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.
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.
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