Jeff Calder
of the Swimming Pool Q's/The Supreme Court

 
photo by Steve Rucker

May 22, 2003- In the Madcap Studio

Lisa King: Talk about some of the earliest memories you have of music. What influenced you at a very early age.

Jeff Calder: My family wasn’t very musical. My grandmother had a spinet piano that was just a nice looking piece of furniture. Outside of church music that I heard when I was very young, I don’t have much memory of being interested in music before the fourth grade, when I got a transistor radio. A Motorola black transistor radio for Christmas. You can see the exact radio in a horror film from the period called “Blood Feast”. There is a moment in a motel room, just before a slaying, where that same Motorola radio is next to a bed. The music I heard on the AM radio was from around 1960. I was growing up in Charleston. We had an AM station there called WTMA, and at the low end of the dial there was the black station. So I bounced back and forth between those two stations. There was some pretty wild activity going on at the low end on the gospel and rhythm & blues station. The music that came out of that little transistor radio sounded incredibly exciting. Even something like “Calendar Girl” by Neil Sedaka had a real exciting thing about it. You couldn’t put your finger on it. Just tons of reverb. I know now how they were recording those songs, but when I was a kid, I had no idea. So it was intriguing.

So anyway, I was perhaps in the fourth grade. That’s when I first became aware of popular music on an emotional level. Before that, now that I think of it, my father worked briefly in a hardware, for a short period of time, and, for whatever reason, they sold 45 rpm records. So he would bring home things by Jerry Lee Lewis. I remember this track, “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.” It was a Sun forty-five. The first 45 I ever bought was “Bird Dog” by the Everly Brothers. Those were very exciting records. But when I really started connecting emotionally to popular music was when I was maybe eight years old, before the Beatles. In that period, after the end of rhythm & blues and early rock & roll as popular forms, there was a lag of 4 or 5 years before The Beatles when there were Teen Idols. The interesting thing about that radio station in Charleston was that, though they would play the contemporary Top 40 hits, they would also play things from the past. From the era of rhythm & blues and rock & roll in the fifties. It was fascinating, but essentially it was gone.

I became very interested in that music because, unlike most of the [Teen Idol] stuff that was happening in the early 1960’s, this music obviously had sounds and attitudes that weren’t around anymore. I would visit a neighborhood record and greeting card store and read their copy of Cash Box every week, looking for signs. Over a period of a few years, I began to put together in my mind what I now realize was some sort of historical perspective on pop music. I was only able to really put it in perspective many years later, the music that fascinated me from the era before I got my transistor radio. First of all, there was a lot of Novelty Music at the time, or what people called Novelty Music. The importance of Novelty Music has never really been acknowledged in writings about the intellectual rock and roll that began to happen with Richard Farina, Bob Dylan and the Beatles. In these unusual little records you can begin to see the possibilities for popular music. The satirical possibilities. Political possibilities. The possibilities to use words in different ways and ways that don’t make any sense. Look at Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa,” though that was much later. Also, the obscure regional 45s. There was a track called “Please Mr. Kennedy” by somebody named Jim “The Lassie Stomper” Nesbitt. I don’t really remember what the political perspective was on that. Obviously that’s probably 1960 because that was when Kennedy and Nixon were running for office. Those regional and obscure novelty records had a great appeal to me. And then, in a more mainstream way, you began to see in a lot of intelligence in late Fifties music. There was a great deal of intelligence behind The Coasters, for instance. Those songs were all written by Leiber and Stoller, the songwriting team. They were very, very bright guys. Very witty. Songs like “Little Egypt,” those were fantastic pieces of work. You see some of that sense of humor in the songwriting of Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. And Chuck Berry. This eloquence, this sort of sly humor. All of that to me is connected to novelty music of the period. That and this 50s crazy rock and roll sound was really gone by the time I first started listening to music when I got that radio in 1960. I would do anything I could to find ways to hear that music. It was not easy to locate. There was no such thing as an Oldies Station. When you’d hear an old song you’d have to call WTMA and beg them for information.

So those are my first memories of listening to music. I can remember hearing things I have never been able to find again. I don’t even know what they were. They were these long, crazy narratives, long story songs that were funny. Things like “Alley Oop,” although that’s not really a narrative song, but The Cadets’ “Stranded in the Jungle”, which is a direct precedent for “Bob Dylan’s 115^th Dream”. Those songs had little stories and characters that for whatever reason had an appeal for me. I’ve never really lost my enthusiasm for that music. I still don’t think there is a better 45 single ever recorded than Howlin’ Wolf’s “Back Door Man.” That’s an incredible piece of work. What is that? 1956, ‘58? You weren’t hearing that on the radio when I first started listening. Not that there weren’t good things. I still stand by Leslie Gore’s “It’s My Party”. There was some good work being done. You really had to really dig for it if you were a kid. You had to hunt for that music. I suppose over the next fifteen years of my life I would hunt for that music. Try and own it.

LK: Talk about your first guitars.

JC: I didn’t really have any musical instruments around the house when I was growing up. I was into Tom Swift, Jr., slot-cars, ping-pong, yo-yos, tops—what Bob Elsey calls “the sickly sports.” When I was in high school, I wanted to be in a rock band, but I couldn’t play anything. I wanted to write words and write songs. By this point, my family had moved to Lakeland, Florida. I just wanted to be in a band. But nobody in their right mind was going to have me in their group. Although I did have some musical experiences, I really never had a regular band. It wasn’t until I was in college-- I went to the University of Florida in the early Seventies-- one of my middle years of college I got a Les Paul Jr. that I thought looked really good. ‘56 Les Paul Jr. I had that for a few years. And then I got a Gibson SG, that my friend Larry Berwald who later played in Wet Willie helped me pick out. That’s when I started to get serious about playing guitar. At that point I had met Glenn Phillips and musicians in Atlanta. I was still living in Florida, maybe ’74 or ’75. That’s the guitar I learned to play guitar on. I shouldn’t say learned to play the guitar, that’s when I learned to play around on the guitar. My approach to playing the guitar was somewhat backwards. I immediately got the most complicated jazz chord book and learned to make these jazz chord formations. After about eight or nine months I got to where I could make them rather quickly. But I didn’t have the slightest idea how to put them together. I just wanted to learn how to play these chords that looked really good. It was of some value because I learned how to change chords quickly in odd formations. I learned how to run some musical scales, but I simply had no idea how to use any of that. I didn’t have the slightest idea. I could just run my fingers on the guitar. I couldn’t play songs by any body else, and I didn’t even bother trying. It was many years before I learned how to apply any of that.

LK: What is a Swimming Pool Q?

JC: You know, I came up with that name with a bunch of other names in the middle Seventies. I had graduated from college, I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a musician, and I wanted to have a band. And write songs I guess, and perform them. I wanted it to be an unusual group. I was living in Florida at the time, and a lot of the song ideas were about making fun of people in Florida, in as condescending a fashion as possible. So in a notebook in which I had a collection of band names, Swimming Pool Cues was a name that I had. I had misread something in a detective novel, as “swimming pool cues” instead of “swinging pool cues,” so I just put that in the list of band names, along with Johnny T. and the Fruit Jockeys, which was another band name under which we played a couple of dates. A funny band where all the musicians except for me wore a large orange papier mache heads. You know, like oranges. However, that name just didn’t seem like the right way to go for a real regular band. So, Swimming Pool Cues was another name in there, and because of this connection with Florida culture of that era, and I guess a fascination with it to some extent, it seemed like that would be a really good name for a band that would reflect the subject matter. I don’t know if really you can say it’s a pun, but it’s a word for what swimming pool and pool cue’s would be when combined. It doesn’t really mean anything other than suggest, in my mind anyway, a kind of tropical Florida image that’s queered. Made odd. You know what I mean? Somehow Cue transmogrified into Q, and Q is a pretty strange letter. It implies peculiarity. So I guess that’s why it had an appeal for me. Just that the letter Q itself implies peculiarity.

That was when you could come up with really cool names for bands. Ridiculous names for bands. It was kind of okay. We were coming out of what was an emerging underground of the middle 1970’s, all of the bands wanted to have names that were somewhat in opposition to run-of-the-mill kind of names, that a lot of the American groups from the era had. In the hippie era, of the Sixties, there were a lot of great names for bands. Particularly with the West Coast groups. But then there was a period where bands didn’t really have cool names. When everything started going “good life.” Hippiedom started morphing into, I don’t know, but when the creative explosion and the turmoil of the sixties began to subside in around 1972, you began to see the hedonistic aspect of that culture elevated over political and social concern, artistic and poetic exploration, that was the whole middle 1970s of popular music in this country. The people that emerged in the underground, which became New Wave and Punk, we all were people who were seeking music from England, or music from the past, but we didn’t really want anything to do with this Good Life rock culture that was taking over everything at that time. The progressive aspects of radio were eliminated. I don’t know if you can say the music industry has ever recovered from certain aspects of that. That rejection of everything that was good about progressive radio’s early days. In an attempt to consolidate format…that’s another subject. That’s off the subject, sorry. In this emerging underground, you could come up with any kind of strange name, as long as it was different from what was going on, it was okay.

LK: Talk about the forming of the band. The band members early on.

JC: I began visiting Atlanta when I was out of college in ’73. I wanted to be a writer, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I wanted to write about, but I felt I knew a great deal about pop music, an enthusiasm obviously, so I began writing stories for a publication called “Zoo World” out of Miami, under the pseudonym Randy Pego. That was a gag name we used a lot in high school. We worshiped “My Secret Life,” an anonymous Victorian soft porn novel on Grove Press, which had an arcane vocabulary. The word “Randy,” meant sexually aroused, and “Pego,” meant the male member. We had a pipe into the school office who would periodically slip in messages for the principal to read like, “Will Randy Pego please report to the music office. Your organ is missing.”

I also did other freelance work for the Lakeland Ledger, The Tampa Tribune, I was a stringer ultimately for Charles M. Young at Rolling Stone, when he was the Random Notes Editor. He was very kind to me and always made certain I was paid. I submitted a number of funny Random Notes. Dickey Betts and his band members had a drunken fight in their jockey shorts, tore up a hotel room, and I somehow secured dialog along the lines of, “You want a piece of me?” Some weren’t so funny, like the time that Patti Smith broke her neck in Tampa when she whirled off the stage.

The first feature story I wanted to write was about Hampton Grease Band, which no longer existed in 1974. I’d seen them in my Freshman year at Mercer University in Macon in 1969. I later transferred to the University of Florida in Gainesville. They were really striking, and there were many aspects of the Hampton Grease Band that I admired very much. And the world of the late 60s that produced them was really gone by that time, 1974. So I traveled to Atlanta, and I met most of the members of the group. For whatever reason, I became closest with Glenn Phillips, who was one of the Grease Band’s guitar players. He was just releasing his first solo album, “Lost At Sea,” which to me is one of the first Indie records in America, in the modern sense. We became friends, we began writing songs together. He was one of my first songwriting partners, the other being one of my oldest friends in Florida, Phillip Hall. Glenn would come to Florida and play, and I began visiting Atlanta.

I was getting more and more serious about wanting to start a rock band. What you began seeing in the middle Seventies in New York City, were people who had literary backgrounds like Richard Hell and Patti Smith forming rock bands. These were poets, litterateurs. Even rock critics like Richard Meltzer and the late Lester Bangs had bands at some point. So, it wasn’t unusual for someone with a literary bent to want to have a band. It was just something else you did.

I knew a lot about the Atlanta music scene, and during that period it was very active, even though it didn’t have much of a national profile. But it was active on an underground level, and I think the fundamental reason for this was Hampton Grease Band. They began a scene here from which other Atlanta bands with similar aesthetics emerged. Through Glenn, I began to meet musicians here, and Glenn introduced me ultimately to Bob Elsey, who was probably eighteen when I first met him. I knew that he was a guitar player, and that he was still in high school. And I can remember when I first met Anne Richmond Boston, at Glenn’s house. She had long curly hair and a horizontal striped boating shirt, similar to one that I owned. I knew both of them probably a year before I moved here in March of 1978. So, that’s kind of how we began to get the band together.

So, in January of 1978 I met Bob in Atlanta. We had made plans on the phone in advance. We went to see the Sex Pistols at The Great Southeast Music Hall, on January 5 I believe. And then Bob and I left for Florida shortly after that. Of course Bob neglected to tell his parents that he was going to be going off with some strange person down to Florida for about six weeks…Miraculously that didn’t cause a problem. In the house where I lived, kind of in the country outside of Lakeland, we began putting together some songs I had written, and we began writing songs together. The first song that Bob and I wrote together was “Rat Bait.” We still do the song, and it’s still really fun to play it. It was our first single.

We made a six or seven song demo with some other local musicians, one of them being Danny Roberts, who was a very talented songwriter who had been with Tom Petty’s band out in Hollywood. They had gone out to Hollywood together in 1973, and Danny stayed out there for a few years. They had this group together called Mudcrutch, which was most of The Heartbreakers as you know them, plus Danny. But by 1978, Danny had left the band and come back to Florida. I remember, he said, it was just ridiculous, they had been in the studio working on this record for two years, and the thing would have to sell a million copies for them to break even! We just both laughed about that, like that was impossibility. I guess Petty had the last laugh on that one. But Danny was there, and he was a very talented songwriter with a lot of recording experience, so he helped us put together our first demo.

I should tell you that there was a great moment when we had just recorded the “Rat Bait” demo. There was a very young mandolin player, a really good picker in Lakeland called Mike Marshall, who is now a bluegrass legend. Mike was very young, and we had him come over, I think we wanted him to play on something. He was very polite, and we played him “Rat Bait”, and he said, “It sounds really good, but why would anyone want to do that?” It was a good question. I remember one time Buddy Buie of the Classics IV said to me, “Jeff, when are you going to realise that esoteric just isn’t selling?”

So, we worked on the demo for about six weeks, and ended up with this thing. Bob took a bus back to Atlanta, and it was like a 21-hour bus ride, the driver got lost and he ended up in Alabama, and it was just a nightmare. In March I moved to Atlanta, and I lived in a garage with a dirt floor, behind Bill Rea’s house. Bill was a bassist for Glenn Phillips Band for years, just an amazing fretless bass player. So I lived in this garage, for months behind Bill’s house, and we began putting The Q’s together. We got Billy Jones who was a very good bass player in a band called The Nasty Bucks. Robert Schmid was the drummer in Cruis-O-Matic which had been the band that had opened for the Sex Pistols when they played in Atlanta. They were one of the early New Wave groups here. Their singer, Johnny Hibbert, had “chiseled features.” He later started Hibtone Records which released the first R.E.M. single.

That was the basis of the band. And we had Anne Boston. Actually our first drummer was Ken Smith. Ken is pictured on the inside of the Hampton Grease Band record. He was an okay drummer, and he played with us on a date, and then he moved away. Then Robert joined. We had to audition for him by playing “Rat Bait” on WRAS, the Georgia State radio station. So we asked Anne to come as, I don’t want to say a decoration, but we had asked her to come to give things a kind of flair. She had cut her hair very short since the time I first met her at Glenn Phillips. She was a very unique young woman, very talented artist, and had an intriguing personality. She had a hobby combo known alternately as Mississippi Law or Black Dick, which had members of Thermos Greenwood and Hampton Grease Band. She really didn’t know what we wanted her to do, and we didn’t really know what we wanted her to do, we just wanted her onstage with us to be honest. Plus we knew she was a really great singer. But we didn’t know how to deal with that, none of these songs like “Rat Bait” had much room for a good singer. It was just some words that were weird, and some male croaking going on. But we stuck with it, and gradually Anne found a place in the whole thing. We had never really thought about having a female vocalist. If you listen to those early demos, and some of the early first record, you can hear these songs, and they are from a completely different sensibility. But by the time we do “The Deep End,” we’ve got a handle on it. I think that the songs Anne sings on there are really good. Like “Overheated” and “Little Misfit”. At the beginning, Anne would come to the shows, and she would bring all of these toys and gizmos, and set them on the stage because the poor girl didn’t have anything to do. We just wanted her to be on stage with us. I had the confidence that if we did it long enough, something would come of it.. “Sing here, and then say something here.” It took several months before we began to develop this thing as a group. In between my croaking and Elsey’s guitar playing, and he wasn’t even twenty years old yet, he was a spectacular wunderkind, a natural, gifted musician with a lot of feeling to his playing as well. Robert Schmid was a very showy drummer. Very propulsive; Great stage presence. Technically very good. By the end of the first year of the Swimming Pool Q’s existence it was clear that technical ability, with the exception of my playing because I had kind of learned on the job, it was clear that we stood out.

There was a whole New Wave and Punk ethos, and I’ve talked about this in many places to the point of tedium, but one of the things is that you weren’t really supposed to be a good musician. There was a strong effort made to conceal any kind of technical facility. Because of my background, and the things that I liked, and I liked a lot of that minimalist New Wave and Punk music to be sure, for very obvious reasons. I felt a part of it. But at the same time, I wanted to be around really good musicians. That is how we built the band. Anne Boston is a very talented singer. I didn’t really know how talented until later on. At some point I had gotten a Stratocaster with the finish stripped and had this old Central Florida hick named Chestnut paint it candy-apple red. My idea was to balance that very clean Stratocaster playing against Bob’s Les Paul guitar and try to make those things interlock the way that a lot of the bands that I liked when I was younger did. Although I was by no means up to Bob’s level as a player, I had a strong idea of what I needed to do to make it work the way it should work. I think ultimately we achieved that. It took a few years of intense effort to make it work. The Q’s were all really strong musicians and that’s what carried us through our first two or three years. The songs were very odd, but we were able to execute them in professional situations, because they did so with such confidence.

You have to understand that the South in 1978-79 was not ready for New Wave and Punk, any more than it was ready for Hippie Music in the late 1960’s when the Allman Brothers broke out. So it was a similar situation. I think that one of the things that distinguished us is that we put ourselves in positions that no groups in their right minds would place themselves. We would play places that would never have had anything to do with a New Wave or Punk band, in some of these small towns in the South. The way that we were able to pull it off was simply through the ability of the musicians. Because the songs we were performing were absolutely ridiculous.

LK: Talk more about musical experiences in your teenage years.

JC: In the very early days around 1960 when I began to be interested in popular music, the first show I ever saw was Bobby Rydell. He was a Philadelphia teen idol at the time. I saw him perform at the Citadel Armory, and there was a picket fence in the front of the stage and somehow I got turned around and put up on the fence by some hooligan, and tore the seat out of my pants. It was extremely humiliating, and that’s been my career in the music business in a nutshell. Right there at the very beginning. I should have known at the time that it was going to be that way. My ass hanging out. I can still see the pants, too. I did happen to have a white sweater, with one of those thick shawl collars I was able to wrap around my behind and conceal the catastrophe. But, I liked Bobby Rydell quite a bit. Especially the B-side of a single called “Third House on the Right”, which happened to have a little rockin flair to it…

Obviously the British Invasion happened at a key moment in 1963-64, and we were all crazy about the Beatles like everybody else in America. And then their movies began coming out. A film by the Dave Clark Five came out. Lots of movies about the British Invasion. Gerry and the Pacemakers, all of these British acts. It was a huge cultural event. We began seeing these films in Charleston and kept going back to them. I was maybe twelve. To me, the thing that was interesting about those films looking back is that they were usually black and white sixteen millimeter films set in these old towns in England, that really didn’t seem that far removed from where I was living in Charleston. These places looked like places in Charleston. Which was a very unique city in the United States. It certainly has many problems, but it is a very old place and very unique even for a Southern town. There just aren’t many places like Charleston. We have a song called “Short Stuff”, which appears as a bonus track on The Q’s reissue of “The Deep End”, and it has this line, “You’re the Civil War with a refrigerator.” And that’s what growing up in Charleston was like, growing up in the era of The Civil War with electrification, automobiles and The Beatles.

So I was able to relate to these British Invasion films and bands as though they were not really far away. They weren’t foreign. All of these bands were incredibly new in their hair styles and in the sounds they were making. Of course, they had precedents musically, but it was a whole new sound. You saw that newness. I saw this future against the relief of the past, and transferred it to the place where I lived. So it wasn’t strange at all that you might be able to have a very cool, advanced pop band in this ancient environment. I doubt many of my peers felt the same way at all, if they even cared about it one way or the other. That period amped up my enthusiasm for rock and roll.

So, by the time I moved to Florida in 1964, my identity was very tied up with clothing, popular music, and with books. I was probably in the eighth grade at that point. And when you are moving into adolescence, and you are pulled out of this environment that you are used to, obviously I didn’t want to leave Charleston. I’m glad, of course, today that I left Charleston, for many reasons, although I love to visit there and still have a lot of relatives and friends there, I didn’t want to go. My childhood was unlike the painful childhoods of so many people that I know now. My family was a middle-class family, we didn’t have a lot of money, and we weren’t from any kind of pseudo-aristocratic background. But it was an incredibly beautiful place to grow up, and there were never any problems at home. My Mother and Father, my family, they were very sweet, there was never fighting or boozing, or unpleasantness that characterized a lot of American families, of which I was totally ignorant, as I came to learn. So I was very happy. My grandparents let me do whatever I wanted to do, they encouraged whatever ridiculous whim I might have, and it was wonderful. Why would you ever want to leave that? So, it was very traumatic when we moved to Florida.

You’re a new kid in school, in a strange place, and Florida was a very different culture compared to Charleston. It wasn’t very old at all, kind of like an overly sanitized Mexico. Florida has only been a place with any kind of modern civilization since the early twentieth century, really. Everything seemed to be made out of aluminum siding, stucco, and concrete brick. Those plants that have points on the ends of them. It was a total shock. So, you had to have some kind of personality, so I just exaggerated to an extreme an enthusiasm for popular music, and clothing. As far back as I can remember, all of us in Charleston were into clothes. I don’t have any idea why that happened. But we were really serious about it. The way that shoes looked and shit, you couldn’t buy certain shoes if you had the foot of a boy. So you had to buy the shoe, and then stuff it full of paper, and then make it look a certain way. It was a big commitment. The shirts at that time were beginning to have loops on the back, and that was a real big deal, and if you were a boy you couldn’t buy one of those shirts because they only made in men’s sizes. So you had to have a boy’s button down shirt modified with the stupid ass loop, and you had to get your mother to find a way to fashion the loop, and it looked terrible, and some jackass would yank it in the hallway. But those things were very important. When we moved to Florida, I exaggerated the clothes obsession even more, and fell in with people who had similar interests. Nothing’s really changed for me. I still have those interests, which were very defining for me personally when I was a teen. Remind me to tell you about the time my pair of 1952 olive silk slacks with the “Hollwood Top” completely disintegrated at a Quentin Crisp reading, just about six months before the old boy cacked. Thank God I had my clipboard with me.

In the ninth grade, I met John Dickson, who managed a clothing store called Maddox Men’s Wear. I got to know him over the course of the next year. He was in his thirties at the time. He was the manager of the shop, an excellent dresser—tied a great four-in-hand knot--and he was hysterically funny. But I had no idea how brilliant he really was. So, when I entered the tenth grade, I was probably fourteen, I asked him if I could work at the store, and he said yes. It was a great store, and I worked there throughout all of my high school years while the American cultural revolution of the late 60s was starting to pick up steam. Unlike most of my friends, I worked after school until nine o’clock at night. By the time I was 15, I had become an excellent clothing salesman. Totally disingenuous. Fixed on the thrill of the con. I once saw Dickson sell a plaid sport shirt on the basis that the fabric had been treated in elephant urine. I took these skills with me for the rest of my life. Promoting a New Wave band was just the same as selling a shirt, a pair of pants, or a suit. I did once sell a suit to George Jones, but I’ll tell you about that later.

What soon became clear was that Dickson had an enthusiasm for really hip music. He grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was the editor of the local paper, and he gave David Brinkley, the famous newscaster, his first job. Dickson had been a jazz drummer in the early 50’s, he really knew jazz upside down. I didn’t know anything about jazz. I knew that the guys looked good-- that was really the most important thing-- but he was also into Bob Dylan, Mimi and Richard Farinia, and all of these early folk rock musicians, and that’s when we really connected. When I came into the store with a copy of “Bringing it All Back Home”, he zeroed in on me, connected, and I was working there shortly after that. He was a painter, and he wrote songs with an autoharp. He put these long poems, incredibly long 80 page poems to music. It was wild. He wrote plays, and all of those things. It was an amazing experience at a point in life when for most Americans of high school age, all of the imaginative doors and corridors began to close down in this absurd rush toward socialization and funneling people into the work force. All of these things that you find in business culture. That’s not what happened with me. All of those doors opened up, they didn’t close. Working with Dickson-- there wasn’t a lot of traffic in the evening--he’d type away on the Smith-Corona, and I’d stand over his shoulder and watch what he was doing. And it was all very funny, and it just poured out of him. I would occasionally ask him, “What does that mean?” I would laugh and everything, but I was like “What does that mean?” There’s really nothing more infuriating you can say to somebody who is artistic than “What does that mean?” When people say that to me now I just want to throttle them. “Who gives a shit what it means, you know? I don’t give a fuck what it means. I don’t know what it means.” It just drives me insane. And that’s of course exactly what I was doing to Dickson. And Dickson would give me the same look that I would wind up giving years later to anybody who ever asked me what anything meant.

One day, it was a Saturday morning, around ten o’clock when the store was opening, Dickson was already there in the back room. The store was locked. I came in about fifteen minutes late, I’m sure I was hung over, and I walked in the door, and you have to understand there was a window. Stores had windows and you did window displays. At the time, they had these things called T-Bars. It had a metal base, and a rod that would screw into the base, and then a second rod that would go through a fitting to create a T. Ergo, “T-Bar.” You could hang neckties on it, or shirts, whatever you wanted to put in the window display. We had dozens of these bases and T-Bars in the back. Dickson had assembled, I don’t know when he had the time to do this, but he had assembled a spectacular mobile using T-Bars and mulitple bases, that was maybe five or six feet high. He could hold one of the bases in his hand, and a rod went up, went through a fastener, went off to one side, and then he’d put another base, and then another fastener and so on. It looked like this giant molecular structure made of metal T-Bars. As I walked in the front door, he advanced towards me from the back of the store. And I saw this thing, it looked like some sort of a demented chemistry experiment, and as he approached me with it, he began spinning it with his hand. It began turning like a mobile. And it was an unbelievable moment for me because it didn’t mean anything, but at that moment I also understood what it meant. I never again asked Dickson what anything meant. From that moment, I understood completely what it meant, watching that structure spin. And there was no reason for it. Why would he have created that? Why would he have done that? But I knew intuitively what it meant. It was the critical artistic moment in my life. So when I was with Dickson, and we did things after that, whatever small way I was a part of the creative process of what he did, it never occurred to me beyond that moment to ask what anything meant.

LK: Talk about some of the touring in the early days of the Q’s.

JC: In the career of the Q’s I see very definite dates of demarcation. In the early days of the group from 1978 to 82, was like “The Heroic Phase.” Those were very different times than just a few short years later when we signed with A&M Records and went on tour with Lou Reed. That to me became a very different world. The audience that we had initially had begun to drift away. Not all of them, because we still had a large number of loyal fans, particularly in the South. But a part of the audience had begun to professionalize. By 1984, it was a different situation than those first days. The Police tour was the culmination of a lot of intense touring for us. These are things you don’t really talk about as a group, but we were on the verge of seeing the potential of what we were doing to communicate to a much larger audience. From an art project almost, to a real band, moving through a world where you have to come up with money, and a van, you’re traveling, all of those things that every other band has to do. We were on the verge of that when we toured with the Police in the spring of 1979. We played with a number of groups back then. We played with Devo, and a lot of bands that were well known bands from that era. But when we played with the Police, we’d been together I guess almost a year. And I think this was almost true for the Police, as well. That was when their song “Roxanne” was just hitting. They were playing in small theatres, maybe 500 to 1000 seats, which was a big crowd for us, and it was still a big crowd for them. Up to that point, the biggest crowd the Police had ever played in front of was at the University of Florida in May ’79, and there were maybe 6,000 people at an outdoor show. It was the Police, The Swimming Pool Q’s, and a group called the Tone Tones, which featured Vic Varney who played with The Method Actors from Athens. We were playing for 500-1000 people, every night on this six date run around the South. Once again, it was a somewhat backward region, as far as accepting new trends in popular music. All of a sudden we were playing for these enthusiastic audiences, and everywhere we went, we’d already been to these towns, and people knew who The Q’s were. They really dug it, we got a fantastic response opening for the Police.

Also the Police were very good musicians. These guys would go out and do an eight song set, I think, and they would stretch it to 90 minutes, and they would jam. They would play fucking “Roxanne” for twelve minutes. And the next song 12-15 minutes. And they were great. Still one of the best shows I ever saw was their sound check at the Agora. It was just unbelievable. So we related to them because they were good musicians, and they had a Punk attitude, and they were very friendly. They weren’t yet very big stars. Although there are very few people you meet that you think of as like, stars. Like real stars. Not these phony baloney American celebrities now, these nobodys. But Sting was an exception. He was somebody who had a very imposing physical presence. And being exposed to those guys as musicians, and with their attitude--which was get in the station wagon and go and do it-- from all of those things we jacked up as a band from that point forward. Robert became an even greater drummer, the band really began to start playing with a whole new awareness and confidence from having toured with the Police. You could see there was a possibility for something bigger. We didn’t know how big, but just bigger. We never used the word “career.” We never even heard the word “career” applied to any band we knew and ourselves, until we became involved with the music industry on a much more serious level, in 1984 when we went to Hollywood. They began talking about, “Your career this, and your career that.” Nobody ever used that. If you used that word “career” in Atlanta and Athens between 1978 and 1982, you would get laughed out of the god damn state. “Career? What the fuck are you talking about, man?” Can you imagine R.E.M. talking about their career? Maybe R.E.M. did talk about their career. Maybe they were more on the ball. We didn’t know what we were getting good at, but we were becoming more serious about what we were doing as a group. At that point, we began to “take the stage.” We had already gotten to the level that most bands never really have the opportunity to reach. That is, when you take the stage you are a commanding presence. We were fortunate. We were able to have experiences playing in front of larger audiences from a very early point. We were playing small clubs, as well, and having many different experiences at the club level. But we were playing in front of large audiences and learning how to deal with that situation. Which could sometimes be hostile.