate takes. These notes along with Bill's annotations on the master tape boxes themselves help form a picture of what he was trying to achieve by building what could have become one of Austin's supergroups of the '70s. But in 1972, that wasn't his goal.

We offer three sound bites from the 1972 Base sessions: in the first, "David", whose last name is not listed in the Sonobeat archives, appears to be teaching a new song to the band; the second, a jam in which Bill offers instructions to the musicians and which features two bass guitars; and the third, a spectacular clip of Eric Johnson in an imaginative guitar jam.

In 1972, Base may have been nothing more than producer Bill Josey's controlled recording experiment, but when he remade the band in 1973, he had a commercial end game in mind for the new "Ernie Gammage and Base".

Tommy Hill & the Country Music Revue

Tommy Hill and the Country Music Revue master tape box

Rockabilly fiddler, guitarist, and singer Tommy Hill had a long career in Hollywood and Nashville as a successful songwriter, band member, and producer for a slew of marquee country stars including Johnny Horton, Webb Pierce, Ray Price, Jim Reeves, Kitty Wells, and Hank Williams. Beginning in the 1950s, the Texas native, born and reared in a small town outside San Antonio, had a succession of recording contracts with Decca, Hickory, Starday, and MGM, but was never successful as a recording artist in his own right. In the '60s Hill formed the short-lived Stop label, recording and releasing singles by the Jordanaires, who often sang back-up for Elvis. In 1972 he formed another record company, Gusto, and it was may have been for this fledgling label that he came to record an album of 10 tunes at the Sonobeat studios on North Lamar in Austin in November of that year. Or, Sonobeat owner/producer Bill Josey Sr. may have recorded Hill with a view to capitalizing on the surging "outlaw" country music movement in Austin at the time. The Outlaw Movement was led by Central Texas singer/songwriter Willie Nelson, and to some extent, Hill's material and delivery share that Outlaw feel. Unfortunately, nothing in the Sonobeat archives indicates whether Bill Sr. ever offered the Hill masters to national record labels or intended to release them on the Sonobeat label itself.

Hill's Sonobeat sessions yielded Where's Julie, I Ain't Never, Funny How Time Slips Away, Polk Salad Annie, Lonely Women (Make Good Lovers), Boogie Woogie Blues, Whiskey River, and She Needs Someone to Hold Her.

The musicians who performed on the Sonobeat recording are introduced on tape by Hill before the first song. They include Benny McArthur (lead guitar), George Rodriguez (drums), Larry Gentry (bass), Jess DeMaine (organ and guitar), and Carl Gertz (steel guitar). Ten tracks were recorded, or at least mixed down, as demos in November 1972. Other than the first "intro" song, we believe the other 9 tracks were covers, including the sound bite we present below of a Willie Nelson classic.

Hill penned dozens of country hits for other performers. His most successful tune was Teddy Bear that took country singer Red Sovine to number 1 on the country charts in 1976. A member of the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, Hill passed away in 2001 at age 72.

The Pleasant Street Band

 While revisiting the Sonobeat master tape library recently, we came across two 7" reel boxes marked "Pleasant Street". For almost 40 years, we've had a mysterious, unlabelled 33-1/3 RPM LP test pressing in the Sonobeat archives. The album is a little folksy, a little bluesy, and features vocals that sounded vaguely familiar to us. When we compared the ten songs on the Pleasant Street master tapes to the ten tracks on the test pressing, we were surprised to find they're one and the same.

The story goes that singer/songwriter Bill Wilson, who had recorded several demo albums for Sonobeat beginning in 1969, returned to his native Indiana in 1972, taking a factory job in Indianapolis. He heard that a popular local club band, Pleasant Street, was looking for a dobro player. Wilson didn't play dobro, he didn't let that stop him, learning it almost overnight in order to audition for the band. Soon after being invited to join Pleasant Street, Wilson talked his bandmates into a road trip to Austin to record an album with his friend, Sonobeat owner/producer Bill Josey Sr. Although we don't know who in addition to Wilson performed on the Pleasant Street recordings in the Sonobeat archives, a bit of online research leads us to believe that the band then consisted of Scott O'Malley (rhythm guitar, keyboards, and vocals), Tom Williams (bass and vocals), Chuck Cline or, perhaps, Klein (drums and vocals), and Greg O'Haver (guitar, banjo, and vocals), and, of course, Wilson (dobro and vocals).

The titles of the songs on the master tapes and test pressing aren't listed anywhere in the Sonobeat archives, so we'd have to guess at most of them. We do know, however, that one tune on the Pleasant Street album is a cover of Neil Diamond's hit Brother Love's Traveling Salvation Show.

Pleasant Street Band broke up in 1974, and its members spread to many other Indianapolis bands. Bill Wilson, however, moved on to a solo career, eventually landing a recording contract with Columbia Records.

Next: 1973