October News: The NU Record, Freestyle in El Paso & Another edition of Nu Shooz: On The Road

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(the BagTown gang hanging out in John’s studio control room aka the man-cave.)

We’ve FINALLY started RECORDING!
After a year of song writing, “Bag Town” is ready to roll into the studio. We actually started laying down some tracks TODAY. We’ll be sharing more of this adventure with you all as it progresses, so please stay tuned!

We have another mini-movie to share from our Nu Shooz On The Road series.

In this episode, we head to San Bernardino, CA, for a show with radio star Art Laboe and promoter Alan Beck featuring acts like The Manhattans, Heatwave, Zapp, and more. Every road trip is different, but this one even more so after we got a phone call that is every parent’s nightmare…(Spoiler Alert: Everything turned out OK...but MAN, that was WAY too close!)

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Super Freestyle Explosion in El Paso

Last but not least, we’re headed out on the road this weekend (10/10/15) for another Super Freestyle Explosion show in El Paso, TX. We’ve never been…and are looking forward to a little R&R after our last 'On The Road' adventure!

On The Road: Behind the Scenes Video from The Freestyle Tour w/Lisa Lisa, Exposé, Trinere and more…

From Valerie's iPhone it's our nu YouTube playlist - "NU SHOOZ On The Road." In this video it's the Super Freestyle Explosion Tour in Stockton CA w/Exposé, Debbie Deb, Trinere, Lisa Lisa, Johnny O, & Stacey Q and more...

On The Road

We had an amazing summer full of shows with both our full 8 piece band and the Super Freestyle Explosion Tour. We feel so lucky to get to travel and play with so many great acts and musicians. We wanted to share some of these experiences with you - so Valerie started making little movies on her iPhone. So far we've got Philadelphia, Stockton CA and Las Vegas in our "On The Road" playlist on YouTube. Hopefully we'll get YOUR city in the mix someday soon!
 

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

Co-Hosting the 80s @8 Show on 106.7 The Eagle w/Jim E. Chonga

We had a great time co-hosting the 80s @8 on 106.7 The Eagle w/Jim E. Chonga (on the right.) It was fun to go in the way back machine AND to talk about the NOW of Nu Shooz. Great to meet Bubba too! (on the left)

For those of you who missed the show, check out the tasty conversational tidbits below!

It Was 36 Years Ago TODAY

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Freestylin' in Fresno 2015

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!

Actually, we have TWO dates to celebrate this month. TODAY, Sunday, June 21st, is the 36th anniversary of the first Nu Shooz gig. You read that right. 36 years since that first show in 1979 at Colonel Sumners Park in Portland, OR. Yup. We're a summer solstice, baby! There were just four band members back then. (It would take another year before the Shoo-horns and I-Lets came on board.)

Also, last week, we played Fresno, CA, with the Freestyle Explosion Tour. Two years ago in Fresno was our first EVER performance on the tour that has taken us all over the U.S.. Nu Shooz has always had a soft spot for Fresno; friendly people and a great crew. It was one of the best shows on the 1986 tour too.

NOW it's on to...

San Jose, CA, with the Freestyle Explosion Tour on Friday, June 26, and then back to Oregon the next day for a show with the entire 8-piece band on Saturday, June 27, at the Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts.

We're rackin' up the frequent flier miles!

Hope to see you soon,


Valerie and John



     

It Takes A Universe

It's been interesting around here, a hundred projects going on at once. Carpenters are upstairs rebuilding the shower, while downstairs, we're working with our friend Mariecella on choreography for the horn section.

Somewhere on the other side of town, the finishing touches are being applied to our "nu" website by a guy named Daniel Webb (really - you can't make this stuff up!), and Tim Simpson is building a synth-guitar system so we can trigger piano sounds from a six-string.

We have a summer-ful of shows coming up and a million details to attend to; costumes, charts, drum heads, wires, vans...Whoever said it takes a village was only partly right.

It takes a universe.

In the next few months, you can visit the Nu Shooz planet, and we hope you do; we'll be playing from 7 PM to 8 PM at the Rose Festival in Portland, OR with the Crazy 8s and Sir Mix-A-Lot on May 30th. Then the Freestyle Explosion Tour w/Stevie B., Taylor Dayne, Seduction, Debbie Deb, and more...hits Fresno, CA, on June 12th.

For more Tour Dates, visit our SHOWS page. And while you're checking out the other pages on our newly revamped website, don't miss the ABOUT page. It comes complete with a groovy timeline that takes you from the band’s humble beginnings as a four-piece - through the heady days of the mid-1980s - to the current incarnation of the 8-piece live band. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll be amazed that we lived through it all and are still ambulatory today. We'd love to hear what you think...so please let us know!

Hope to see you soon!

A Story About a Dad, Two Boys, a Giant Caterpillar and a NU SHOOZ Orchestra Video

Happy Father's Day! In honor of the occasion - we'd like to tell you a story about a father and son and how our new video came to be...

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Malcolm.

He had one of the best dad’s in the world - a dad who loved him IMMENSELY and would draw, and write stories, and create whole worlds that Malcolm grew up knowing.

One of Malcolm’s favorite stories was about a boy named Momo and his giant pet caterpillar Neener. Malcolm’s dad drew gazillions of pictures of Momo and Neener and told Malcolm stories about their adventures. Eventually he wrote the stories down and illustrated them.

As Malcolm grew he started to draw too. He loved drawing alongside his dad. Pretty soon he was drawing his own versions of Momo and Neener’s adventures…

They drew and drew and drew, and the years went by. By the time Malcolm was 8 there were 5 Momo and Neener books. He knew them all by heart…

Malcolm grew and grew and grew, and as the years went by he became a passionate artist. Momo and Neener were still a part of his life, but they slowly faded into the background the more he created worlds of his own...

One day Malcolm’s parents had an idea. They had made a record with their band the NU SHOOZ Orchestra called Pandora’s Box and on it there was a song called “Right Before My Eyes.” It was a beautiful bossa-nova that Malcolm’s dad had written about how quickly Malcolm was growing up and changing. Malcolm had been learning how to animate his drawings. Could he make a video for the song starring his old pals? It seemed like the perfect time for the boy and his caterpillar to return.

Malcolm said yes and began work in earnest.

But then he got distracted…

And then, all of a sudden he was grown and left home! Malcolm’s Mom and Dad missed him terribly - but especially his dad. He and Malcolm were creative buddies together. They had egged each other on and learned from each other’s art - every day since Malcolm had picked up his first crayon. He was heart broken.

But then Malcolm started working on the video again. This time he was going to finish it and make his dad proud.

And he did.

RIGHT BEFORE MY EYES

Music by John Smith

Video by Malcolm Smith

Dedicated to all those who take the time to BE with the young people that they love. Remember to savor every moment. How quickly it all goes by!

Nu Shooz and director Jim Blashfield talk about “I Can’t Wait” in an interview w/Sloan de Forest

When citing examples of music video directors with signature looks, names like Anton Corbijn or Matt Mahurin jump out, but the unfortunately overlooked genius in this club must be Jim Blashfield. Creating a trademark visual sensibility with just a handful of videos, the Oregon native created dreamlike fantasies with a cut-out xerographic animation style that reveals a gentle magic hiding the ordinary — strangely devilish garage-sale travelogues, if you will. Jim’s artisan videos, which embrace both texture and perspective, include Talking Heads’ “And She Was,” Paul Simon’s “Boy in the Bubble,” Tears for Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love” and Michael Jackson’s wildly self-effacing “Leave Me Alone.” His most visually-trippy grab bag of kitchen sink mischief, though, is his clip for Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” from their album Poolside. The video he created for his fellow Portlanders, Valerie Day and John Smith, helped propel the duo’s inescapably catchy hit into pop history — and also into the still-curious minds of video music fans everywhere.

I spoke to Jim recently about his career, and he shared his experience on creating this amazing piece of filmmaking:

“I explained that I wanted to improvise it. I didn’t want to plan it at all. I wanted the experience of just making it up from what was around when we got to the studio. The morning of the shoot, I loaded my kitchen table and chair and lamp into my car along with some biology slides and a coffee maker and some kind of cigar box and headed over to the stage. I rummaged around among the props there and found some canvas and some walls from a commercial and some fake cactuses. I went upstairs where the band and the crew were assembled– we had a good and very professional crew, as you can tell from looking at the images– and told them I would be back in 10 minutes with instructions about setting up for the first shot, about which I had no idea whatsoever. I rummaged around in people’s offices and borrowed a few other items which looked promising. I went upstairs and said we were doing a video that took place in the desert, and set people about creating that. It seemed like we needed something in front of the green walls, so the video editor went down the street and came back with a dumpster, and rigged a way to make the lid go up and down with fishing line. I recalled that my friends who were on vacation had a great looking dog house for their dog Buster, and some people went there and stole it. We called up a friend with an obedient dog who would stay when asked, and he brought his pooch over. Somebody else got a bunch of tools out of the trunk of their car.”

“After the shoot the next step was a trip to Seattle to get the footage transferred and do strange things to some of it. Then, for post production, a trip to the thrift store and the corner grocery, returning with every other little gadget and doo-dah you see on the screen. The video editor was Mike Quinn who subsequently did the high-degree-of-difficulty video editing for my videos for Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and others. During editing I called my friend Roger Kukes, the animator, and asked him if I could use part of his animated film ‘Up’ for the ending of the video where Valerie opens the little box and all the wiggly images come out, revealing all knowledge known to humankind. I recall that the opening scene with the Banana and souvenir totem pole dropping onto a piece of metal with holes in it took about 8 hours to composite, and was completed while I slept on the couch in the editing room. The scene where the image of the dog watching the golf ballish thing swings in and unceremoniously lands on Valerie’s head– and where it remains for longer than might be considered, strictly speaking, necessary– is there because it made me laugh when we tried it in post and was left in because nobody said I couldn’t. We had a take in which the guy with the smoke machine walks through in the background waving it around while Valerie is singing, but I left that out, due to some conservative impulse on my part, which I regret.”

Exclusively for The Golden Age of Music Video, Valerie Day and John Smith collectively answered a few questions about the video by email:

Q: How did you and Jim find each other?
A: Jim Blashfield was a local film maker/artist working in our hometown, Portland Oregon. We knew him first as a cartoonist, His drawings appeared in the local ‘free press.’ By the time the Shooz signed to Atlantic he’d become a world class video director, and his stuff was unique. It seemed like a good fit, and as it turned out, it was. His ‘I Can’t Wait’ video is our favorite of the three we made.

Q: How was working with Jim during the shoot? He said you really went with the flow.
A: The whole shoot was a swirl of madness. We had 48 hours between coming off the road and a vacation in Mexico. Jim improvised the whole thing, grabbing up objects like plastic sharks and samovars and somehow working them into the shoot.

Q: What do you recall as a highlight from the shoot?
A: A few days ago we were talking to a friend who worked on that shoot. She says she remembered Valerie sitting on a chair atop a spinning platform. They shot hours of this spinning thing. Jim kept saying ‘Shoot it one more time.’ None of that footage made the final cut.

Q: After I spoke to Jim, I realized that most of it was done on the fly and there’s no real subtext, other than Valerie plays a scientist examining things and trying get the answer to “tell me what it’s all about”. When people ask you to explain parts of the video, do you find that irksome or amusing?
A: We prefer to let people come up with their own interpretation. Carl Jung’s work with the unconscious suggests that everything in our heads is connected, all our preferences and prejudices, what we like and what we don’t. Somehow the random imagery in the “I Can’t Wait” video ended up saying exactly what we wanted it to say.

Q: Jim said, “If viewers look closely they may notice that happiness seems to be represented as a shark found lurking in a coffee pot, a metaphor which is certainly worth considering, if you ask me.” What do you think about that?
A: In the hands of a lesser director we might have ended up with a melancholy/needy girl waiting by the phone. Not Jim. It wasn’t that we discussed our vision so much as he was just as psychedelic as we were.

Q: What did you think the first time you saw it, and what do you think when you see it now?
A: MTV was a cultural revolution. In some ways it ruined music, in some ways it added a new dimension. At the time it was just thrilling to be a part of it, to know they were watching us in Cleveland…and Brazil. When we see it now, it still holds up as a perfect piece of art, one that represents Nu Shooz exactly how we wanted it to be seen.

TOP 5 THINGS TO DO WHILE RECOVERING FROM AN APPENDECTOMY

I had a pretty mellow Father's Day, all things considered. Got to spend the whole day in a comfortable chair, reading. It would have been perfect except that the chair was in the waiting room at St. Vincent Hospital. Valerie woke up that morning in severe pain. By noon it wasn't getting any better so we went to the Emergency Room. Within the hour she was under the knife, being parted from her  APPENDIX!

The Appendix is like the 'Vice President of Internal Organs,' [i.e.; no known function] So as I sat reading in Father's Day splendor, Valerie's Appendix was being impeached. The offending organ went quietly, stating only that it "wanted to spend more time with family."

As luck would have it, the surgeon was a Nu Shooz fan. As they wheeled her into surgery, he asked "Are you the Valerie Day?" Turns out he still had his old 45.

We ended up having a great time at the hospital the next day. Her room had a lovely view of the hills above Portland, and the room service was excellent. "Would you like another pain pill with those fries?" We ended up staying all afternoon. While we were soaking up the local hospitality, Valerie came up with this list of "Top 5 Things To Do While Recovering From An Appendectomy " - John

And here's the list...

 TOP 5 THINGS TO DO WHEN RECOVERING FROM AN APPENDECTOMY

(Not neccessarily in this order:)

1) Play Words w/Friends Even if you're too gorked out on pain meds to actually find the PERFECT Word (for the most points), WWF is great exercise for the mind and you can still feel connected via messaging with your friends.

2) Watch "The IT Crowd" on Netflix Warning! Practice laughing without moving your abdomen FIRST. This British comedy series HURTS it's so funny!

3) Meditate Get some HEADSPACE. Find inspiration on meditation here or on www.tricycle.com

4) Eat popsicles 'Nuff said 

5) Check out the latest news, article, book, video on BRAIN PICKINGS Brain Pickings is…" is your LEGO treasure chest, full of pieces across art, design, science, technology, philosophy, history, politics, psychology, sociology, ecology, anthropology, you-name-itology." I could get lost on this website for decades!http://www.brainpickings.org/

5) Kill some time on Facebook After almost a year of treatments for breast cancer, I have to say that - even with all it's faults - FB can be a lifesaver when you're spending a lot of your life in bed. You can live vicariously, be distracted in awesome ways from how bad you feel, keep in touch with those you care about and who care about you, and, if you share what you're going through, be uplifted and supported in your recovery. Thank you, FRIENDS!

OK. There were actually six things. But who's counting!

KUNG PAO & DONUTS

This year, by supernatural coincidence, National Donut Day came in the same week as the release of the NU SHOOZ latest album, Kung Pao Kitchen. We feel that this harmonic convergence deserves some quiet reflection…

TODAY’S MEDITATION:
What does the latest Nu Shooz release, Kung Pao Kitchen, have in common with a donut?

 For starters, both have a hole in the center. While we could go deep into the meaning of that Negative Space, it’s the part we can see where the richness lies. This richness can only be experienced directly. Bite into the donut. Dive into the music.

Only then is the true flavor to be revealed.

Both the donut and Kung Pao Kitchen contain mood-enhancing qualities. Who can stay in a bad mood when biting into a fresh Maple Bar or a classic Old-Fashioned? And who can resist the pleasing thump and bleat of 80s-heavy Nu Shooz beats?

Of course, there are differences. We don’t recommend dipping the album in coffee, and we don’t recommend putting a donut into your CD player. But Nu Shooz music and fresh donuts share one more important trait: Both are common pleasures that make us glad to be alive.

And both are worthy subjects for meditation.