When We Played for 40 Million People (and Didn't Know It)

It was the summer of 1986, and the Nu Shooz song ‘I Can’t Wait’ was a Top-5 hit all over the world.

Our label, Atlantic Records, sent us over to Europe to do press and TV appearances; not the whole band, just Valerie and me. We were too busy to notice that the label wasn’t interested in the band, and was marketing us as a Husband and Wife ‘Synth-Pop’ Duo from Portland, Oregon.

We had an eight-hour hop over the North Pole. A car picked us up at Heathrow. On the way into town, our song came on the radio. Pretty cool!

So here we are in London.

It was the Pre-Internet era, what we call ‘the Horse and Buggy days.’ There was no way to do research into which media outlets we were slotted to appear on. We didn’t know if we were going to be on the British version of Dick Clark or Howdy Doody. Nowadays it’s so easy. Does the interviewer have an audience of ten thousand, or a million…or twelve? Is the show we’re going on a local morning show, or syndicated around the world?

Besides being jet-lagged and shell-shocked by our sudden rise to fame, we were clueless about the music business…I mean the POP music business.

We were scheduled to be on a show called Top of the Pops on the BBC. Never heard of it.

John’s Journal from 1986

But first, we were ushered into a recording studio, where a room full of musicians was re-recording our song! What? The label rep took us aside and quietly explained that the British Musician’s Union requires that British musicians have to be hired to play any music that will appear on TV. I remember the guitar player didn’t have the part quite right, but the horns and the backup singers were better than the record!

I asked the label guy, “Do we have to use this version?” “Oh no,” he laughed. Nudge nudge wink wink. “This is all for appearances. Don’t worry.”

Before our appearance on Top of the Pops, we flew up to Manchester to be on a cute little ‘jukebox’ show, a sort of Dick Clark/American Bandstand in miniature. Fine Young Cannibals were on the show too. The audience was mostly middle-school kids. (Thirty or forty years later, someone sent us a clip of that show which was re-broadcast in Germany!)

Our driver for the British leg of the trip was a portly gentleman named Bil. [One ‘L.’] He took a liking to us right away and vice versa.

“You folks aren’t like the usual Rock Stars,” he said. “You’re real people.” He went above and beyond the call of duty and showed us around London, a city he clearly loved. I remember he showed us some Medieval doorways on London Bridge, barely five feet high. “People were much shorter then.”

John and our driver, Bill, on the London Bridge.

He took us to the oldest Toy Store in England, established in the late 1700’s. He bought me a little box of toy soldiers- I still have them- dressed like Hussars from the Crimean War. He introduced us to his wife, and we all had fish and chips at his local pub. All in all a perfect London experience; one we never could have had as mere tourists.

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I think we did a couple of morning shows, and then it was onto Top of the Pops. I was used to hiding out in the corner of our nine-piece band, so now I’m feeling naked. It’s just Val and me out there doing these silly dance steps, miming our song. But what I mostly remember is I made one of the worst fashion choices of my career, a stupid, ill-fitting beret!

It was all a great big swirl.

A different driver picked us up to go to the airport, and we never saw BIL again; never got to thank him for being the best part of our trip.

Then it was on to Paris.

The French label put us up in a palatial suite at the Hotel Nikko overlooking the Seine.

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I think we did about ten TV shows while we were there, mostly morning shows. I don’t know how effective it was since we didn’t speak French. The last thing we did was a TV show called ‘La vie du Famille.’ (Family Life) It was a kind of Ed Sullivan/Hollywood Palace kind of revue…you know, pop singers but also jugglers. I can still hear the theme song in my head forty years later:

La vie du famille
C’est important

Also on that show were Vince Clarke of Erasure, and the ‘Soul Makosa’ man, Manu Dibango.

Backstage, taking an old-fashioned 80s selfie.

Next, it was on to Italy, where we did some radio.

(They pronounced the name of our band like New Shoots.) We were scheduled to appear at an outdoor show in Sienna. It was part of a festival called the Pallio, sort of like the running of the bulls in Pamplona, but with horses. It had been going on for the last 500 years!

Sienna, Italy

Squads of Ghibbellines and Guelfs did that drill where they toss flags in the air. The food was better than in France, that’s for sure. And I was getting used to the Synth-Pop-Duo thing. To get out of doing dance steps, I refused to lip-sync guitar and hid behind a dead keyboard instead.

There was a Brit Punk band called Sigue Sigue Sputnik on the show, with their Statue-of-Liberty hair-dos. They were flipping off the audience. Well, I never dug the Punk thing.

Anyway, the point of this story is, in the Pre-Internet era, there was no way to look things up, to find out what we were getting into. As we learned much later, Top of the Pops was beamed all over Europe and in the 80s had an audience of FORTY MILLION PEOPLE!

If I had known, I would have insisted on bringing the band!
And maybe chosen a better hat.

Everything About The Making Of I Can't Wait

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.

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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:

1. Mid-tempo [meaning funk]

2. Mid-tempo

3. Fast

4. Mid-tempo

5. Slow

6. 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

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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!

THE GOLDEN AGE OF THE PORTLAND MUSIC SCENE

The Key Largo calendar circa 1984.

It’s our humble opinion that Portland, Oregon, for a brief period in the 1980s, had the best music scene IN THE WORLD.* I should qualify this by saying we only had New York and L.A. to compare it to: New York, where famous jazz guys were making fifty bucks a night, and L.A., where you had “Pay to Play.” [I.e., Sell tickets to get a slot on the club stage, where you’d get exposure and hopefully gain the attention of an A&R man from a major label. People die of exposure.]

Portland was different. For a Golden Period, from around 1980-86, dozens of clubs opened. There was a brief relaxation in Oregon’s strict liquor laws. This came at the exact moment when Nu Shooz changed from a struggling four-piece to a nine-piece band with four horns.

There were ten clubs within a mile radius of downtown. We worked every weekend for seven years. Nobody was getting rich, but our lives felt rich. And it was a unique situation at that time. The Last Hurrah, for instance, wanted sixty percent original music, and that’s what the audience wanted, too.

A video has just surfaced that describes the joy of that era and what brought it to an end. It’s a Cable Access show filmed in 1987 called PDX Rocks, hosted by Pat Snyder. Pat was one of the main photographers capturing that world as it unfolded. In this clip, she’s interviewing two of the most important club owners from that period, Peter Mott (The Last Hurrah) and Tony Demacoli (The Long Goodbye, Luis La Bamba, Key Largo.) Their contributions to that scene AND to the career of NU SHOOZ are beyond measure.

A few of the bands eventually got record deals and dropped out of the club scene. Billy Rancher, one of the biggest local stars, was about to be signed when he died of cancer. According to Peter Mott, all this siphoned off a lot of the top talent.

But other forces conspired to bring that golden period to an end. A recession drove up unemployment. The price of liability insurance for the clubs exploded by 600%, and as Tony pointed out, people had other entertainment options. Cable T.V. and the VCR reached critical mass around 1982, and I swear, you could feel it from the bandstand. The audience was staying home.

No scene lasts forever. We were lucky to live in a time period when it was great to be young musicians. And we’re grateful for intrepid club owners like Peter Mott and his brother Michael and Tony Demicoli, who worked so hard to make that scene happen and made our artistic lives possible.

*I guess Manchester, England, had its own Golden Era around the same time, but that was a faraway land, and it was pre-internet.

Stealing Like an Artist: The Creation Story of Driftin’

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In 2012, Austin Kleon wrote an influential little book called ‘Steal Like an Artist.’ “What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

The Nu Shooz song ‘Driftin’ is a perfect example of this kind of thinking in action. The song was written in 1987 for the Shooz’s second Atlantic album ‘Told U So.’ My songs usually start with a nice set of chords. ‘Driftin’ was based on two chords one of my friends used to play. I often name music bits: the BB King Lick, the Watchtower Progression, the Stevie Wonder Thing, etc. So the first two chords in Driftin’ are the Azul Chords, named after my late friend and fellow songwriter, Azul Amey.

The harmony (on the word Driftin’) came from some R&B tune I can’t even remember. I just knew I could use that bit for something. And it was that tiny piece that put the song into the Ballad box. Lastly, there was a Jimi Hendrix song called ‘Driftin’ on his album ‘Cry of Love.’ I can’t remember how that piece of DNA drifted into the songwriting process, but that one word fit everything else that was going on…

I remember exactly where I was sitting when this was all coming together. It was late spring. I had a cute little Gibson B-25 on my lap. I’m playing the chords and trying to stuff every nautical oceanic seafaring thing into the lyrics. And during this whole process something happened that was more than stealing. It’s more like borrowing a few lumps of clay from fellow artists, taking it back to the potter’s wheel, spinning and kneading it till it becomes something completely new. My version of Driftin’ bears no resemblance to Jimi’s, but he was definitely along for the ride.

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We loved this song so much that we recorded it twice: first in 1987 on our album ‘Told U So’ and then in 2010 on ‘Pandora’s Box.’

NU SHOOZ TIME MACHINE: Recording at Prince's Paisley Park

A while ago we asked the question, What would you like to see on our website?

The universal answer was (of course,) more stories about the ‘good old days.’ Some stories we’ve told over and over, like writing ‘Should I Say Yes’ in a full-blown [pun intended] tornado.

Is there anything left to say?

Valerie and I sat down and brainstormed, and came up with a pretty good list. We’ll take them in the order that they occurred to us. Here’s story #3.

Paisley Park, MN

The most futuristic building in Eden Prairie, Minnesota is Paisley Park, the home studio of Prince Rogers Nelson. Home studio is a little misleading. It’s a sprawling complex with three world-class recording rooms, a kitchen, and a full wardrobe department where they ‘built’ all his wild clothes. 

We were there working on our second Atlantic record, Told U So. The producer was David ‘Z’ Rivkin.

We had the whole place to ourself for two weeks. 

Our manager, Rick, asked me, “If you could have any guest stars on the record, who would it be?”

“Maceo Parker.”

Maceo was the alto saxophone player on all those late-60s James Brown records. He was one of my Soul Music heroes since I was eleven!

Rick found him somehow, and we flew him up to Minnesota. He played on our record for five hundred bucks. Said he could use the money ‘cause he had a half-dozen kids and lots of alimony payments.

 James Brown used to name-check the kid

 on his records.

That name-check made him famous.

David Z.

Maceo!

     Blow your horn

     Don’t want no trash

     Play me some POPCORN

     Maceo, C’MON!

When J.B. and the band got to Africa, the locals thought Maceo! was just a cool American thing to say, like hang ten or cowabunga! 

So, I’m sitting behind the mixing board. Maceo starts playing on the title cut, and it sounds too…happy.

I look over at Rick. “This is Maceo Parker! How can I tell him what to play?”

“Go on,” Rick says. “You gotta do it.”

 OK, so…

“Maceo…um…that’s a little too sweet. We’re looking for something a little more like…” I sing him his solo from Ain’t It Funky Now. [1969]

Bedop bedop vol-u-vop!

“Oh, ha HA!” He says. “You want that jagged stuff.”

Prince’s saxophone guy, Eric Leeds, shows up. He’s a great modern funky bebop player; perfect for Prince’s band. Plays mostly Bari. I tell him he’s one of my favorite horn players. He looks at me like dirt under his fingernails and says nothing.

Parker and Leeds are sitting in the corner. Maceo’s taking swigs off a bottle of blue mouthwash  he carries around with him. He doesn’t drink, and he declines our invitation to dinner. 

During the mixing, which was Rick’s job and bored me to death, I got to roam the studio. One room was full of every keyboard in the world. Another room was packed floor-to-ceiling with tapes. There was a guitar case in the hallway with a label that said, #3 PEACH.

I sat on the floor and took it out of the case. It was one of those wild Prince guitars, with the long protruding slightly suggestive upper horn. 

The neck was skinny.

The action was tight.

John L. Nelson

Around this time, Prince’s father strolls in.

He’s a little old bald man in a purple suit, about the same height as ‘The Artist’ himself. He asks the receptionist for a few posters, “for his girlfriends.”

Prince was having a little pop-up concert at a club near the studio. David Z got us in. We got right up front. The band didn’t go on till two or three. Sheila Escovedo, (Sheila E) was the drummer. Damn, she was good! In musician speak, they dug a deep trench! We stood five feet from the man himself. They played non-stop for two and a half hours! 

Sheila E.

Back at the studio the next day, I had more time to explore. Made my way up to the second floor, where the wardrobe department was. There were a dozen sewing machines at individual stations, like a factory.

In the corner, there were all these clothes. Famous clothes! There was the fur coat and wide-brimmed hat from the MTV Video for I-forget-what-song.

So, I’m there in the wardrobe room at Paisley Park.

Trying on Prince’s clothes.

They were so tiny. 

Like clothes tailored for Tinkerbell,

Or Peter Pan.

Prince in the coat.