Newport Beach’s Murphy Karges, founding member of Sugar Ray, pens first book

Murphy Karges can still remember the first practice for the band Sugar Ray in 1988.

It happened at a little beach house down on the Newport Peninsula. Karges, who had graduated from University High in Irvine a couple of years earlier, met up with Corona del Mar High graduates Mark McGrath, Rodney Sheppard and Stan Frazier.

“I got a phone call because Stan had dated my sister once,” Karges said. “That’s the only connection, and he knew me. He asked if I wanted to meet at the beach to jam.”

Karges recalls the amazing energy that ran through the band. Almost a decade later, Sugar Ray would hit it big with the song “Fly.”

The original grouping — McGrath on lead vocals, Sheppard on lead guitar, Karges on bass on and Frazier on drums — stayed together for 23 years.

Karges, who lives in Newport Beach with his wife and three sons, is proud of that. He’s also proud that he’s about to become an author for the first time.

His new book, “Basics for Bassists: How to Not Suck at Playing Bass,” comes out on Tuesday.

Newport Beach’s Murphy Karges was a founding member of the popular band Sugar Ray.

(Courtesy of Andrew Karges)

Karges, 57, said the book took him about two years to complete. It comes after he ran a music school in west-side Costa Mesa for a couple of years, at the same time he was doing a YouTube channel.

He originally thought he’d be doing a video series on how to play bass, but it ended up in a book format.

“I don’t want to just sit and do the hour thing,” Karges said. “I was like, ‘What if I can just put all my information in one place that they can take away and look at it on their own time?’ … I just wanted to help people. I wanted to encourage people to get rid of their fear and pursue what they love. If it’s bass and music, then wonderful.”

The book features humor, self-deprecating at times, and plenty of illustrations. It also has storytelling that makes it appealing to music fans, including a chapter on Karges’ own inspirations on bass.

Karges held a book-signing party Saturday night at House of Blues Anaheim’s Foundation Room. After the signing, he performed with the Millennium All-Stars, which also features former members of bands like Third Eye Blind, Goo Goo Dolls and Panic at the Disco.

Karges has played bass for more than four decades, but he wants readers of his book to understand that much of music is simple, at its core.

Murphy Karges, a founding member of the band Sugar Ray, lives in Newport Beach with his wife and three sons.

(Courtesy of Murphy Karges)

“A song is linear, and you’re only going to learn two parts, maybe three,” he said. “There’s a thing called the three-part method in the book. You only have to memorize six or seven notes for songs sometimes. You’ve got to know where they go, and you’ve got to have rhythm, and you’ve got to learn some skill. But I want to give people a path … so they can see, ‘Oh, that’s not that hard, I can do that.’”

Karges said the process of putting the book together, including his two editors Matt Price and Erica Carlin, illustrator Paul Palmer-Edwards, and others, almost felt like a band piecing together an album. He dedicated the book to his late sister Stacy, who he said died in a car accident in Seattle many years ago. She was his biggest fan.

The former Sugar Ray bassist maintains a passion for life, and he said he hopes that is evident in the book from the first words of Chapter One: “Congratulations. You picked a cool instrument.”

“My overall writing rule is, don’t be boring,” Karges said. “I’d rather not write it if it was like a whole bunch of boring words with no energy, no heart and pictures of bad-looking hands with bad fingernails.”