Growing Music, Musicians, and a Few Vegetables Too…

Kurt Shobe was just a kid when he heard Steve Miller’s jungle love. But as music can do, it made a lasting impression on him that never left. So, when it was time to pick up the guitar and really get serious about it at 16, he went looking for someone that could help him not just play but play well. 

Pete Williams wasn’t just a guitar teacher to Kurt. He was a teacher of music and life lessons. Because it wasn’t just Pete that a young Kurt was learning from through these formative years. It was Pete’s entire band. 

The boys in the band were Kurt’s first exposure to what it was like to be a professional musician. And it was those lessons that Kurt took with him to emporia state. 

Gene Morrow was the next step in Kurt’s Musical growth. Genes band Detour was a further step up in their approach to the music business, touring with bands like John Anderson and The Bellamy Brothers. Ask Kurt and he will tell you this is when “the art of the possible” became a reality to him. He watched how the band handled its business. Specifically, Gene. And when it was time to step up and be the lead singer, he got his first lesson as a front man in a band that was that successful. Kurt was learning not only what it was like to be in a band, but how to run one… And as fate would have it that’s what was next for him.

Sundown was the band that was the first call for anybody in the area. Now a guitar player and front man with years of experience, Kurt had a handle on the stage and the band that he put on it with him. He took all of the lessons that he learned along the way and combined them into multiple years of success with sundown. 

But Kurt wasn’t just learning how to succeed as a music businessman, and musician on the stage during this time. Kurt was growing in multiple ways in his life.

By now, Kurt had kids and a wife at home. He was juggling the idea of a family, his career as an educator, and his first real steps into the studio recording. “Hello Sweetheart”, a song about how Kurt was trying to juggle everything in life and balance it with his marriage got played on local radio stations and showed Kurt he had the ability to not just play the music on stage but also send it out to the masses through the medium of Radio. Belco Studios was the home of where he learned to move his music from his mind to the airwaves. 

But as life can do, it moved on and changed. Kurt went from 250 shows a year with his band sundown to putting up his guitar for 10 years after his first marriage dissolved, and he met the love of his life, Lori. With a job at a refinery and a focus on his new relationship Kurt was content. It wasn’t until a friend of his came to him and asked him to play lead in a band almost 10 years later that Kurt pulled the guitar down off the wall. Kurt played with David Hollanders band for almost 2 years… then came the next step in his musical growth…

Now is the time, when all of the musical past and life history came together into the first version of Kurts most recent band Steel Skarecrow. Kurt wasn’t wet behind the ears anymore when it came to music or running a band. He had taken the lessons he learned back in the day from Pete and Gene and his experience as a lead guitarist and front man to become more than just a musician. Kurt was a successful businessman now. In and out of music, Kurt knew how to run a business and how to turn hustle into success. This know how is what has made Steel Skarecrow one of the most successful bands in the last decade in the Midwest region. With multiple radio hits and hundreds upon hundreds of shows under their belt, they have proven to be the standard that is called when somebody needs to depend on good music for a night.

So, it makes perfect sense as Kurt continues to grow, that a solo effort, where he remembers the somethings that are old and celebrates the somethings that are new, is his next step. Just like the garden that Kurt grows at his home music fans will get to pick the fresh music that he has grown for them with this solo effort…and just like he has planted, watered and watched light give strength to the peppers, tomatoes and squash in his back yard he’s done the same with the each home grown track on his new project. 

Farm to table, studio to radio or radio to stage Kurt embraces the growth process. That’s why we would encourage you to enjoy the next step in Kurt’s musical growth by streaming and downloading “something old, something new”. There’s a lot of love and history in every track. 

Farm to table, studio to radio or radio to stage Kurt embraces the growth process.