FAN QUESTIONS!

Art by Malcolm Smith

Andy writes, "Hey guys - I hope you can answer this for me. Was Gary (Fountaine) the original bass player from back in the early 90’s? Just reminiscing and remembering back when I worked in a computer shop and was on one of these camera chat programs (hi-tech back then) one evening. It basically just gives you someone to chat with, and I got this guy sitting there with a bass guitar in his lap. He could hear me talking, but I couldn’t hear him. That’s when he moved the camera closer to a golden record on the wall, and it said Nu Shooz. As a huge fan, I was totally starstruck."

O.K. Here’s the answer!

The first Bass Player in NU SHOOZ was JIM HOGAN. At the time, he was also the best-looking member of the group. He was a trombone player as a kid (just like Berry Oakley of the Allman Bros) and, therefore, musically literate. Jim has a key role in Nu Shooz’s history. 

Our drummer, Randy, son of a music store owner, was good at finding gigs.

(L. to R. John Smith, drummer Randy Givens, bassist Jim Hogan, and guitarist Larry Haggin.)

We were just barely putting a set together when he got us a gig at the park half a block down the street. Colonel Summers Park in Portland, Oregon. So now our band had a gig, but we didn’t have a name.

We’re in the kitchen of the house where we practiced.

We called it Twenty-One-Twelve.

There was this wallpaper above the stove, like old newsprint, and we all looked over and saw these button-down shoes. Hey, we could be the Shoes. Stupid! Cool!

A week later, we’re in a record store, and we see an album by this band from Ohio called SHOES. I don’t know why, but leaving out ‘the’ bugged me for whatever reason.

Enter Jim Hogan.

“Well,” he says, “We could be New Shoes!” and we should spell it with a ‘Z’ because it’s MORE ROCK.”

Without Jim, we wouldn’t be NU SHOOZ.

He played in the band from May ’79 to around the Summer of 1980.

(Jonathan, back row, third person from the left, on the back of our 1982 album, Can't Turn It Off)

Our SECOND bass player was JONATHAN DRESCHLER. Jonathan was a really good R&B, Motown, and Soul player. He could play that STAX stuff, especially. We stole him from another band. He was perfect for that incarnation of Nu Shooz. Jonathan played with us from 1980-82.

Bass Player Number Three: RANDY MONROE.We had this great drummer, Towner Galaher, who could TOTALLY play that Tower of Power stuff. He LOVED their drummer, Dave Garibaldi, and that’s the stuff we were playing in 1981. He threatened to quit if we didn’t replace Jonathan with his friend Randy. It’s painful being a bandleader sometimes.

Randy got to be there for the Roaring ’80s, and the word ‘FUNKY’ sells his bass playing way short.

(Randy Monroe and Towner Gallaher, 1982, Civic Stadium, Portland, OR.)

Towner and Randy kicked the band up five levels. You can’t fake that kind of thing or wish it into existence.

In ’82, we accepted an offer from a Top-40 agency for a chunk of money to tour up in Montana, Idaho, and Northern Washington for six weeks. Sixteen hundred bucks a week sounded like a lot of dough, but split Twelve ways? Hmm.

This whole story has been told elsewhere, but when we got back to Portland, another band took our place at the Last Hurrah. Five people quit, including our rhythm section, Towner and Randy, and one was fired. For a minute, NU SHOOZ was down to me, Valerie, and our Trumpet Player, Lewis Livermore.

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BASS PLAYER NUMBER FOUR- GARY FOUNTAINE.

We met Gary when he was thirteen or fourteen. Valerie and I met and lived for a while at a Hippie Commune on Twenty-Third and Kearney in Portland called the Cosmic Bank. Gary lived three blocks down with his big brother Ed.

A long time later, we learned that their father was one of the great bass players in the Portland music scene of the 40s and 50s. The family still has his bass, in bad disrepair. If you drive up Weidler into Northeast Portland, there’s this strange street triangle...and THAT was the beginning of the Black NIGHTLIFE scene. It ran for eight or nine blocks farther North.

The 1940s PORTLAND BLACK NIGHTLIFE SCENE thrived because the train station was three blocks away. The Pullman Porters, as it turns out, were not paid all that well, but they formed a kind of upwardly mobile stratum of Black Society.

They had ‘WALKING AROUND MONEY.’

What that battered bass must have seen.

When we met Gary, he already knew he wanted to be a Bass Player.

His brother Edward, a couple of years older than us, knew more chords than we did.

Gary was playing ‘bass’ on a Harmony Sovereign, a folk guitar. This was a weird era in the mid-70s when there were these two virtuoso bass players on the scene, Stanley Clarke and Jaco Pastorius, playing fast and busy as all get out, playing Jazz Guitar, not bass. With all due respect, I felt like they ruined all bass players for a while.

Anyway, in 1975, Gary was playing really fast with one finger — dugadugadugaduga.

Gary knocked around the scene. We lost track of him for a while.

Then, in ’83, our whole band Quit or was Fired. Our nine-piece band was down to three when we hired Gary.

GARY FOUNTAINE WAS OUR BASS PLAYER FROM 1983 TILL OUR FINAL BAND APPEARANCE AT ‘80’S IN THE SAND’ IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC IN NOVEMBER 2017.

Gary onstage at 80s In The Sand, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, in 2017.

Nu Shooz Bass Players Reunion, 2012. L to R: Randy Monroe, Gary Fountaine, and Jonathan Drechsler.

Got a Question for The Shooz?

Just head on over to our CONTACT PAGE and we’ll try to respond in a future newsletter.

Farewell to our longtime bass player and friend, Gary Fountaine. September 15, 1957 to December 28,2023

We lost a good friend recently. Our beloved Bass Player Gary Fountaine died of cancer on Dec 28, 2023, at the age of 66.

Gary was just a kid when we first met him, thirteen or fourteen. He already knew he wanted to be a bass player, but he didn’t have his own bass yet. I can still picture him the day we met; he was playing Stanley Clarke riffs on a beat-up Harmony Sovereign. Back then, he had this crazy one-finger technique.

We lost track of him for a while. In the meantime, Gary developed into the accomplished bass player we know and love. He played in a million bands. There were lots of places to play in those days. Gary didn’t read music. He told me once that he kept track of all the different set lists by compartmentalizing them in his brain.

Gary used funny terms like “Ice Cream Changes” and “Lumpty Gigs.” He also taught me things about being a father, things I remember to this day.

There are certain players and singers who put out 110% every night, whether there’s five people in the audience or 50,000. THEY LEAVE IT ALL ON THE STAGE. There are a lot of clips of Gary on YouTube right now. (You'll find a special one below.) You can see the joy that emanates from his corner of the stage, whatever band he’s playing with. He’s so happy to be there. He loves his instrument. He loves the music and the audience. It was never fake.

Everybody knows the real thing when they see it, and Gary Fountaine was the real thing.

Goodbye, old friend.

Perennial Interview Question #3: How’d You Get The Band Name?

Early Nu Shooz band poster circa 1982

HOW DID WE GET THE BAND NAME?

OK…Once and for all, we come to Perennial Interview question #3.

(Question #1 is: What’s “I Can’t Wait” about?
Answer: “It’s about six minutes and twenty-nine seconds. That’s the long version.”

Question #2: What’s it like to be in a Famous Band with your spouse?
Answer: “Well, we got to see each other a lot!”)

Back to Question #3.

We started rehearsals for what became Nu Shooz in May 1979. Our drummer, Randy Givens, was the son of a music store owner. He could play something credible on almost any instrument and was particularly resourceful at getting gigs. Before we learned our first song, he’d already gotten us a gig at Col. Summers Park, half a block down the street.

The gig was a month away.
We needed a name.
Something to put on a poster.

Somebody (not me) said, “Let’s call it ‘The John Smith Group’.” That was the kind of thing jazzers did in the late 70s.

“Hell no!”

I forget what other names we came up with. I think one of them was ‘Hide the Silverware,’ which I kinda liked.

John Smith & Larry Haggin

Larry Haggin and I, former members of the late great Latin band Felicidades, had decided to put a new thing together. We were standing by the kitchen stove at “Twenty-One-Twelve,” the house where we had band practice. On the wall behind the stove was ‘Contact Paper.’ Does anybody remember that stuff? It came in wood grain and bunny rabbits and a thousand other prints.

This one was printed to look like a page from an 1890’s newspaper, what they used to call ‘fish wrap.’

And on the page was an ad for lace-up shoes.

Larry and I looked over at the same time and said, “We could be The Shoes!”

“Yeah…that’s stupid enough.”

This was the era of Band Names with Dumb Nouns; The Cars, The Police, Doctor and the Medics.

“Yeah…The Shoes.”

photo by Valerie Day

OK. Fast-forward two weeks. We’re in a Record Store. (Remember those?) And we find a record by a band called SHOES. Just SHOES. Personally, I thought the omission of the ‘the’ a little pretentious.

Anyway, the search for a band name began all over again.

Then, Jim Hogan, our bass player and arguably the best-looking member of the group, says, “Why don’t you call it New Shoes?”

“Hey!”

“Not bad!”

The original concept for the band was a mash-up of the Temptations and late-period Isley Bros.; four-part soul harmonies and Psychedelic Jazz guitar solos. There were two good singers in our four-piece band and two bad ones. I was definitely in Column B. We won’t say who the other one was.

Since the concept was a vocal group, I decided to be clever and spell the name New Shoo’s, you know, ‘Shoo’ like a backup vocal syllable. “Shoo-bop-shoo-BAM!”

Poster art by John R. Smith

But Americans, as a people, not the best of readers, read it as Shoosss. So that lasted for one poster.

Jim Hogan to the rescue again.

“You should spell it N-U-S-H-O-O-Z.

The ‘Z’ makes it more ROCK!”

For 30 years I didn’t like our band name very much. It sounded frumpy and old to me. I wanted something edgy and dangerous like METALLICA or MEGADETH. Then in the roaring 2010s, we went out on the 80’s tour, and I realized that it was perfect. Like the ’80s, it was bright and bouncy and all about dance music.

We’ve answered this question so many times that our stock answer to the Perennial Interview Question #3 is:

“The BEATLES was already taken.”

As We Turn the Page... Some Love for Our Band ❤️

Every era has its beautiful moments. There have been many incarnations of the Nu Shooz band since our first gig back in the summer of 1979. We want to celebrate the fun we’ve had over the last five years with our current line-up. Thank you Gary, Fountaine, Margaret Linn, Tracey Harris, Haley Horsfall, Tim Jensen, Paul Mazzio and Johnny Riley for all your hard work and the joy you’ve brought to our lives onstage and off. Doing shows, rehearsing, and especially recording the ‘Bagtown’ album were a total blast.

Here’s a video we made of some of the highlights of the hang we’ve had since 2014.

Now it feels like the page is turning. The two of us will still be playing the hits for as long as you all want to hear them. Our first show of 2019 is just around the corner on March 30 near Phoenix, Arizona. (Check our website calendar for more dates near you.) There are new projects in the works; more about that later.

It’s a new era, and we can’t wait to see what’s in the next chapter. In the meantime…

Be well!

Love,

Valerie and John