Birth of A Band, The Record Deal and The Making of "Present Tense": 40th Anniversary Edition

By Jeff Murphy

With nothing more than their love of melodic, guitar-driven, rock music and the will to be in a band, three friends from a small mid-western town in Illinois; John Murphy, Gary Klebe and Jeff Murphy started their band; SHOES before any of them even knew how to play an instrument. Raised on the pop/rock inspiration of the British Invasion and Chicago's vibrant AM radio of their childhood, they not only taught themselves how to play their instruments and write songs, they also learned how to record and produce themselves, as well as manufacture and release their recordings on vinyl.

They ended up signing a major-label record deal and having videos on MTV and VH-1. Getting their start during the early days of the Do-It-Yourself, home-recording renaissance of the 1970's, SHOES went from recording in their living room to recording their major-label debut in England at the legendary Manor Studio, with Queen's production alumnus; Michael Stone as their co-producer. They eventually built and ran their own recording studio and indie record label.

With a musical career that now spans more than 40 years, this book documents the band's inception, through the process of recording that first major-label album; "Present Tense". This 40th Anniversary re-release edition includes a new Epilogue that expands on the years since that release. It's a "behind-the -music" peek at how they did it and what they went through along the way. In a testament to their common bond, they remain close friends and are still musically active, today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098316952

Book preview

Then"

Birth of the Band

Shoes - Gary (Klebe), my brother John (Murphy) and myself (Jeff Murphy) started as school friends that wanted to be in a band. We weren’t actually musicians (and still really aren’t). We were high school buddies with a dream of making music and getting songs on the radio. We had no musical training, no recording education and came from Zion, Illinois, a small town in the Midwest that had absolutely no music scene or even a club to play at.

Growing up in the town of Zion had a certain Mayberry-type charm to it, which was great when we were kids, but as we grew older we discovered that certain opportunities were lacking. Zion was founded in the early 20th century as a religious community and was steeped in a very conservative attitude that was passed on by the founding fathers. It was a dry town, so there were no bars, clubs or even restaurants that served alcohol. But it went past that…way past that. Technically, there were still laws on the books that prohibited things like smoking, dancing, movie theatres, pool halls, bowling alleys, and virtually any activity on a Sunday. I guess it was more like River City from the movie The Music Man than Mayberry. Even the simple possession of tobacco was, at one time, illegal. But Zion was within radio reception of Chicago and Chicago’s AM radio in the early and mid-sixties was a phenomenal influence on every red-blooded adolescent that imagined themselves to be a pop star. It was a type of schooling that ingrains itself in your subconscious and feeds your imagination. It educated us on various styles from British Invasion to Motown. From the dance rhythms of the Philly sound to the psychedelic sounds from San Francisco.

Fortunately, we’re pretty quick learners with an avid interest in recording and technology. Inspired particularly by the British Invasion and The Beatles, we figured we could piece together the type of music we loved that seemed to be getting harder and harder to find. It came to be known as Power Pop.

I’ve always had a fascination with tape recorders and I asked for my first, reel-to-reel recorder at the age of 8. I received it on Christmas day 1963. It was a portable, battery-operated machine made by Ross with 3 reels. It was this machine that I ended up taking apart and using as my first distortion unit for my guitar. We didn’t have much money in the early days of the band so I disassembled it, installed the electronics in a small box and used it as a pre-amp to boost the sound from my guitar and create distortion. In recordings, it provided a unique, compressed fuzz tone that I have used many times over the past 40 years. The guitar solos on Your Very Eyes and Girls Of Today" are good examples of its tone.

This is the same Ross model Mark 400 tape recorder as the one that I dissected in 1974 to use as a guitar fuzz box

I became a young audiophile and owned several reel-to-reel tape recorders through the years. But it was after TEAC’s 1972 release of the first, commercially available 4-channel recording machine (the Teac A3340S) that I secured my first personal loan, co-signed by my friend Garry Holverson, and purchased my first multi-track machine in early 1974. With this new 4-channel machine it was possible to record something on one channel, then listen back to it while adding something else on another channel and the new track would be in sync with the first channel! A standard tape machine cannot do this.

This tape machine fathered the birth of Shoes, sometime in early 1974.

Slowly, we began learning how to play instruments, sing, write and record, all at the same time. It consumed us. Once we started the journey there was rarely a day that we didn’t do something musical. We’d use any and all instruments or tools that we could to make some type of sound and record it. The recording process gave us a chance to experiment and build confidence without the scrutiny of an audience. If we made a mistake, it could be erased forever with just the push of a button and nobody had to know it ever happened. As we were learning to record we continued listening to our record collections and began to listen, to really listen to them, with a different perspective. We began to dissect them and understand how they were put together and what made the songs tick. We would record something and then listen to an album we owned and compare the sonic differences. Our records became resource material in shaping what we thought sounded professional and what didn’t.

Despite the fact that Shoes was originally the brainchild of John and Gary, I owned the recording gear and officially became a member of the band at some point in 1974. It was more a function of just hanging around when the two of them got together. I was never formally asked to be part of the band. It was