'Bagtown' Lives On!

Time flies doesn’t it? Just over a year ago we did a video shoot for the song ‘Bagtown’, the title cut from the album… (You guessed it)…’Bagtown.’ We shot the band in front of a green screen. Director Mike Wellins was behind the camera.

Malcolm Smith went to work building the town. That project took seven months, burned up many hot-glue guns, and filled about 30 square feet of our studio. The result of his labor was fantastic and magical beyond our wildest expectations. Mike came in and shot it from every possible angle.

Then it was time to take it down. We were sad. “Can’t we leave it up for just one more day? Or a week?“

Mike to the rescue again. He happens to be the proprietor of the FreakyButTrue Peculiarium, one of those institutions dedicated to keeping Portland Weird. He offered us a home for our beloved ‘Bagtown’ set, and came up with this beautiful presentation. ‘Bagtown’ is now under attack from Godzilla and Sharknado!

All is right with the world.

The "Making of..." our nu video for "Bagtown"!

Seven months ago we had a video shoot with the band for the song "Bagtown"
Over the winter, our son Malcolm Smith has been working on the miniature Bagtown set - which is ALMOST complete. Next we'll put it in the hands of animator/director Mike Wellins and his talented assistant Jasper Thun who will take our green screen selves and actually put us INSIDE the town. Mike is also the proprietor of Portland's FreakyButTrue Peculiarium (something you must see if you ever make it to the city!)

No date for completion yet. The cool part is, BAGTOWN LIVES! Check out the video above that we made in our studio to get a behind the scenes glimpse into the "Making of..."

Spring 2017

Spring is Here! The trees are getting their fresh coat of leaves. What better time to release a Nu Shooz song with brand-new clothes on. We’re proud to unveil the Eric Kupper Radio Remix of “Real Thing” from the “Bagtown” album!

We want to thank everyone who took the time to vote for their favorite cover art on our FB Page. Here’s the winner. Hope you like it!

“Real Thing” was remixed by Eric Kupper, a star of the house music scene. Eric is known to DJ's everywhere for his production skills and a client list eight miles high, having worked with everyone from Alicia Keys to Depeche Mode. There’s a radio edit, and a club mix for you folks who want to dance all night. The response has been fantastic.  Comments are rolling in from all over Europe, Asia, and Africa! We’re also charting on Traxsource - the ultimate DJ go to site for new music.

You can listen and download the radio edit here...

And the (longer) Club Mix is here on Traxsource.

Summer shows are already falling into place. We’ll be Freestylin’ it at the shows below in May and June. Watch this space for full band shows later this summer.

FRIDAY MAY 19

First, it's the 3rd annual LOTOS Music Festival in Boca Raton FL, featuring Boy George, The Romantics, Ace of Base, Nu Shooz, and more.

FRIDAY JUNE 2

Then it's the Temecula Valley Balloon & Wine Festival in southern California with The Motels, Dramarama, Pretty Poison, Nu Shooz, and more.

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All in all, life is good. As winter turns to spring we look forward to another season of music, art, and fun.

Vive le printemps!

XO VALERIE AND JOHN

JUST RELEASED! The "Real Thing" Eric Kupper Club Remix

Hey Everybody! It's the "REAL THING" Eric Kupper Club Remix!

Eric is known to DJs everywhere for his production skills and a client list eight miles high, having worked with everyone from Alicia Keys to Depeche Mode. Since 1986, he has played on, remixed, and/or produced over 2000 records for artists spanning all contemporary musical genres. His work in the mid-to-late 1980s/early 1990s, especially his work with Def Mix Productions, is considered to be part of the foundation for house music as it exists today.

We love the remix he created for "Real Thing" and are ecstatic that he agreed to take it on. We hope you like it as much as we do. Enjoy!

January/February News

Hi Everyone!

Happy New Year, first of all. 2016 was a great one for Nu Shooz. (We almost hate to see it go!) Thanks to YOUR support, we were able to release our album "Bagtown." Last month we heard that "Bagtown" was chosen as one of the Top 50 Albums by SoulTracks.com - one of our favorite music sites for soul music.

Another highlight was an appearance with our band on Oregon Public Broadcasting's ARTBEAT show. If you didn't get a chance to catch the broadcast - here's a LINK to the full half-hour concert and interview. Thanks to everyone at OPB for doing such a splendid job!

2016 saw Nu Shooz crisscrossing the country playin' the hits. If we didn't get to your city, well...it sure seems like we did! Fingers crossed - we'll get there soon!

If you live anywhere near Everett, WA, we're playing the Historic Everett Theater there on Saturday, Feb 4th, on a double bill with Animotion. Should be a great show.

Last but not least, John and Valerie will be heading to Delray, Florida for Honey Nightclub's "I Want My 80's Back "Valentine Rewind" on Friday, February 10th.

Thanks for your support, and for keeping the music alive. Without you, things wouldn't be nearly as interesting! Here's hoping 2017 is the best year yet.

xo

Valerie and John

The Lost 80s Live Tour w/Flock of Seagulls, Wang Chung and more...

What a busy summer it's been, starting with the release of 'Bagtown' in May. Since then we've been all over the place - Bakersfield, Coachella, Vancouver WA, and a beautiful sold out show at the historic Greek Theater in Los Angeles. So fun to hang with our Freestyle pals; Lisa Lisa, Exposé, Debbie Deb, and J.J. Fad to name a few. Thanks to all who were able to attend and make these shows some of the best ever.

Next up we're looking forward to a tour with a completely different kind of line up. The 'Lost 80s Live' tour starts on August 27th in Sandy, UT with A Flock of Seagulls, Wang Chung, Cutting Crew, Animotion, Nu Shooz, Naked Eyes, and Farrington and Mann the Original "When In Rome UK". The tour continues with a swing through Northern California with shows in Sonoma (9/2) Saratoga 9/3) and Lincoln 9/4 then on to Las Vegas NV on 9/10. For more info on the line up for each of these shows and tickets, visit the Lost 80s Live FB Tour Dates page HERE.

We've also been having fun doing some interviews surrounding the release of 'Bagtown'. Here are a couple we thought we'd share with you...

James Taylor (no...not THAT James Taylor) is a Brit who is an expert on CREATIVITY. He interviewed us last month for his blog about the creative life and was totally engaging (http://www.jamestaylor.me/valerie-day-and-john-smith/).

Also here's a nice print interview with 80s music fanatic Sarah Miss Parker.

Can't get enough? Glutton for punishment? Head on over to our PRESS page for more interviews and articles.

Enjoy!

Valerie and John

'Real Thing' Official Lyric Video Released

The Strands of Time (The Making of the ‘Real Thing Video’)

Is there a reason and a purpose for everything? Maybe – maybe not. And maybe the reason’s just not clear at the time. Ten years ago I started scotch taping pictures into old phone books. The original idea was to create an image file for drawings, otherwise known as an Art Morgue. This turned into a sort of mega collage, while it’s original function was completely engulfed by Google images.

Around the same time I was writing music for documentary filmmaker Larry Johnson for things like The Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Texas and a museum exhibit about Buffalo Bill in Colorado. We also traveled to Vietnam twice together to work on Larry’s film ‘Ghost Money.’

Fast forward to the present. The Nu Shooz band had come back to life, rising from the swamp like the creature from the Black Lagoon. The creature wanted CONTENT, and it wanted it NOW. Valerie got busy making a series of short films about life in Nu Shooz-land; in airports, in rehearsals, in the studio during the making of Bagtown.

Now she wanted to make a “lyric” video for the first single – ‘Real Thing.’ Our dining room table was soon cluttered with scissors, paste, and magazines as she started cutting out letters and pasting them together to form the words from the song. But she needed a background. The phone book collage! It would be the perfect backdrop for this frenzy of fonts. Two days later, after 100’s of photos and video had been taken, she sat for 6 hours and started to edit. 30 seconds in and it became obvious that unless she wanted to cancel life (and upcoming gigs) this project would never be completed in time!

A call to Larry was made. Could he take over the editing chair? Does he have time to get it done in a week? Yes! He’s available and into it!

So there you have it. All these crazy strands came together – the collage book, Larry Johnson, Bagtown,the films, the songs. Sometimes you have to do these things just for fun, and let the strands weave together on their own.  - John

'How Two “Jazz Hippies” (and a Dutch DJ) Made Portland’s Biggest Song Ever'

'Nu Shooz's "I Can't Wait" turns 30.'

By Matthew Singer, Willamette Week February 16, 2016

For a song to achieve immortality, it's going to need an especially sharp hook.

Sometimes it's a riff. Sometimes it's a melody. In the case of Nu Shooz's "I Can't Wait," it's the sound of Donald Duck scatting through a vocoder.

God knows what the keyboard preset is actually labeled. But you'd recognize it before the prominent bassline, or even the title. It wasn't even the band's idea—a Dutch DJ threw it on a remix—but it was the missing piece that, in 1986, propelled a regional Portland hit into a global smash. Even in its original form, "I Can't Wait" is the platonic ideal of a classic '80s song: timeless in its blend of fat-bottom funk and R&B elegance, but with just enough retro-futurist kitsch to immediately evoke the era.

As two self-professed "jazz hippies," singer Valerie Day and songwriter John Smith admittedly had no idea what went into creating a pop single. So how did they end up writing the biggest song ever to come out of Portland? Turns out it was, at first, mostly an act of desperation.

By 1983, Nu Shooz was in a rut. It had been playing clubs since the late '70s, drawing good crowds but failing to sustain a lineup or a consistent musical direction. In December, John Smith dedicated himself to rerouting the band back to its R&B roots.

John Smith: The mission statement was to write the funkiest thing that I could, and kind of blow all the dust out of the exhaust pipe and get us back to what we're supposed to be doing. I rented a four-track machine for the incredible sum of $24 per month, and the first reel, "I Can't Wait," was on it. There were five tunes I was working on, sitting on a wooden box by the furnace in the basement with a nylon string guitar. In the summer of '84, we went into the studio, and the first thing I did was slow it way down. It laid there like a lump.

Valerie Day: It was slower than the live version we'd been playing. I remember coming into the studio the day it was my turn to record the vocals, and I hadn't heard he'd slowed it down. I get into the studio, and I was like, "I can't sing this."

Smith: For about six months, we tinkered with it. Then, on the way to the studio one day, I was listening to the Time, and they had this bottle part on "Jungle Love." I appropriated that, put it on the track, and then it started to move.

"I Can't Wait" ended up as one of five songs on Nu Shooz's second official release, an EP recorded at Cascade Recording in Portland.

Day: We get these five songs recorded, we put this on a cassette called Tha's Right, and we release it on our own, basically. And nothing, really, was happening. Except this music writer, for The Downtowner magazine in Portland, he wrote about the band and said we were boring live, but we had made this really cool thing, and it was a shame local radio wouldn't play it.

Gary Bryan, co-host of KKRZ's morning show: We read the article and went on the air. They mentioned Nu Shooz in the article, and we were like, "We'd love to play it, but we can't play it if we don't have it." No one ever brought it in.

Day: Our manager at the time, who was a bartender at the Veritable Quandary, he was a morning person, thank God. So he heard this on the radio. He jumped on his Vespa, he drove it to the station, handed them the cassette, and they picked "I Can't Wait" to play.

Bryan: The next day, we put it on the air. We made a big deal out of it. A lot of people started calling for it, and we put it into heavy rotation. It came up every hour and 45 minutes or something. We took it to No. 1 on our chart, and that meant we were reporting that to radio and record magazines, and to Billboard. And we thought, "Let's get these guys a record deal. Let's try to bust a band out of Portland!"

After hearing "I Can't Wait," Greg Lee, a local promo manager for Warner Bros., became a champion for the band in the Pacific Northwest, helping spread the song across the region.

Greg Lee: I took it to several Portland radio stations and played it for them, and they all agreed immediately, like, "You need to get this to us!" That was the impetus for myself. I wanted this to be on Warner Bros.

Day: Greg also got us a demo deal with Warner Bros. We recorded some songs we'd had for a while, and the label said, "Sorry, we've got Madonna already."

Lee: Usually, when a label passes, they don't offer you anything other than "C'est la vie." [Michael Ostin, head of Warner Bros. A&R] gave the band what was called a demo deal. That was a financial gift, so to speak—an honorarium given to the band to make another demo. It was sort of like, "We're passing, but we see there's something there."

Striking out with the majors, the band's manager licensed "I Can't Wait" to a service which would do limited pressings geared toward the international market. A Dutch disco label picked it up, and handed the song off to a young DJ named Peter Slaghuis for a remix. He didn't change much, but he did add a curious-sounding synth melody over the top.

Smith: We call it "the barking seal." The first time I heard it, we were playing the University of Southern Oregon in Ashland, and I heard it over the phone. Our manager played it. "Here's the remix, what do you think?" And I liked it because I never in a million years would've thought of that.

Day: We met Peter Slaghuis when he came to New York one time, and he tragically died in an auto accident when he was in his 30s. Much, much later, we found an interview he did where he said he actually didn't like "I Can't Wait" at all. He did as little to it as possible because he didn't really want to work on it.

Smith: The secret Nu Shooz cool test is, if they come up and sing the bassline, they're cool. If they sing the barking seal, they're less cool.

The "Long Vocal Dutch Remix" became a hit in the New York club scene, and finally landed Nu Shooz a deal with Atlantic Records. By June 1986, "I Can't Wait" hit No. 3 on the Billboard charts, leading to appearances on American Bandstand and Soul Train, an international tour and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. It also opened up other, previously unfathomable opportunities.  

Smith: My manager asked me who I most wanted as a sideman, and out of my mouth came, "Oh, Maceo Parker," because he'd been my hero since I was 11 years old. So we recorded with him on the second Atlantic record. 

Day: One of our heroes at the time were Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and I think we met them at the Minneapolis Music Awards.

Smith: Jimmy Jam came up to me and said, "We wish we had written that song."

Nu Shooz followed "I Can't Wait" with two other charting singles. But its second album for Atlantic, Told U So, underperformed. A third album was never released.

Smith: They didn't even call us to say they were dropping us. We found out at a show. We met the new Atlantic rep, and he didn't know who we were. I said, "We're on the release schedule for September," and he said, "Uh, I don't think so."

Day: It was kind of hard for them to understand who we were and what we were about and what our potential was. We had three A&R people in that seven-year period, and one of them was the guy who discovered White Lion or whatever.

Nu Shooz in 2013. IMAGE: Phil Isley.

Nu Shooz went on hiatus, with Day and Smith concentrating on raising their son. Beginning in the late '90s, "I Can't Wait" began to take on a second life, appearing on movie soundtracks, getting sampled by Vanessa Williams and 50 Cent and, most recently, remixed by Questlove for a Target ad. Day and Smith are currently working on a new Nu Shooz album, due out this year.

Day: It's kind of a miraculous thing. This song is like our child. We birthed it and raised it to a certain point, and then it went out in a world and now it's doing it's own thing. We obviously had something to do with it, but at a certain point, it's not about you anymore. It's really about the song having its own life.

Happy Holidays from the Shooz!

Dear Friends,

There are as many ways to celebrate the Holidays as there are families and individuals to celebrate it. Call it Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or Winter Solstice, it's a time to reflect on the people we hold closest to our hearts and hearths.

The Nu Shooz family has much to be thankful for, most of all YOU, our loyal listeners who have supported our band all these years. To all of you we send our wishes for a safe and lovely holiday season. Our gift to you...an intimate live video performance of 'Christmastime is Here' in our studio with our backup singers Tracey, Margaret, and Haley. You'll laugh - you'll cry - and not necessarily in that order. (Make sure and check out the outtakes at the end. They're the best part ;-) Enjoy!

Warmly,

Valerie & John

November News

Gettin' down to the end of 2015. What a year it's been! And the party's not over...

Last month we started cutting tracks for the 7th Nu Shooz album: BAGTOWN. (Songwriting began a year ago.) Our friend Sean Holmes was in our studio recording demo vocals over the last few weeks. Here's a little video of him cutting the backup vocals on the title track now...
 

We enlisted our son Malcolm Smith to do the cover art, and he did a fantastic job integrating the 'bag people' into his drawn world. It fits the music perfectly. And what is the music like? John says, "It's a cross between a 1979 Toyota and an American breakfast: two eggs, hashbrowns, and sausage patty...with a side of wry."

We're looking to serve that up around the 1st of May.

Watch as the artwork comes alive here...

In the meantime, if you're in the Phoenix area this month, we'll be at the Arizona State Fair with Lisa Lisa, Debbie Deb, Stevie B., and J.J. Fad. That's Saturday, November 7th. Should be a GREAT show.

That's all for now. For those of you who heard about Malcolm's car accident, we're happy to report that he's fine and fully recovered and suddenly has the ability to converse in fluent Croatian.

Just kidding.

Love,

Valerie and John