Jeff Calder
of the Swimming Pool Q's/The Supreme Court
photo by Steve Rucker
May 22, 2003- In the Madcap Studio
Lisa King: You wrote a piece on Oscar Wilde?
Jeff Calder: I had been contacted several years ago about doing a book on rock and roll and clothing, by Michael Jarrett, who is a fine writer and an instructor at Penn State. Michael was editing a series of books for Temple University. So, I was doing some research on it, and I came across a reference to Oscar Wilde’s tour of the south in 1882. I started looking into it, and in Richard Ellman’s biography there is an itinerary. And it’s staggering. In one year Wilde played 140 dates all the way to the West Coast and back, and all throughout the South. I became interested in his tour of the South. How was he received in this section of the country, just barely recovering from the destruction of the Civil War? So I wondered what people in the South had made of him. I began looking into it, and reading about it, and there have been some excellent essays on it in academic journals. So I became more interested it, and forgot all about doing the book on rock and roll and clothing, and just began accumulating all of the information I could find about the aspect of his American tour that dealt with the Southern states. When it was done, I had uncovered things that I had never seen published before. Things about Oscar Wilde possibly witnessing a lynching in Louisiana, and I uncovered the account of the lynching in a tiny local paper. I located an account of Wilde being drunk on a grizzly bear hunt down in South Georgia. Interesting little things like that. And I also began thinking about Oscar Wilde and his connection to early Bohemianism in the South. There really aren’t any studies about Bohemian culture in the South, as far as I know. So I saw him as a lightning rod for the emergence of a Bohemian culture here. I haven’t taken this any further yet. But it seems to me that in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century—this is difficult to document-- there was an emerging Bohemian culture here.
You see it reflected in the modern era, and it’s connected with homosexual culture, in New Orleans and other places. You see it in this fabulous sense of humor in the modern era with people like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote, really all the way to someone like Fred Schneider in the B-52’s, who is obviously a very funny guy. But it’s a special kind of Southern personality. There are many Bohemian aspects in the South, but they are concealed. Certainly, in the era when The Swimming Pool Q’s began, in the late 1970’s, all of the bands that were part of our group in Atlanta and Athens were really an extension of a Bohemian culture in the South. Small as it may have been. So there were implications about Oscar Wilde’s tour of 1882 in the South that went far beyond just the historical aspects of it. I documented all of this stuff, but it’s never really been published. It’s shocking to me that people who should know better, at the editorial level of regional magazines and papers, have no interest in this subject whatsoever. When it was complete, I sent it to Oscar Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, who really has the spirit. He has published several wonderful books on Oscar. I’ve corresponded with him. He’s a relatively young man, meaning that he is not that much older than me. My primary interest in Wilde is as a thinker. He was a great essayist. His Oxford notebooks are astonishing. And he was by all accounts a very generous person who came to a bad end at the hands of filthy Tory scum, whose guiltless descendants nevertheless owe the universe a written apology.
LK: You had mentioned an earlier songwriting partner in Lakeland?
JC: Phillip Hall was a boyhood friend of mine. He’s one of my oldest friends to this day. Phillip is very supportive, but he has no problem telling me I’m full of shit, even when I’m not, which has kept him quite busy over the years. We drove around his in parents Mustang when we were 14. We loved to get tore up on frozen whiskey sours and listen to the rocketships blast off in “Blows Against The Empire.” He was a very talented actor and director, a novelist, a playwright… a Renaissance man. He was one of the best actors I have ever seen onstage. And I’m not just saying that. Everyone that ever saw Phillip Hall on stage says that he is the greatest actor they have ever seen. He was a guitar player, long before I was. The first songs I ever really wrote were with Phillip. In 1970, we did a song called the “Hindenburg Sonata” which was about, you know, the crash of the Hindenburg if it had happened in Lakeland. He was the only person I knew with a tape machine, and he was very good with it, for those early sound-on-sound home recording days. So, the first songs I ever wrote, I wrote with Phillip. He’s also a very good editor, and he has helped me edit a lot of pieces that I have done, like my historical notes for “The Deep End”. He also helped me edit this long piece I wrote on Matthew Sweet for his recent compilation, “To Understand: The Early Recordings of Matthew Sweet.” I had maybe ten or fifteen thousand words, and I had just a day to get it down to three thousand for the booklet. I emailed it to Phillip, went to bed, woke up, and it was 3,000 words. He’s quite a good editor. He lives on the Gulf Coast around the corner from Jerry Wexler, and I’ve been scheming on ways to breach the old boy’s wall.
LK: Talk about other writings you have done.
JC: In 1991, Anthony DeCurtis, the writer for Rolling Stone and other publications, asked me to write an essay for the Duke University journal, South Atlantic Quarterly. It was a special issue on rock and roll and popular culture that he was editing. He wanted a view that was less professorial and more the perspective of a working musician. So he asked me to write this story which became “Living By Night in the Land of Opportunity: Observations On Life in a Rock and Roll Band.” That was a big undertaking. I never will forget the moment when I woke up—I’d been ill for several months-- crawled in the other room, the deadline looming. There was a great message on the answering machine, which I think I still have, and it was Anthony, and he had a tone in his voice. He said, “Jeff, I am speaking to you now as your editor and not as your friend. Please send me something… Anything.” So I eventually got this giant thing to him, and he did a lot of editing work on it, and he shaped it up, and then I sneaked some things back in when he wasn’t looking, a bit of subterfuge he has not let me forget, I should add. Thanks to Anthony, it turned out really well, and I am really grateful to him for allowing me the opportunity to do that because across the country a lot of people responded to the piece. I went to South by Southwest, the music conference in Austin, and appeared on a panel. A number of teachers have called to say that they have used it in their courses on the music business.
LK: Talk about Harry Crews.
JC: I took Harry Crews' Creative Writing class at the University of Florida in fall, 1972. I hadn't read any of his books and didn't know much about him, other than that he was a published novelist with a wild reputation. Crews was from South Georgia, but at this point he looked strangely Mongolian. He had a Fu Manchu mustache, a giant hoop earring, and his head had been shaved while, he said, he'd "been laying up with some woman out in the woods." Crews had a couple of brilliant affectations. He had an unusual gait, like he was riding an invisible unicycle. And then one of his eyes was always closed while he enlarged the other to an absurd proportion, like a pirate. He was thin and wire-y, like the dust cover photo on "The Gypsy's Curse," which he was working on at the time and from which he would read segments to the class. He had a tattoo of a hinge on the inside of his elbow. You have to understand that Gainesville, Florida at the time had become fully hippie, with a lot of mushroom-potion drinking going on. My friend Steve Cumming and I once wrote a song called "I'm From Gainesville, Somebody Shoot Me." Anyway, set against the longhair crowd, which was very smug, Crews' appearance was shocking, like a circus performer, but also way ahead of its time, in a proto-Punk way. If you didn't do anything, he'd give you a B grade, and you didn't even have to come to class to get that. If you turned in a short story, he gave you an A.
I wrote a story titled, "The Air-Village Floater," which had as its main character a poorly-disguised grandiose version of me named Grant Boone. When Crews read it to the class--in its entirety, I might add--he was very complimentary, which made some of the students jealous. The story had a purple style, and it contained a ludicrous dream sequence that I'm sure I thought was clever, but which made it an easy target for criticism from the class. Crews leapt to my defense, and said forcefully, in this exaggerated hickish accent, which was very funny, "I don't have any problem with the language. And you can also see things like that when you take little red and yellow pills!" making a little pinching gesture with two of his fingers.
I was one of the students he asked to join his Graduate level course, but I had to do my student teaching the next semester at P.K. Yonge Lab School, where I "taught" one course in voodoo, ESP and parapsychology-because that's what the high school students were into in 1973-and another course in rock & roll. But that's another diversion involving Tom Petty's group, Mudcrutch, that I'll tell you later.
Crews thumbed his nose at the academic establishment, but for all his weirdness and sense of humor, he was a Classicist in his own way and a very inspiring teacher. My favorite writer in high school was Gore Vidal, because he was very witty and thoroughly kicked William F. Buckley, Jr.'s ass in a series of televised debates during the political conventions of 1968. But from Crews, I learned about the many points of view from which a novel could be written, and about how you could make a book out of place like Lakeland, with its orange groves and phosphate pits. And I became aware of writers like Eudora Welty, whom I found Crews reading in his office one day. When I came through the doorway, he said to me, squinting one eye and raising the other, "And to what do I owe this honor?" I grew to really like Eudora Welty because she reminded me of my grandmother, and I think that her novel "The Golden Apples," is an extraordinary piece of High Modernist work that is still decades in advance of what Southern writing is supposed to be. Gina Webb and I saw her read at Agnes Scott College the same week that Captain Beefheart and The Magic Band played in Atlanta in 1978, and those events were the cultural high points of my first year here, a time that was both exhilarating and very lonely for me.
Crews was still a relatively unknown writer when I was in his class, but in the following two years, he began writing a monthly column for Esquire which made him a national literary celebrity and, as these things often do, seemed to create a lot of personal problems for him. At least that's how it appeared at the time. When I saw him "read" at the University of South Florida around 1975, he was stinking drunk and had to be helped about by the novelist William Price Fox, on whom he'd occasionally turn with mock anger. It was a sensational performance, antagonistic and existential, something like what Norman Mailer might have turned in during the mid-60s, if Mailer had been Davey Crockett. When someone asked what it took to be a real novelist, Crews replied, very slowly, drawing out each word deliberately: "Blood….Bone…Marrow!" And throughout the rest of the evening, which was foreshortened, he would periodically return to this theme, shouting out "Marrow!" at this or that perceived provocation. I have a brilliant friend named Robert Ray, who is a singer/songwriter in the Vulgar Boatmen and a Film Studies Professor at the University of Florida. Once, when Robert passed Harry in a corridor at the school, Crews, appearing forlorn, asked Robert, "How are you doing, son?" And Robert answered, "Fine, Harry," to which Crews responded, "I'm glad it's working for someone."
LK: What is The Duplex Planet?
JC: Duplex Planet is a magazine created by a friend of ours, named David Greenberger. We met David in the late seventies when we were touring the Northeast, and he was living in Boston. We would stay at David’s place. He was an artist and a musician. He worked in a nursing home. And as a therapeutic aspect of his job, he created a little magazine called “The Duplex Planet.” He had all of the people at the nursing home contribute to it as subjects, poets, and writers, and he would do interviews with them. It was really nice, and it became quite a little cult publication that came out every few months. All kinds of people were on the subscription list to The Duplex Planet, from Iggy Pop, to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top; It was quite well known. Anyway, in one of the early Duplex Planets he asked the elderly gentlemen at the nursing home, “What is a Swimming Pool Q?” He got some cool responses to that. And then years later, David began an album project with the regular poet of Duplex Planet, who was named Ernest Noyes Brookings. David would ask bands that he knew, and bands he didn’t know, if they would put Brookings’ poems to music. He recorded several volumes of those, at least 4 or 5 volumes of Brookings poetry. Bands like XTC contributed, and we did one called “Milk” in 1992. I think it’s on our web site. It was on the album “Outstandingly Ignited”. It was nice. You can hear in “Milk” a lot of what “Royal Academy of Reality” was going to become.
LK: You wrote a piece on Rockette Morton?
JC: Rockette Morton was in the Magic Band during the really classic period that began with “Trout Mask Replica” and ended with “Clear Spot,” where he was both bassist and guitarist. He had dropped out of sight years ago, and nobody really knew where he was. I had run into people who were associated with the Magic Band and nobody seemed to know where he was. In fact when the company, “Table of the Elements” produced a multi-cd set of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band about 4 or 5 years ago, I remember talking on the phone with John French, also known as “Drumbo,” who was doing the liner notes, and they were excellent liner notes. He was trying to track down Mark Boston, a.k.a. Rockette Morton, and he couldn’t locate him. I’m a pretty good detective, so I started looking into it, and I just reached a dead end everywhere. Simply couldn’t find him, and nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Then, about two years ago, somehow he surfaced, and it turned out he was living in Aiken, South Carolina, about a three hour ride from Atlanta. It’s just on the other side of Augusta, Ga. So, Denny Walley, also an alumnus of Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa, who lives here in Atlanta and plays on the new reformation of the Magic Band, put me in touch with Rockette Morton. So when The Q’s were playing in South Carolina, Anne Richmond Boston-- no relation to Mark-- and I drove through Aiken, and we met Mark at a Waffle House. We talked for a while, and I did an article about him, and had several phone interviews. Very sweet guy and a fabulous bassist. He hasn’t lost any of his touch. He just completed his new solo album, “Love Space”, and, as I said, he’s playing in this current reformation of The Magic Band. As a matter of fact, David Greenberger, who works with Robyn Hitchcock, contacted me recently trying to reach Rockette Morton on behalf of Robyn. It would be nice if Mark began working with people like Robyn Hitchcock, who is obviously supremely talented.
LK: Much earlier you had mentioned that you once sold a suit to George Jones?
JC: In 1968-69, George Jones and Tammy Wynette lived in Lakeland, Florida. George had a reputation as kind of a carousing individual. I didn’t really know much about country music at that time, but I certainly knew about George and Tammy. They were local legends. They lived in an area outside of Lakeland called The Highlands. It was orange grove country. George would get bombed out there when he was off the road, and one night Tammy hid the liquor from him, and the car keys, so he got on one of those riding lawn mowers and drove about five miles all the way into Lakeland to Southside Liquor Lounge to get a drink. You have to admire that kind of determination.
But I didn’t know what George looked like. One morning, I was working at Maddox Men’s Wear around eleven o’clock. He came into the store, but I didn’t know who he was. George was an odd looking character. One of those little crew-cuts that made your head look like the top of a bolt. The real thing. He came in, and I don’t know if he had been drinking before noon, but he had the kind of nervous tic that would suggest so. He wanted to buy a suit. So I went around showing him suits I thought he might like. The ones we kept on hand for the hard-shell Baptists in the area. But he wasn’t interested in those suits. He was interested in these sharkskin and mohair suits that the African-American clientele seemed to gravitate toward. Mohair, shiny, Soul Suits, like you saw Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett wear. Definitely not a suit that this little sawed-off white guy with a crew cut should have wanted. So, okay, let’s do it. I got the suit on him, and it was a weird, kind of iridescent gold thing. And he loved it. So we got him outfitted in it, chalkmarked it, and then he just kind of wandered aimlessly out of the store, sideways like a crab, and left his Mastercard by the cash register. That’s when we realized it was George Jones, and I had to run down the sidewalk to give him his card back, yelling, “Mr. Jones! Mr. Jones!” We had the suit altered, but he never came back to pick it up. Quite a striking individual.
Years later, the Q’s were recording a demo for EMI in Nashville, maybe 1982, and George was in the studio with us. He had gotten locked in, and was trying to get out, and was really frightened that he couldn’t, like he was claustrophobic. So, The Q’s were running all over the place, and Anne was like, “I love all of your albums with Melba Montgomery!”—she worshipped George, and who doesn’t--and finally we got him out of the studio, onto Music Row, and he had parked his silver flat-back Cadillac with one tire up on the curb in front. I feel like we’ll meet him again someday, you know.
LK: You have a reputation for wearing immaculate hand tailored clothing.
JC: Gentleman Jim. A great tailor. I’ve worked with Jim since 1982. Jim grew up in Harlem, and he apprenticed at a tailor’s shop two or three doors down for the Apollo Theatre. As a teenager, he cut clothes for a lot of these soul performers of the classic era, including Johnny Thunders who had done a song called, “Loop De Loop,” a fairly obscure track which I happened to know, and Jim was impressed that I knew who Johnny Thunders was. In the early Eighties I had sought out some spectacular paisley fabric in New York City, which was really difficult to buy because it was not a regular fabric store. It was a store where they sold fabric in huge quantities to fabric stores. So I had to pull all kinds of stunts to get five yards of this paisley fabric. After I succeeded in doing this, I brought it back to Atlanta, went to Jim and asked could he make me a double-breasted Edwardian suit. It was no problem to Jim because he knew how to cut clothes for performers. No pockets; You don’t want anything fucking up the lines. All the little tricks of cutting a suit to be worn on stage. So I gave it to Jim, and then went back the next week, and all of a sudden Jim vanished. I didn’t know what was going on. He turned up a few months later at another shop. He still had the fabric, and everything was cool, and we were back in business. So, he got this suit done, and it was a fabulous looking suit. I was at 688 one night, a pretty famous New Wave club in Atlanta in the early days. This must have been 1981 when this went down. One of the owners of 688 was Steve May who had been a tour manager for Prince. So Prince was in town, and he was performing at the Agora, and after the Agora show, he came over because Steve had this new club, and he had been Prince’s road manager. So Prince came over, and I was there, we were performing, and I had on the paisley suit, and Steve introduced me to Prince, and I noticed he was admiring the paisley suit. And as you now know, the rest is history. I should tell you that that paisley suit is proud to say at the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, on display currently next to Cindy Wilson’s outfit, and that’s a real honor.
LK: What was “The Black Cock.”
JC: I guess we were in maybe the tenth grade in Lakeland, and I was working in the clothing store with John Dickson, and we sold these Rooster Ties. They were flat bottom ties, knit ties, of unusual fabrics. So we had racks of these Rooster ties, and these neckties were on clips that hung on the tie rack. The clips were in the shape of a little black rooster heads. Whenever we would sell a Rooster tie, we would throw the clip in the box. We had hundreds of them. My friend Jib Black, who is now a successful attorney in New York City, had a band called The Prone Position. Interestingly enough, Dickson had named the band. I remember that Dickson painted the drum head for the Prone Position on top of the pant rack, and it was psychedelic Op Art lettering, and the “I” in Position was dotted with a middle finger. It looked fantastic. Like “Fuck You” from The Prone Position. So anyway, Jib had gotten Strep Throat, and it was a big deal because The Prone Position had been scheduled to play for Lawton Chiles son Bud’s birthday party. Like his fifteenth birthday party. So, Lawton Chiles was at that time a state senator, and later became the U.S. senator from Florida, and then governor of Florida, and was really one of the great Southern politicians of the modern, of far greater significance than that rude prick, Zell Miller. The event was going to be in the basement of the Polk Federal Bank, which you had to get to by an elevator. And it was a bank, like a vault. Jib had Strep Throat, he couldn’t sing, so he asked me to be the singer for the Prone Position that night. So all the guys in The Position had on turtlenecks, and navy blue blazers, and I was constantly attempting to subvert the project whenever possible. So Dickson dressed me up in this outfit, which was black leather pants, a hound’s-tooth cape, and I guess a German helmet with goggles, like a Hell’s Angels motorcycle helmet, and he dumped about six bottles of cologne testers on me. It was just unbearable. And he named me The Black Cock. I had an attendant that would carry the train of the cape, and another who had a second function. So we get to the event, we go down the elevator, the band is beginning, and as the elevator doors open, you hear the guys in the band announce, and you have to remember the State Senator is there, it’s kind of an uptight situation, “Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome…The Black Cock!” So, I came out of the elevator with the guy holding my train, and the other attendant in front of me, and, as I approached the stage, he was scattering dozens of these black Rooster Tie heads. The song we busted into was an original called, “Torture Chamber”. It was just a bunch of shrieking pleas like “Oh, Dear God, No!”—I mean, you know, The Black Cock would have a torture chamber in his castle, right?--over a song that sounded like the theme from “The Twilight Zone.” Okay, it was the theme from “Twilight Zone.” We got about 15 or 20 minutes out of that. Then it was pretty much downhill, because it was quite clear from that point forward that I didn’t know any of the other songs, or how to sing them. Like The Outsiders “Time Won’t Let Me” and “Hang on Sloopy”. I guess we got through that one. But that was it for The Black Cock. When Jib found out about this on Monday…I had some sort of pseudo managerial position for the band, but it was over after that. We remained friends of course, but The Black Cock was retired. I have to say it took me 25 or 30 years to really get the joke on the name. I just thought it was connected to the Rooster Tie heads. You know, the priapic reference. I was in my forties before I figured that one out. So that’s the tale of The Cock.
LK: Talk a bit about Supreme Court.
JC: When I met Glenn Phillips in 1974, we wrote some songs together. Actually, they were some of the first songs that The Swimming Pool Q’s had as part of our early repertoire. So Glenn and I had a songwriting relationship years prior to The Q’s existence. By the latter part of the eighties, we had accumulated enough songs so that we could perform a full set. So we began Supreme Court. We would play periodically, and eventually made a record for DB Recs in the early 90’s. It was a strong record, I think. It is an excellent collaboration. Glenn and I have known each other for almost thirty years, and we’re still friends, and I still enjoy writing songs with him. We almost have enough material for a second album. The first one, “Supreme Court Goes Electric” got a four-star review in Rolling Stone when it came out. The album title was a reference to the reinstated Death Penalty. You know, The Chair. And, simultaneously, to that silly controversy that erupted after Dylan “went electric.” I also play guitar and bass with The Glenn Phillips Band.