Jeff Calder
of the Swimming Pool Q's/The Supreme Court
photo by Richard Perez, 1979
May 22, 2003- In the Madcap Studio
Lisa King: I’m going to give you some words. Just respond to the first thing you think of.
Jeff Calder: We’ll give it a shot.
LK: Slow Fear.
JC: You know, slow fear is like a panic attack that you have when you wake up and you realize that you’re really not going to be able to pay whatever bill you have incurred with your tailor. And you’re going to have to flee across the Channel like Brummel. Beau Brummel. I think one of the real drags about living in a landlocked city like Atlanta, there isn’t really a Channel across which you can flee. It’s kind of a problem. Which is why I’m always longing to be in a coastal city like Charleston or Savannah. There’s not really a Channel there either, but its closer. It’s a big Channel, maybe like three thousand miles of one, but at least it’s something you can fool yourself with. That’s the slow fear I’m talking about.
LK: Porch Light.
JC: My grandmother’s front porch had a porch light that was an unusual, oriental affair. I always really liked that front porch and her front yard. It had dozens of giant Camillia bushes and a big Wisteria bush that was in the middle of the yard, for no apparent reason. In the song “Stingray” that Glenn Phillips and I wrote, that The Pool Q’s did, and is also on “Supreme Court Goes Electric,” there’s a reference to “cutting a path through my grandmother’s outsized wisteria.” With the car. The Stingray. That bush you could see from the porch. It was a memorable bush. Granny got tired of it and made my grandfather tear it out.
LK: Pink Fuzz.
JC: I guess pink fuzz reminds me of your 1980 New Wave situation. And some shoes that some of the New Wave ladies would wear, and they were exciting shoes. They would create a kind of rush of blood to the head. To the brain.
LK: Pen Lines.
JC: When I think of pen lines, I think of Anne Richmond Boston’s drawings. She used to do very nice drawings with pen lines, with Rapidographs. I don’t know if they still make them, but I always liked the way Rapidographs looked. Nice looking pen. When you’ve got a Rapidograph, it looks like you know what you’re doing. Since I never knew what I was doing, I always had one so it looked like I did. And Anne’s lettering. Her hand lettering is quite good. She has beautiful handwriting. She did the hand lettering on “The Deep End’s” original interior lyric sheet.
LK: Garden of the Moon.
JC: That reminds me of when I was a little boy, in South Carolina. My grandmother’s family was from a little interior town maybe 15 miles from the city named Stallsville, which was near Summerville. It was one of these little interior towns to which people from earlier centuries would go to get away from various fevers that would happen in the city in the summer. They, my ancestors, were buried in this place near Summerville called The White Church. So we’d make these unbearably boring pilgrimages to The White Church every few months to put some flowers of these graves. They were so old, they were like smooth stone. You could barely make out any of the names of the dead. But this pilgrimage was a big deal, and that’s what garden of the moon reminds me of. When I was about six or seven, and my grandmother and grandfather were there, and there was a groundskeeper that was slightly demented, named Finnegan. He was trying to negotiate with me to buy my jockey shorts from me; for some reason, that was an enthusiasm of his. Being six, or seven, it seemed like it was an unusual request, you know, somebody was trying to buy my underpants. I didn’t know why he wanted them, but it was going to be a difficult transaction to complete. My grandfather caught him trying to do this, and shooed him away. Apparently he had a reputation as some kind of person who would do this. But I think he kept the place up all right. Garden of the Moon.
LK: Modern Orange Sky.
JC: It reminds me of one of the early unknown songs by The Swimming Pool Q’s, called “Orange Flotation Collar.” That was about a skiing instructor at Cypress Gardens in Florida. It was an absolutely horrible piece of work. It was about a professional water skier who had a drinking problem, and he ended up crashing into a Cypress Tree while skiing, and it took his life. It was sung in the first person, and the opening line was, “Orange flotation collar, wrapped around a tree/ Orange flotation collar, all that’s left of me.” Just absolutely horrible. I have this on tape. I have a performance of this at Rose’s Cantina, which later became 688. Just awful. Those are the ones you remember. It was part of a series of songs that we wrote, and probably the best of the lot was “Shoot A Quick Nine,” which was about a guy who gambled away his home on the golf course. It was about six minutes long, and extremely involved. The lyrics go, “The kids are hung on the latest kick, Mama’s fallen for a toothpick prof, Heart’s pumping like a two dollar trick, and he can’t turn his tummy off. From a third story office in Durham Street, he looks through Venetian blinds; Shoot a quick nine.” So, he’s obviously not really happy about the way things are going with his marriage and his life, and he goes to the golf course, and its endless verses. Kind of like that Gordon Lightfoot song about the ship.
LK: “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?”
JC: Yeah, except it’s about golf. So it goes on, and he ends up losing the house and crashing the car. A lot of these songs ended up in crashes. I don’t really know why. Which reminds me of a funny story Matthew Sweet recently told me about the late Ricky Wilson of The B-52’s. Matthew was out to dinner with him and some of the other B-52’s. This would have been in 1980-82, when Matthew was living in Athens. So they were out to dinner, and apparently Ricky was one of these Plato guys, who wouldn’t say anything very often. He would occasionally make a statement, and when he did it was profound, and everybody would get quiet. And so everybody was chattering, Athens-style, and all of a sudden he said, “I had a dream last night.” So everybody got quiet, because he was going to say something, and somebody said, “Well, what was the dream about?” And Ricky said, “It was about a crash.” And then somebody asked, “Well, what kind of crash?” And Ricky said, “I don’t know, just a crash.”
LK: Vibrating Dreamscape.
JC: A vibrating dreamscape reminds me of the drawings that the musician and artist Lisa King did for the songs on the “Royal Academy of Reality.” A series of luminescent images. Those are all vibrating dreamscapes to me.
LK: A moving electric charge.
JC: Well, that reminds me of the week that “Rubber Soul” by the Beatles came out. I was over at my kind-of girlfriend’s house. I was in the ninth grade, and we were attempting to make out while “Rubber Soul” was playing, and Charlotte-- we’re still friends, although I really don’t know how after this-- I was slobbering on her, and she had braces. It was very messy, and you really couldn’t get up under a bra then. I don’t know how they had them constructed, but it was just horrible. And I was fumbling around trying to make something work, and her older sister came in and caught us. Just terrible. But I’m glad it was her sister, because Charlotte’s mother was the Mayor of Lakeland at the time. Had her mother caught me, I would have been sent to the Tower of Lakeland, and no doubt had my temporarily reduced appendage removed. So every time I hear “Michelle” or “Girl” from “Rubber Soul”, the hair stands up on the back of my neck to this day. That’s kind of like a moving electric charge. Charlotte and I are still friends. She’s an excellent artist for the Chicago Sun Times, and she’ll kill me if she reads this. But there has to be a statute of limitations on kiss-and-tell, especially when it’s this good. Charlotte and her best friend Cela, who died last year, were very artistic girls. Very striking femme fatales from my remote youth. The three of us listened to WLS out of Chicago late at night, and we always knew the next happening songs before anyone else, which was important for some reason. They wore great clothing, you know, that Hullabaloo look. They really had that thing down. That weird, pink glossy lipstick, and those little eyelashes and painted eyes. I don’t know why they don’t go back to that. Like painted eyebrows and sun flames…it was a good look. They always had little things painted on their cheeks, too. That kind of comes back to pink fuzz. Where in the fuck have all the flowers gone?
LK: Blue Screen.
JC: I used to go to drive-ins a lot when I was a kid. And blue screen reminds me of the drive-in. Specifically, getting into as much trouble as possible at the drive-in. At the time you could go to the drive-in, and you could get the projectionist to announce that you had lost someone. You could get them to break into the movie and over the drive-in speakers request that such-and-such a person come to the concession stand. Every week we would go and come up with a new name, and during the middle of the most climactic part of the movie, ask him to make an announcement. Usually it would be someone with a name like “Clyde Toris.” Always a lot of fun to have the projectionist bust in with, “Would Clyde Toris please come to the concession stand.” That’s what blue screen reminds me of.
LK: Talk about the crash with Glenn Phillips.
JC: The Swimming Pool Q’s had been working very hard on the road for a long time, solid for a couple of years. We were always touring in places where we had no business being. And this frustration kept building, and during this period of time some minor thing would happen in Atlanta, that would seem far more important than it was. So Bob [Elsey] and I would get into these little frenzies, and I can remember we would drive up to the A&P Parking lot, and we would find a shopping cart, and we would position the car behind the shopping cart and then begin accelerating as fast as we could with the shopping cart in front of us. Then we would slam on brakes and watch it crash into something. Elsey and I could get ourselves into these states without much problem at all.
We would drive around Lakeland when Bob was visiting in the early days, and we would drive into town, and the FBI Offices were on the ninth floor of the Arcade Building. They were on the only floor of the building with lights on at night. So we would drive into town and look at the building, and then get on a pay phone and call the FBI office and say, “Uh, what’s going on with this Cuba thing?” Just anything. We could get ourselves into these states. One time at Christmas, we worked at Brentano’s at Lenox Square, the Atlanta shopping mall, and Elsey and I would try to avoid work whenever we could. We would get these shopping carts full of books, and we’d have to take them to the basement to a trash compactor. I can’t remember why, but it was Christmas time, and we were really insane with Christmas shopping at Brentano’s, and we got this giant Santa Claus display from the store, and stuck a big metal pipe in his mouth, and we hung a sign on him that said “Suck Me!”and then put him in the trash compactor, huge compactor, and put it on “high” and watched Santa buckle up with the pipe in his mouth. Just would cackle about it endlessly, and talk about it for weeks. It didn’t take much for us to get into that state of mind.
So one night we were over at Glenn Phillips’ house. Bill Rea’s, where I had lived, was in this old suburb called Brookhaven. It’s about 3 in the morning, and I was in my wife’s car. She had just moved up from Lakeland, and it was a green Datsun. We get in the car, and I was driving, and I say “We’re going to back over to Bill’s.” Okay, fine. There was no discussion about it, so we drove backwards all the way over to Bill’s, which is two miles across this residential area. When we got to Bill’s, we couldn’t find him, so we just kept backing onto this golf club called The Standard Club, which was adjacent to Bill’s house. We got onto the first fairway, and I decided, since we were that far, let’s just keep going. Bob was in the back seat, and Glenn was in the front, and we drove all the way over to the first green. Well, Elsey sensed that something bad was going to happen, and he leaped out of the window, which is not an easy thing to do from a swiftly moving 1970’s Datsun. He leapt out, and we kept going, you know, fuck him, so we got around to the green, and spun around the pennant, and came back up the green. It was a long incline, and Glenn kept begging me to slow down. I didn’t think I was going that fast, and I said, “I know what I’m doing.” We came to the crest of the hill, and I don’t know why anybody would have ever…I mean, who would have thought there would have been a brick wall on the other side of the hill? It’s a golf course, for god sakes! What’s a brick wall doing on a golf course? Nevertheless, there was a brick wall there, and we crashed into it probably going 35 or something like that. It was a tremendous collision. Phillips went through the windshield, and left an imprint of his noggin on it, and I injured my pinky finger. On my right hand. It hurt. He was complaining about his stupid head, picking glass out of it, and I was going, “My pinky’s hurt! What are you complaining about?” So Elsey showed up, steam was coming out of the radiator, and at that point I think there had been some sort of alert with security at The Standard Club. Somehow we got the car off the course, and there was some explaining to do about how the front end of the Datsun had been completely destroyed on a golf course. That was not very easy. I’ve talked my way out of a number of things in my life, but this was the one that was not going to be possible. I’ve got a great picture of the car.
LK: You once phoned Gore Vidal?
JC: Vidal and Buckley had these debates in 1968 at the Democratic and Republican convention. They were just phenomenal. It climaxed in Chicago with Vidal, and this was on national television and it had the highest ratings of any television coverage of a convention in history. ABC. Howard K. Smith was the moderator. They were sensational, and Vidal was great, and we all really liked Gore Vidal. So Vidal, in this climactic exchange, called Buckley a crypto-Nazi, and Buckley sat forward in his chair and he says, “Listen to me you god-damn queer, you call me that again and I’ll slap you in the god-damn nose, and you’ll stay plastered.” This was on national television. It was like, “This is television!” There was a great moment after Buckley said that, Vidal leaned back and crooned, “Bill, how extraordinary…” That convention ended in August, and the election was in November. Nixon versus Humphrey. And their commentary continued on Election Night. There was some kind of curtain separating the two. That was great. It was obvious they were being kept apart. It was late in the evening, near the end, and I timed it. We were at Lawton Chiles house. We picked up his phone, and we didn’t charge the call to the Senator, we charged it to a concrete company. You could do that at the time. Charge long distance calls to other people. So we called ABC in New York City, and I said, “This is Jackie Gleason’s private secretary. And we are trying to reach Mr. Gore Vidal.” So they put me through a succession of operators, and the timing was unbelievably perfect, because by the time I got through, Vidal was coming off the set, and they put him on the phone. So I started talking to him, and he was very cordial, and he had no idea why Jackie Gleason’s private secretary wanted to talk to him, but we didn’t really get into that. I said, “You know we really think you are great Gore, and what’s the deal with Buckley? Why were you separated?” and Vidal said, with that great sly drawl of his, “Well, the curtain was Bill’s idea.” Finally he figured out I was just some jackass, and he had to go. But I did get through to Vidal. A few years ago I acquired those debates from the Vanderbilt Television Archive. They were a great moment in the history of American television.
LK: Mermaid and Pharaoh.
JC: Give me some easy ones, I’m fading. That sounds like some kind of jelly or something. Like green jelly that you might get on a shelf in a gourmet shop. It should be. Mermaid and Pharaoh. I’d like to get a dozen of those.
LK: White Glitter Notebook.
JC: That reminds me of the notebooks that we had in junior high school, called “Slang Books”. That’s when things really started to go bad. When you started to become a teenager. Things started to get kind of mean. These Slang Books, each page of the notebook would be the name of somebody in your little group of people. Then they would pass the Slang Books around and people would write one-sentence things under their names. Usually they were unpleasant. Or, worse, under your name there would be nothing at all. There was nothing white or glitter about them, but just an odd phenomenon that I’ve never encountered anywhere else. Strange practice.
LK: Andre Breton.
JC: One of the great minds of the 20th century. Far more important than George Orwell. Much better writer, more important thinker, and well in advance of Orwell in his denunciation of Stalinism. As important as Freud, or Marx.
I should talk some more about the other guys in the band. They are really important to the record, “Royal Academy.” I’m just this motivating, organizing force and the lyricist. With The Swimming Pool Q’s, the continuity has never been broken. It’s not as if we stopped playing or have ever broken up. So at a certain point, when you are creating the material, you begin to create it and think about it with the other personalities in mind. That’s quite different from writing a song, and then having people perform it, essentially backing you up. The Q’s have never been that kind of group. I never wanted to be a part of anything like that. I wanted to be part of a band from the very beginning. I have never thought of The Swimming Pool Q’s being a back-up band for me. Even though I am the most outspoken person in the group and essentially the spokesperson for the band.
After playing for several years, everything that I did as a writer, if on an unconscious level, began to come with Anne’s voice in mind, or Bob’s guitar, anticipating what he might do. Or what Bill Burton might do on the drums, stretching what he did into some new area. But, of course, they never really did what I thought they might do; they did something better. This is the important thing that distinguishes a band like ours from a backup group for some guy who is a songwriter with ideas. That’s an important thing about The Q’s that I would like to get across.
We were talking about Anne the other night.
LK: She was a puppeteer?
JC: When I moved to Atlanta, I remember that Anne was involved in some kind of pupettering projects. The thing about Anne is, as I said earlier, when Bob and I started doing this, we never talked about having a female presence in the band. All of those early songs were male-oriented, with a male perspective. I knew that when we started looking for musicians they would have to be unique people to want to be in a group like The Swimming Pool Q’s. And I wanted to be a part of a group of people who were artistic. When we met Anne, like I said, there weren’t really any songs for her to sing. We asked her to come play at the first engagement we did at The Nexus Art Center in early June, 1978. There was nothing for her to do but just stand there, which was fine with me. It was just the presence of such a unique person that seemed right, though we knew she was a good singer. Her apartment was full of paintings, and hundreds of toys and strange things on all the walls. I had never really met anybody like that before. I had never met any woman like that. It was like, this is someone who really needs to be in this group, whether she wants to be in it or not. So when she performed with us originally, she would carry these toys and things with her. Gradually, we began writing songs specifically for her. So you had a situation where you were then creating things for somebody else, whereas before you were doing it just for yourself, for me to croak. I didn’t have much of a singing voice. I remember Glenn Phillips asking me, “ Have you ever thought about writing a song with a vocal melody?” I was like, “What are you talking about, man? There’s a bunch of words, you just sort of jam them in there. What’s a melody?” I was knowledgeable about pop music history, but what did he mean? Like, you know, “Yankee Doodle Dandy”? Of course, Anne had a very melodic voice, and that eventually opened up a whole new world, a new way to write songs. I really learned about melody and harmony from Anne. There was a real place for her later, and that’s when the group began to unfold.
It isn’t easy for someone like Anne Boston to be in a rock band. She’s not a “rock chick,” whatever that is. She’s a self-reliant, complex person who has little tolerance for enterprise as inane as show biz. Nonetheless, I learned from Anne how to respect a woman in a professional and artistic relationship, in a very real way. In my Twenties, I didn’t have that in my frame of reference. Not only did I learn a whole new thing musically--learning to write for a specific female personality that I was vain enough to think I understood-- I also learned a basic, practical skill, that is, how to have a professional and artistic relationship with a woman. How it should be. Not that it has been without considerable trail and error, and, at times, a slow, agonizing crawl over red-hot coal. I don’t believe that the phenomenon that happened with Anne in The Swimming Pool Q’s could have occurred with any other female vocalist. I can recall countless occasions when she’s singing onstage, wailing at the top of her game, and I step back and think, “There is no feeling that will ever be any better than this. This is it.” Then Elsey tears one off, and the cosmos sucks back on itself like some kind of free balloon in reverse.
LK: One last thing before we end. “…And then he walked on down the hall…”
JC: Well that was a great line from the Jim Morrison song, which, when we were teenagers, we thought was just fantastic. We could never get enough of that line. I can remember our last year of high school, we’d always go to Beach Week at Cocoa Beach, and we’d take over and create as much chaos as we possibly could. We stole one of those old fashioned intercom speakers off the wall in one of the classrooms the last day of school, hooked it up to a portable amplifier and a microphone, and one guy would hold the speaker and the other would hold the amp, and I would preach into this intercom, driving around Cocoa Beach. We’d set up and have mock revivals, and I’m quite sure that “and he walked on down the hall” was a very big part of those jackass performances that we thought were so hysterical, and bored the fuck out of all of the women that we were with. I remember we actually drove through a revival tent in one of these little hick towns one weekend. That was a phenomenal moment hearing the squealing and shrieking of the attendees. This little car flying through the tent. Just amazing.