Fan Questions: Tales from the Studio - Remember Those Analog Days?

Dear NU SHOOZ, can you talk about some difficult recording studio experiences?

Anthony
Tampa, FL

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Hi there, Anthony,

You asked about difficult recording experiences. So here's a few.

1. This doesn't come under the category of 'difficult,' but it was formative. When we recorded the original 'American' mix of "I Can't Wait," the audio engineer Fritz Richmond said, "Is this going to be a single?"

And we were like, "Single? What's that?"

He ended up cutting the intros and verses and "middle-8s" in half and made some breakdowns without which the famous version of "ICW" wouldn't have been possible. He did this by cutting up the 2" master tape with a razor blade on an editing block. There was no digital audio back then, and that's how it was done.

Fritz Richmond was this incredible, super-humble guy. You'd never know he was part of the Greenwich Village folk scene and actually started the whole 'granny glasses' thing. He never brought any of that up while we were recording - that's just the kind of person he was.

He’s deserving of a whole blog post of his own. Someday soon, we’ll write it.

Fritz with his washtub bass and granny glasses.

2. We were down in L.A. at Sunset Sound Factory recording "Should I Say Yes." We couldn't get a vocal take that I liked better than the demo. Eventually we decided to use the vocal from the demo tape. The problem was, the demo vocal was on 1/4" four track and the master was 2" 24 track. Also, they were running at slightly different speeds. And there was no time code. So we had the demo FedExed down from Portland, set up a machine and 'flew in' the vocal one phrase at a time. To do this Jeff Lorber marked a place on the demo tape with a grease pencil, played the master and hit go on the other machine. It would take several attempts before it landed in the right place. We did the whole song like that.

Sunset Sound Factory

Jeff Lorber

3. At some point in the making of a record, we'd have to make a cassette and take it in to the A&R department at the Label. The problem was, the people at the label always had the crappiest stereos, and no two cassette players ran at the same speed. This was way before CDs or DATs. So we're sitting with whoever and the tape is either running too slow or too fast, quaaludes or helium, and everything sounds stupid.

image by Feodor Chistyakov

There you go. Thanks for the question. There are so many more. Like the all-nighter I pulled for a band I was producing. Next day, I found out it was the wrong tune!

Like the pet rabbit, Gary who liked to chew on the cables and eventually died for his bad lifestyle choices.

All the best,

John R. Smith
Nu Shooz

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.

FAN QUESTIONS!

Artwork by Malcolm Smith at Art Party Comics

KJ writes, “Tell Me A Lie” is one of my all-time favorite Nu Shooz songs, and I was wondering what your songwriting process is.

Hello KJ!

Well, first of all, thanks for that wonderful letter. 'Tell Me a Lie' was one of my absolute favorite songs off of "Bagtown." Another was 'The Color of Everything' from “Pandora’s Box.” That whole album was a departure from my normal writing style, which was to start with a bass line, a kick/snare pattern, some nice chords, and go from there.

On 'Pandora,' well... Martin Scorsese made a documentary about Bob Dylan called 'No Direction Home,' which I watched over and over in the studio. And that's when I finally realized what Lyrics could do. That they could be like impressionist paintings. At that point, I'd been writing songs for thirty years. So this time, I STARTED WITH THE LYRICS, just writing free of the music.

The first song that came out of that writing style was 'Spy vs Spy.' It was like a revelation. It opened up lyrics to new rhyming schemes and song forms. In the early days, it was so hard to keep four hours of material fresh. At the end of the night, there were always songs we were tired of but had to play to fill the time. So, I worked on songs in batches of ten and tried to finish two every week for Wednesday's rehearsal. I wrote some pretty flimsy stuff at times, but just good enough to fill the dance floor. (Some of those I'm still rewriting in my head.)

But how I did it was what we called the BONE PILE. The BONE PILE worked like this.

I would work on music and lyrics separately. I'd collect a bag of chord changes that I liked and SEPARATELY a bag of word fragments, mostly TITLES and hooks. Then, I'd try the hooks against the chord changes till I found ones that fit together. It was very much an assembly line process. 'The Real Thing' was a song that came together like that. The lyric fragment I started with in that song was "Whatever you want, whatever you need." And it expanded out from there. Musically, I knew I wanted to make a Gamble and Huff/ Philly Soul song like they might write for the OJays.

So, that might be more than you wanted to know, but that's how it was done.

We really appreciate it when people dig into our band and get beyond 'I Can't Wait.' There's a lot there. And we loved the bit about your bass player from Senegal. Our songs were well-liked in Africa, especially (for some reason) 'Should I say Yes.'

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Gotta question for the Shooz? Just get in touch through our contact page and we’ll try to answer in a future newsletter!

Freestyle AND Full band Shows in August PLUS a new video series: Q&A w/Valerie & John

Hi Folks,

As July slips into the rearview mirror, and Autumn is a billboard not too far up the highway - we're on the road again!

We'll be in Philadelphia, PA (8/1),  Las Vegas, NV (8/7), and Stockton, CA (8/14) with our Freestyle Explosion pals, and in Portland for our last gig of the summer with our whole band at a benefit for the Special Olympics  - The Bite of Oregon (8/8 at 7 PM) We've been trying to get to Las Vegas for years! So far, we've only been to the airport.

We've started a new video feature we call "Q&A with Valerie & John." We invited our Facebook friends to ask us ANYTHING. The response was great. So below is this month's Q&A freshly loaded to our YouTube channel. If your question isn't answered in the video, head to the post on our Facebook page HERE. All questions will be answered!

So that's all for now. Here's wishing you an August of sun & fun, family & friends, and plenty of barbecue!

Till next time,

Valerie and John