The most frequently asked FAN QUESTIONS are about the making of “I Can’t Wait.” So, here’s an attempt to include every technical detail about how we made that song forty-one years ago. It’s amazing that we’re still talking about it almost half a century later!
The recording of “I Can’t Wait” perfectly captures that unique moment in music history when analog and digital technologies were colliding. Looking back, it’s amazing how we managed to create such a rich, layered sound with relatively simple equipment. Every decision - from the LINN drum machine to engineer Fritz’s compression techniques - helped shape what would become Nu Shooz’s signature hit.
Subject: I Can't Wait production
Message: Hello Valerie and John! I was listening to "I Can't Wait" today and would love to know how the song was produced. Equipment. Instruments. Etc... Has this information ever been shared in an interview somewhere that I can look up? Thanks for this wonderful classic. — Patrick
Hi Patrick!
Thanks for your letter. We get asked this question a lot, so I'm going to write down the definitive version of THE MAKING OF 'I CAN'T WAIT.'
EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MAKING OF NU SHOOZ 'I CAN'T WAIT' (That we can remember.)
It was the winter of 1983, a time almost unrecognizable now. TV still signed off at 2 a.m. Cable was just getting started. And none of the gear existed that we take for granted now. MIDI was new and prohibitively expensive. NU SHOOZ had a horn section but no keyboards.
Without MIDI or a multitrack, it was harder to write songs, to make them stand up and walk around by themselves. We were playing all the time, almost every weekend, and this created an insatiable need for new material. People would leave the band and you couldn't play this or that song anymore. The new guy would come in, and we'd have to teach him all the moldy oldies. There were songs I was so tired of that it hurt to play them. And in Portland, funk records were hard to find. So, I had to become a full-time songwriter. In the Brill Building days, writers like Carole King and Jerry Goffin made hit songs by putting in the hours—showing up every day.
I started writing songs in batches of ten. How it worked was, I'd number one to ten on a piece of paper and then slot in a bunch of tempos, like this:
Mid-tempo [meaning funk]
Mid-tempo
Fast
Mid-tempo
Slow
Fast... etc
Next, I would assign a Kick/Snare pattern to each number. When you're writing songs, specifically Funk songs, you become a connoisseur and collector of Kick/Snare patterns. Some of my personal favorites are Surf Beats for fast stuff, and anything by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for the FUNK.
I got a lot of Nu Shooz Kick/Snare patterns from the Grandmaster Flash album 'THE MESSAGE.'
I tried to finish two songs a week for Wednesday rehearsal. I.C.W. was one of the first songs to come out of this batch writing process.
As I said before, it was hard without any gear to make a song hang together in your head. My Mother-in-Law had this thing called an OMNICHORD. It looked sort of like a zither, but it was completely electronic. It had a little drum machine in it, you know, like those old 'Home Organ' beats: Swing, Waltz, Bossa Nova, etc. And there was one called ROCK BEAT 1.
I plugged the OMNICHORD into a cassette machine and recorded ROCK BEAT 1 at a bunch of different speeds. This worked for all the tempos mentioned above. This was a vast improvement. Before that, I was trying to make drum beats by banging on a kitchen table with dinner plates on it.
Then I begged our manager to rent a ¼" four-track machine from the local sound company. For the princely sum of $24 a month, they rented us a TEAC 3440. Great machine. [I still have it, by the way.] Right away, I filled a tape with my OMNICHORD beats, and just like that, I was in business. Writing songs was suddenly so much easier.
I.C.W. was written while sitting on a wooden stool next to the furnace in our basement rehearsal space. The bass line was composed on a 1965 Fender P-Bass [Black/Rosewood Fretboard/Tortoiseshell guard] belonging to our Soundman. The Bass was tuned to Drop-D. The chords were played on a cheap [but nice] nylon string guitar called a DISCOTECA SERRANO.
I mixed the demo to cassette, put it in my Walkman, and spent the next month or so walking around and around the block. The first chorus bit that I heard in my head was:
"I Can't Wait till FRIDAY NIGHT"
Eventually, that morphed into the call-and-response:
'Cause I Can't Wait
BABY
I CAN'T WAIT.
Phew!
So now that the chorus was "sitting still," the song needed verses.
My love— The first two words of a Lionel Richie song
Tell me what it's all about— A line from my Bone Pile
You've got something
That I can't live without— A vague come-on
Happiness— The first word in an Alan Toussaint song
Is so hard to find— My answer to his line
Etc., etc.
Back then, I was good at one-and-a-half verses.
Anyway…
We had a Wednesday rehearsal coming up, and I didn't have anything but this half-finished song. The band was actually loading their gear into the basement. Valerie was standing at the sink, and I was at the kitchen table. In ten minutes, I wrote the rest of the song. There! I shoved the paper at Valerie.
She said, "Good enough."
There was just enough time left to scribble up a horn chart.
So now it's 1984, and we're playing I.C.W. in the clubs. We called it a B-level dance song. People danced to it, but we played it way too fast, just to get it over with. Around that time, Rick, our manager, called.
"We need to record something. I need something to market."
He didn't like our first album, "Can't Turn It Off," and he was right. It didn't represent the band anymore. Rick had just inherited five grand from a deceased aunt, and he wanted to bankroll a Nu Shooz album.
He asked me, "Do you have any songs you like?"
"Well," I said, "the one that sounds the most real is 'I Can't Wait.'"
By real, I meant that it sounded the most like a real record. Valerie sounded great on it right away. [Her voice worked perfectly an octave above my songwriter croak.]
Rick booked us into Cascade Studio in Portland, Oregon. Sessions began in the summer of 1984. Before we went into the studio, I was pondering whether or not to use a drum machine. We used to make fun of the early ones. The ROLAND 808 only became popular with the advent of Hip-Hop. We tried cutting the song with a live drummer first, and that just didn't work. We had to have that machine kick/snare/clap…like ZAPP!
For a band that couldn't afford keyboards, a drum machine was out of the question.
Fortunately…
We knew a rich guy who didn't play but had a house full of all the best gear.
He owned a LINN LM-1.
The LINN LM-1 was Roger Linn's first commercially available drum machine. It was so much heavier sounding than an 808. It retailed for $5,000 [in '80s money!]
Next, we put on a bass.
Live bass didn't cut it, either. So we hired a bass player, Nate Philips, who owned a MINI-MOOG. He was one of the great Portland funk players, going back to the '70s band Pleasure. Nate dialed in the sound and played the part. I got my own MINI-MOOG not long after that, but I never could get close to the sound that he made.
The piano was a seven-foot Steinway.
The guitars were a cream-white [nicotine yellow] 1969 Fender Stratocaster and my number one fave 1967 Gibson 335 [battered black].
This is it — John’s 1967 Gibson ES335.
The horns are real, just trumpet and tenor doubled.
Our saxophone player, Dan Schauffler, had just bought a ROLAND JX-3P synth. It had eight preset sounds, and I'm pretty sure we used them all. A good example is the chime in the intro, which was kind of a take-off on "Tubular Bells" by Mike Oldfield, and the legato synth string line that follows. The JX-3P was one of the first commercially available MIDI synths. Everything was new back then.
The Roland JX-3P in all it’s magnificence.
Cascade Studio had a two-inch 16-track machine, which was and is kind of rare, then and now.
It was a real stroke of luck for two reasons. First of all, the tracks are wider than a 2" 24-track, and they actually have a fatter sound. And second, we didn't have those eight extra tracks to clutter up the song.
Before we had anything on tape, I had an epiphany and realized that it would be so much funkier if we slowed it down. I tramped around the studio parking lot, singing the bassline, feeling for where the funky place was. Then I ran back into the control room. We slowed it down to 104 bpm from however the hell fast we were used to playing it.
The band thought I was NUTS!
Especially Valerie, who found it impossible to sing over.
As history shows, we worked that out.
Our engineer was Fritz Richmond, who was a former member of the Jim Kweskin Jug Band and still played with Maria Muldaur. He was one of the bright lights of the Greenwich Village folk scene of the late '50s/early '60s. We didn't know who he was until years later. I could go on and on about Fritz.
Fritz Richmond with Maria Muldaur and Jim Kweskin Jug Band
Often during the making of "That's Right," it was just Fritz and I alone in the control room. We cut the guitars direct, straight into the board, no amp involved. I was frustrated by all the little clicky noises the guitars made.
"I hate recording!" I said.
"Recording is FUN!" Fritz says.
That's the kind of guy he was. Sometimes, he would show up wearing funny hats, bowlers, and tam-o'-shanters. And he was a calming presence, like a great pediatrician.
I ended up stuffing a bunch of toilet paper down at the first fret, and that cut out most of the noises. Later, when I could hear what compression was, I realized that Fritz had really whomped down on those guitars. That's why they sound like a record.
For a great example of what compression sounds like, listen to the guitars on the Beatles' "Baby You Can Drive My Car."
The clap sound on the LINN DRUM was a weak little KACK. Nothing like the big disco clap on ZAPP! Records. We fooled with that for a while. Fritz put a tight delay on it, maybe 22 milliseconds, and turned up the feedback so there were three or four repeats, so instead of KACK, we had the very satisfying THRAPP we all know and love.
Then we recorded vocals. The backup singers were Valerie, her sister Shannon, and Lori Lamphear, a 1980 NUSHOOZ alumnus. We were meticulous about the pronunciation of certain words. We spent hours and hours on this. A good example is how they swallow the 'T' on the word 'WAIT.'
Another feature of the vocals is the quarter note delay on Valerie, which gives the lead vocal a psychedelic dreaminess even if you don't notice it right away. The syncopated vocal lends itself to a straight delay time, whereas a less syncopated line would suggest a dotted 8th note delay.
After all that work, the track still sat there. Then I was listening to Jungle Love by The Time. That track had some bottles for percussion. I came up with a stereo bottle part and a stereo tambourine part, and then the track really started to roil and boil. It was the final touch…almost.
THE REMIX
The sample at the beginning of the I.C.W. 12" [which we affectionately call "the Barking Seal"] was played by Dutch D.J. Peter Slaghuis on an EMU EMULATOR II. The model II still used those big 3" floppies, like a Commodore 64. Over the years, people have told me what the sample was, but I can never remember.
He achieved the stutter effects [I-I-I-Can't Wait] by actual tape-cutting with a razor blade and editing block. I watched him cutting tape at Atlantic Studios in NYC. He had some good tricks, but he was very shy, didn't speak very good English, and didn't like people around when he worked.
So…
That's all the technical musical hardware and anthropology that I can recall. It's amazing that people are still interested in this song forty-plus years on. You can see what a bare-bones process it was, And what a miracle it is. Thanks for the letter.
John R. Smith
NUSHOOZ
11.28.23
P.S. Forty years later, we learned that Peter Slaghuis, who did the famous ‘Dutch Remix’, didn’t like the song, so he didn’t fool with it very much. His dream was to do remixes for ABBA…which is about as far away from Nu Shooz as you can get!