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

 
 photo by Steve Rucker

 

May 22, 2003- In the Madcap Studio
Part Three:

Lisa King: What was different about “Royal Academy of Reality” than the records that you have done in the past.

Jeff Calder: This record is not as complete a break with the past as it may seem. When we did our second A&M record “Blue Tomorrow” in 1985-86, it was a bold move in some ways because we used a British producer. His name was Mike Howlett. He had some success with Joan Armatrading, The Alarm, and A Flock of Seagulls. He had done the Flock of Seagulls hits. Mike was also, and, I believe, still is a member of Gong. Like all British production in that period, and probably today, he had quite a different approach to making records than the American producers we knew. A band like The Q’s was supposed to go into the studio and perform the songs live, and then overdub the guitars and the vocals, then it was mixed, and that was it. Everyone was very paranoid about studio producers meddling with a band’s sound, particularly if you came out of this grassroots guitar pop background. It was almost a purist perspective. I do think there were many reasons to be fearful of the certain kinds of production meddling--Hollywood meddling. But this was a different experience entirely.

We worked very closely with Mike, and, in time, accepted his approach to things. We first did pre-production for two or three songs, and then we went into the studio. It was very different because we did many takes of the songs. He knew what he was looking for, when the performances were good. We edited together the tracks from different takes, which is something we had never done before. Then we did the overdubs, and, quite often, we would spend hours on a single overdub. It took a while to get used to this. We were all about just put the microphone in front of the guitar amp, and let’s do it, what’s the hold up? Mike was very meticulous, and when we started doing this, we felt, where is all of this going? But after some impressive results, we got on the same page and then recorded the rest of the album a few months later. The point being that “Blue Tomorrow” was ultimately a 48- track record, which was fairly shocking for the kind of band that people thought we were. People at A&M were shocked that The Swimming Pool Q’s were making a 48 track record, and they said so.

Well, that was a big learning experience for us. We knew how to make records the other way, the American way. Now we learned how to make records the British way. We also learned not to be afraid of multi-track recording. That was 85-86, so by the time we started working on “Royal Academy of Reality” we had that knowledge. And that record, “Blue Tomorrow” is a very luxurious sounding record. Very beautiful sounding at it’s best. So that elaborate recording mindset was there, and when we started on “Royal Academy”, the way we envisioned it was that it was going to be a very atmospheric and poetic record. A very ethereal record made by what we had always been, a guitar rock band. At the time we started conceiving this is 1991-92, that’s not the way things were going on the American pop scene, as I recall. It took several years of experimentation on three tracks that we worked on: “Light Arriving Soon,” “Skyland,” and “For No Reason.” What distinguished these early songs from “Blue Tomorrow” wasn’t the excessive multi-track recording, it was that we brought in different musicians to play instruments that we couldn’t play. Then we had to learn to record instruments that we had never recorded. We were fortunate that our producer/engineer, Phil Hadaway in Savannah, was very talented, and he was into experimenting with different recording techniques, recording different instruments, and he’s a very good musician himself.

I had worked intensively with Phil on an album by a band from Savannah called The City of Lindas in the very early ‘90’s. A really good guitar band, very creative. Their singer was Ash Arnett, and, like Ash, some of the guys in the band were students at The Savannah College of Art and Design. They were an arty guitar group. Ash is also a designer, and he did the package for the re-issue of “The Deep End”, and he created the package for “Royal Academy of Reality”, which has been receiving a lot of attention. So Phil and I had worked together on the City of Lindas album, and we had a very good rapport. Unfortunately, the Lindas record never came out officially, the band had some sort of personality crisis, and they stopped playing. But Phil and I had done a lot of experimental stuff on that recording, and we talked a lot about The Swimming Pool Q’s, and what kind of record we wanted to make.

Clearly, one of the main differences on the early songs we tracked was that they were much more intimate and interior songs than we had done before. On our earlier records, I usually had a much tougher persona, and Anne was a different kind of persona. There was a contrast there, a balance, but it somehow, at its best, all seemed to work. Well, Anne was gone at that point, and these first songs that we did were songs she probably would have sung had she been in the group. So I had to adapt my voice to these songs. I also had some health issues that damaged my voice, and I wasn’t able to sing very powerfully, so my limitations made it easier to sing these more intimate songs. Turning a lemon into lemonade, as it were.

The vocals on the aforementioned tracks, I recorded by myself on my porch at my house-- since demolished by developers. Then they were assembled at Patrick Belden’s studio in Atlanta. He had a very early version of what a Pro-Tools situation would be today. At the time we started recording “Royal Academy”, ADAT’s weren’t readily available, at least to the extent that I could borrow one. I had to record the vocals for these three songs on a portable DAT machine. I borrowed a nice microphone module from Mike Clark at Southern Tracks, a Neumann-67 from Donal Jones—another great Atlanta engineer-- and I recorded them straight into the DAT machine while listening to the music on a reel-to-reel tape deck. And I did about 25 takes of each song, and then, following detailed notations, assembled the final versions with Patrick. It was incredibly tedious. But Patrick, who has the mind of chessmaster, was one of the few engineers in Atlanta at the time who was skilled at working with computer technology. He was able to assemble some good vocal takes, I think, and those are the ones you hear on the disc.

LK: Talk about the lyrics on “Royal Academy.” They are very poetic, very intimate, and it seems like a departure from narrative character songs. Very cosmic words.

JC: I think a lot of the earlier Q’s songs had a narrative, traditional singer-songwriter approach, no matter how weird some of them were. The earlier songs had characters in them; a sense of place was important. They took on conventional narrative tale-telling styles, and those were forms that we used, or as a lyricist, that I used, although I tried to bend those rules and to make them more unusual. And they had the tension of those two things: Trying to make them unique and still hold on to those forms. Perhaps it had some degree of success artistically. On “Royal Academy”, I wanted to jettison that kind of songwriting. I wanted to go someplace I hadn’t really been before, and to a place that lyric writers in America didn’t seem interested in going.

The vast majority of songwriters in the United States have ignored the tremendous advances of Surrealism earlier in the 20th century, and the advances of Modern American Poetry. Poets like John Ashbury, A.R.Ammons, Wallace Stevens, James Merrill’s “A Changing Light at Sandover.” It was as though pop songwriters were completely unaware of that line. I’m sure there are exceptions, but American songwriters in the pop music world, at their most advanced, were more highly influenced by The Beats, and via Bob Dylan, The Romantics—Blake and Byron. Those Dylan recordings have an intense lyrical expression. And although Rimbaud, through Dylan, Jim Morrison, and later Patti Smith, had considerable impact, you didn’t see the Americans embrace the thinking of the French Surrealists, and that’s what I was gravitating towards as a person. During a particularly rough time for The Swimming Pool Q’s, and for me, personally.

I realized I had to go someplace new, otherwise it was no longer going to have any meaning. We weren’t the kind of people who were going to toss in the towel-- The Swimming Pool Q’s are cut from stronger timber that that. And we weren’t the kind of band that was going to “go Grunge.” That Grunge movement seemed very reactionary. Grand Funk without the funk. Sorry, it just slipped out. We had to go our own way. I didn’t have any idea it was going to take years for us to complete the process, however. Once I accepted that it was going to take a while, and we were going to have to adjust to the reality of not being able to tour and work the way that we should have, it was very liberating. Besides, what choice was there?

So lyrically I wanted to deal with much more positive subject matter. Go completely in the opposite direction from the dominant tendency of Alternative Music in America during the period. Away from narco-nihilism. Away from negation. Away from “No” and towards “Yes.” Ultimately, that decision is reflected in everything on this record. The “Royal Academy” is a life-affirming trajectory without being a Hallmark card. At the same time, there has always been a lot of humor in the Pool Q’s music, and I think throughout this record, even in the more serious songs, there is a sense of humor and a sense of play, the way you saw a sense of humor in the Surrealists, and a great joker like John Ashbury, who is rightly one of the most highly regarded American poets of the last twenty-five years. Make that the last fifty years. He is a tremendously funny, as well as profound writer.

So that’s the perspective I began to assemble for the lyrics on the new album. I wanted it to be, well, you used the word “cosmic,” but I wanted it to be that way without being what some would call New Age. I would say “cosmogonical,” which means of or relating to theories about the origin of the universe. I don’t believe in the spirit world, divinities or the worshipping of quartz pendants--I take that back, quartz is okay. That’s not really the perspective. It’s more of a mock-scientific approach, as opposed to some sort of Harmonic Convergence angle. And then to try to make that “scientific” lyric style work, with the core of the band trying to embellish upon that. The motive-force behind “Royal Academy” is something that I don’t necessarily “believe in.” A lot of people think that when the Universe was formed there was a Big Bang. Well, that’s not really any great insight. But the question remains, what caused the Big Bang to happen? Nobody really knows the answer to that. But the idea behind “Royal Academy of Reality” is that, whatever cause the blow-up, a shard of that resides in human beings in the function of language, the highest expression of which is poetry. So the album begins from that perspective. And a good bit of the disc is simply about poetry. So, it’s about the value of that, and its importance in lending additional meaning to everyday life.

Which is what music can do at its best in some small way. It has the potential to give meaning to the everyday lives of people. Obviously since the early 1970s, in mass transmissions in the United States, that hasn’t really been the case. In the Sixties, there was a great intellectual awakening in pop music with Bob Dylan and Richard Farina, like a supernova that made itself felt in the mainstream for another four or five years before it kind of collapsed. Then there was the dead period, the corporate takeover of progressive radio, until you see a second intellectual awakening with the New Wave and Punk movements later in the 1970’s. The Swimming Pool Q’s were a little part of that. To me, New Wave meant something entirely different than it did to the culture at large. It wasn’t just thin ties and jumping up-and-down in pointy shoes. We were against business-as-usual, and even though we were in many ways in opposition to 1960s hippie culture, or, I should say the remnants of hippie culture, we believed in the power of pop music to bring additional meaning to everyday life.

There are many friends I have, who are very bright, who would completely disagree with this assessment. They are, in a sense, very conservative in what they feel makes for good pop music. It’s a perspective I respect and seek out on every occasion. But I have a different viewpoint. Like modern American poetry, pop music has the potential to make hum-drum existence more exciting and fun and meaningful. That’s why poetry, particularly at the beginning of making this record, had become increasingly important for me. Not being a religious person, someone who believes in a Supreme Being, that’s why poetry was more important to me, and I wanted the lyrics to reflect that. I don’t know if I necessarily believe anything about language being a shard of whatever caused the universe to explode. Which is kind of ironic, given that that notion was the motivation for the concept of the record. But I don’t believe that Dante really went into the underworld with Virgil. I don’t think that James Merrill actually communicated with the “other side” through the medium of a Ouija Board in “The Changing Light at Sandover.” It was just a device, a medium.

LK: Is it a device, or is it a fantasy? Do you look at poetry and lyric writing as a mechanism to transport you to somewhere else or as a portal express something within yourself that needs to be expressed.

JC: I think probably the latter. I’m not really sure I have the answer to that question. I do know that for the Surrealists, they didn’t really believe in the Spiritual World. They believed in the Unconscious World. The world of dreams, subconscious images and so forth, that reside in all human beings. That’s a temperament and a poetic outlook with which I feel much more comfortable, as opposed to the notion of some sort of Spirit World. Or anything beyond the grave, which doesn’t mean I don’t like an occasional ghost movie. To real poets like Octavio Paz, they believe that poetry should be at the very center of life. Unfortunately, for them and for us, I think that poetry is now at the very margin of American life, as Octavio said. Given the diversity, richness, and plurality of America, it’s strange that it’s not at the very center.

LK: Do you look at it as a personal mythology?

JC: I don’t know. Mythology is interesting, of course, but it has definite little story lines. As a songwriter, I don’t believe in anything as definite as traditional mythologies. I recently wrote a new song for Anne to sing called “Persephone,” with which I’m very happy—even though it’s sad—but the original myth has been bent out of shape and has a Feminist perspective. I think. I’m for the ladies.

LK: It’s not traditional mythology that I am referring to. What seems so spectacular about the lyrics on “Royal Academy” is that it feels like a “personal mythology;” its own world; its own Universe. When I use the word “mythology,” I mean a concept and story line that was started by a very small circle of people in a region. People look at mythological things as a large, mass concept. But we know mythological stories because one person, or a few people decided to write these stories down, and use them to teach a concept or symbolize the seasons or why things happen. Often in a very small circle. They are very creative and entertaining stories. And they spread and became very big, and inaccessible. The lyrics on the album seem as intense and important in tone as what you would read in a mythological story, but on a more personal level.

JC: Over a long period of time, I put a lot of thought into how the songs related to one another, and how the words worked within each song. I don’t think there is anything particularly original in any of this, but there are several songs where the stanzas are essentially one long sentence or one long thought. Often, that took a long time to construct. Sometimes years. So the songs are extended thoughts rather than just fragmentary thoughts. The “Royal Academy of Reality” is a Song of Ideas. But I don’t know that I was consciously constructing any kind of personal mythology. If there is that aspect to this record, twenty years from now I might be able to tell you that it was true. But I don’t know how I was consciously doing that during its creation, and I doubt I had or have the skills for it. Presently, I’m still to close to the record and because of that proximity, my thinking about it fails when it confronts the opaque impedimenta. Sometimes I was just trying to make the words work melodically, make them sing-able.

I’ll give you an example: When you look back to The Q’s mid- Eighties work, between “The Deep End” and our records on A&M, there is a dramatic shift in the subject. An element of tragedy appears, and at times the songs have an extreme, almost morbid outlook. I’ve only recently begun to consider this. Why? I don’t know that I could have told you in 1986 why that was the case. I don’t know that I actually understood myself, or what I was trying to do that completely. The world of action generates its own fog, which requires long planes of time for dissipation. I have a better perspective on that period now. And as I am beginning to assemble re-issues of those records, I am thinking more about those albums, and why they had these tragic elements when “The Deep End” did not.

Same thing holds true for this record. I was not consciously aware of creating any kind of personal mythology. Maybe if I thought about it a little more, I could address it more successfully. I should tell you that there are other reasons this record is the way it is. After you have made so many records, you’ve gotten older, what should be the subject of a rock or pop record for a middle-aged person? What are you supposed to write songs about? It’s faking it to write about driving around on the edge of town in the darkness in a Chevrolet. Above all, Springsteen knows this. When you are nineteen or twenty, you write about different things than when you’re older. To me, that’s been the challenge for the smart songwriters who have survived. I don’t know what Jim Morrison would be writing about if he were alive. Captain Beefheart gave it up, but in many ways, he met that challenge from “Trout Mask Replica” onward. What was there left for him to say? Take a look at visionaries like Bryan Ferry, Bob Dylan, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, or perhaps more traditional rockers like Bruce Springsteen and Pete Townsend. Most of them are older than I am, and my betters, and, to varying degrees, they have had very serious problems dealing with what songs should be about. If they are honest with their audience, they can’t continue re-writing the things they wrote when they were tyros. This record was my way of answering that question.

You’re talking about mythology, someone like Joseph Campbell, his books on mythology are very highly regarded books, and he believed that as people become older they become more cerebral. That’s the natural way of human development, as explained in world myths and religions. Campbell was saying that’s the way our minds develop. The new Q’s record is more cerebral, and that’s why. I’m really surprised that more songwriters haven’t drawn this conclusion. Who wants to hear a song about a mortgage? Car payments? All of this middle-aged baloney. That’s fine for some kind of fake country music, but it’s nothing that I’m interested in. There’s more to being a “grown-up” than all of that shit. I’ll let somebody else do that. So that’s the other reason this record is the way it is lyrically. Which isn’t to say that The Q’s might not turn around tomorrow and do a record that is a consolidation of everything we’ve done before or one that has traditional narrative structures. I see no reason why we shouldn’t do that. Personally, I want The Q’s’ next disc should celebrate the other members of the band. I’m sick of me.

LK: Will you talk about the album cover? It’s very beautiful.

JC: When I was still in my teens, I visited my grandmother in Charleston, and she offered me some spending money, which I begged her not to give me, and then took…Quickly…and I drove downtown in her old Oldsmobile, still a fine ideal for a nice ride. I drove around downtown, and I was wandering in some old antique stores and came across the print. Being a seaport, I am assuming that these Japanese prints probably came in with service people, or Navy people. I don’t have any idea. But I came across these Japanese prints, and I had $15 that Granny gave me, and one was that price, so I only got one of them. That is the one that is on the cover of the “Royal Academy”. I really loved this block print. I believe it’s some sort of temple in Japan. And I carried it print around with me from house-to house, town-to-town. Years later, when putting this record together, I had some research done on who the artist was, and the print turns out to be from 1850. When I got it, I framed it and carried it around everywhere because it really reflected a perspective I was beginning to develop as a young person. I really liked the way Japanese and Chinese music sounded. Indian music had been a very big influence on psychedelic pop culture in the 1960s, and it has quite a wild improvisational nature that I admire, but my temperament was more suited to the Chinese and Japanese sensibilities; the qualities of Koto music and so forth. The rigidity. And I can remember hearing Captain Beefhearts’ albums “Lick My Decals Off, Baby,” and “Spotlight Kid.” On those records there are elements that are very Japanese-sounding. With unison marimba and Koto-like guitar lines. I thought that was beautiful and evocative. The tension created by this sort of music appealed to me. The image that is on the cover of “Royal Academy” is connected with that. When it was time to consider the packaging of this record, I kept returning to that image. So when, as the person who writes the words, I decided that the title “Royal Academy of Reality” really summed up the completed cycle of song, that print seemed to work. Ash Arnett did a marvelous job with the package, and it’s one of the reasons why people are talking seriously about this record.

LK: Why that title?

JC: Well to me, poetry is not something that is impractical. Poetry is something that is, on the contrary, essential. I’m not talking about poetry like just words, or poems. I’m talking about a way of looking at everyday life. It’s a world view. Not just the poetry on the page, or the paint on the canvas, or the music on tape; it’s a way of interpreting reality, or of recasting reality, particularly in the wake of the usual traumas and destructions that everyone must face, which can be psychological, physical, and otherwise. To me, the “Royal Academy of Reality” is just the poetic mind. If you go outside…some people go outside and see a tree or a stick or a rock, and they think, “That’s a tree, a stick, and a rock.” But if you live with a poetic sensibility—by accident or through the benefits of an education, what does it matter-- you see that tree, stick or rock and think, “That rock, there’s something going on there.” It is more than just an object. It’s part of a poetic totality. To me, “Royal Academy of Reality” is the poetic mind that has potential to give our lives greater meaning.

Most people don’t have lots of money, and all of the material things. I know that I don’t. They’re never going to get those things. So what? A lot of the people I know who are very wealthy don’t seem all that happy to me, and they have everything that money can buy. So what is going to make you happy? How about the love of learning, the life of the mind, combined with a sense of justice, just to name three things. How about the belief that humankind has the power to interact on multiple levels with the natural world in a new way and advance civilization to the next level. Unless, of course, you have this monotheistic Vale of Tears mentality. This pessimistic “we-are-the-way-we-are” thinking. You know, what a sorry drag. Leave it all behind. Once again, this record is a “Yes” in place of the big American “No.” The image on the cover is obviously a building that could be an academy of some sort.

LK: We talked about the lyrics, now talk about the music of “Royal Academy.”

JC: When we recorded this album, we tried to represent every key in the Western chromatic scale. Which was incredibly foolhardy. Phil and I were like, “We don’t have a song in G-sharp, let’s do that.” Otherwise sensible adults, it never occurred to us that I might not be able to sing in A-flat. Nevertheless, it didn’t stop us from recording the songs in those keys. And, in some cases, it took a long time to figure out how to sing in those keys. They weren’t always compatible with my vocal range. So it was not very practical, but we represented almost every key on this record. So when we assembled the songs, since they’re cross-faded, we had to take into consideration how the songs flowed into one another, and related to one another key-wise, which was very confounding in itself. And then, there was the issue of the subject matter, how things went from “Introducing Time” to “Alpha-Centauri’s Rise” at the end. There were also some rambunctious songs in the middle we had to accommodate. You can kind of see the pattern into which the album falls. “Introducing Time,” “Light Arriving Soon,” “Out of Nothing”, “The Earth Makes Us Feel Things.” It moves through this succession of things to the end when you get to “The Wheel of the Sun” and “Alpha Centauri.” The album is like a wheel through all the keys back to the beginning. Actually, all of the keys aren’t represented, but don’t tell anybody.

LK: Talk about some of the musicians that played on the album.

JC: First, The Q’s, who must be lauded for having survived a supremely disconnected creative process. I’m sure that Bob, Billy and Gary Brown, who played bass with us throughout the making of the record, didn’t know what, if anything, was going on for long stretches. I’m sure that I didn’t! But we hung in and made it to the other side. During the second stage of recording, when we cut most of the album, Billy came down with what I call Drummer’s Block. Didn’t like anything he played, didn’t know what to play, did want to play but couldn’t, didn’t want to play but had to, and so on. Drummer’s Block isn’t uncommon, but it can be destabilizing, and you can’t take a pill and make it go away. There’s no readily available solution. Finally, after a few months of this, he said, “Look, let’s just do it in the studio.” So that’s what we did—at great risk, I must add—and he rose to the occasion. Every one of his drum tracks was done in one or two takes and used as is. There was no computer editing, no fixing the bass drum and snare to sound perfect for The Man. And as a result, I think it’s one of the reasons that a potentially sterile album has the verve that it does. Billy and Gary sound particularly great together on “Alpha Centauri’s Rise,” which was one of the few songs we had played live before we tracked it.

My one regret is that Anne isn’t on the record more than she is. By the time she rejoined, the basic tracks were done, and the keys established. I tried for a couple of years to speed some of them up, to get them in her range, but then they lost their feel, and I finally capitulated. It’s too bad, because when we perform “Deep South” and “Sky Land” in raised keys in concert, and Anne’s sings them, she’s breathtaking, as one might imagine.

Bob Elsey has been great fun to record since the beginning, and you just have to keep the tape running at all times because he’s never going to play the same thing twice, not even for a dollar. His guitar playing has distinguished The Q’s music more than anything else, but on this record I would like to draw your attention to his drumming debut on “The Discovery of Dawn”, which also features my mother speaking on an old telephone tape. She threatens legal action if the album takes off.

Then, there was Phil Hadaway, the producer and chief engineer, who is a very multi-talented musician. He could play bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion. He has a mathematical sense of harmony and so forth. Phil was very important in helping me figure out how to do things, like the six- or seven-part harmony on “Deep South”. He would play on some key parts, like the bass on “Out of Nothing,” and it’s a really great part. So Phil was a very important contributor. He and I have different mental capacities. For instance, he once bought a red Stingray, and, with no prior experience, tore the engine apart and reassembled it in complete working order. Once, we borrowed Brendan’s Roland digital editor—one of the many transgressions for which he nearly killed me, with much justification—and Phil buried his head in the instruction manual and mastered it in a matter of hours.

Marty Kearns, the keyboard player, was someone we had worked to going back to the middle 1980’s. He’s played with Sean Mullins, and a lot of people. Marty was unusual in that he could play very traditional piano and organ parts, but he was also very good with analog synthesizers from the earlier eras. He knew how to get these electronic sounding parts. It’s very unusual to find those skill combined in a modern keyboard player. Someone that can do both of those things. Marty was instrumental in creating the beginning section in “The Earth Makes Us Feel Things,” with many of those bubbling and gurgling synthesizers that suggest a primordial state of formation of our planet. At least that’s what its supposed to do. With his left hand, he manually played an extraordinary bass keyboard pattern on “Out of Nothing” and it sounds as if it were tightly sequenced by computer.

Neill Calabro was also very important. I first met him when I went out to buy a marching xylophone from him, and he demonstrated it by strapping it on and marching around his apartment playing “The Saber Dance”. It was quite a memorable display. Coincidentally, he was also from Lakeland, and he was familiar with the legend of me, which I’m foolish enough to think helped. In the early phase of making this record, we wanted to use Vibraphones, Xylophones, and Marimbas to create that kind of celestial sound. You know, to imply planets whizzing about. I wanted to emphasize that and combine it with Bob Elsey’s guitar atmospherics. So Neill played with us live quite often throughout the ninties, and we would haul the Vibraphone around and try to make it sound okay in the context of a rock band. Not an easy thing to do. Neill’s vibe playing on the record is very beautiful. We had worked out many of these parts in advance. I should mention that, as an actor, Neill appears as one of the street dancers in the famous opening scene of the first Austin Powers movie.

Pete Jarkunas came in to play percussion. He had played bass with The Q’s at a crisis moment in the early days of the group when Billy Jones, our first bass player, had left without notice. Pete and I had known each other from Florida. He was in a Tampa band called Duckbutter, which was a late 60s’ long-hair comedic band, quite well known in the Sunshine State. They were something like a down-home Bonzo Dog Band. He provided a 4-track tape deck and helped on the very first demos Bob and I made. He played bongos on an early tune called “Pencil Place”, an ineffective attack on Disneyworld that’s without question the most inane of our many inane works. (“To Pencil Place, the Pencils race/A misty bevy of crayon sails.”) So when Billy Jones left, we were in a jam. I called Pete in Tampa, and he came up and played bass with us for a year-and-a-half. He’s the bass player on “The Deep End”, but I first knew him as a percussionist. He plays everything, really. Pete lives in Washington, D.C. now, and we flew him into Savannah for a weekend to play all kinds of percussion on “Royal Academy”. So he appears on a lot of the songs.

And then there are musicians that appeared and played on tracks here and there. One of the most significant would be Tom Gray who is a great songwriter. He wrote “Money Changes Everything,” as the leader of The Brains, a song which later Cyndi Lauper had some success with. He’s a great keyboard player in his own right. We always admired Tom as a songwriter and a performer, and as a musician. He had come to master the dulcimer and the lap steel guitar. You can hear the dulcimer at a really key moment at the end of “Light Arriving Soon.” It really lifts the song up at the end. He plays dulcimer as well on “Out of Nothing.” He plays lap steel at the end of “Sky Land,” and its very eerie sounding.

One of the things we were trying to do was to bring together Atlanta musicians who would otherwise never have played together. They were very kind to donate their time. There was little or no compensation, and the “Royal Academy” would be the same without them. Neil Starkey plays the upright bass on “What is Beyond,” a very highly regarded player. Then there was Moe Tucker. Phil Haddaway had worked with Moe on her solo record and on some of her projects. We got to know her, and actually, as I recall, she rang me out of the blue, which was certainly flattering, and I had recommended Phil Hadaway to her as an engineer because she lived in Douglasville, Ga. which was near Savannah. So she was in Atlanta, working on a project, and she agreed to play on “Wheel of the Sun,” and we tracked her on a single drum and a tambourine in a 15 minute period from about 2:45 to 3:00 in the afternoon, while I tried to play along on my Fender 12-string. And that became the basis of that song.

Brendan O’Brien has become a very famous and prominent rock & roll record producer. Most recently, he has had a lot of success with Bruce Springsteen, as well as with Train, on whose song, “Drops of Jupiter,” I was asked to shake car keys as a percussion effect at Mr. O’Brien’s request. This small touch is now generally acknowledged to have given the track that extra zing--so difficult to quantify--that accounted for much of the song’s multi-platinum status, and for which I’ve since rewarded with a gift certificate to Home Depot. Anyway, we first knew Brendan when he was a well-known Atlanta musician in the middle 80s. He was in an early version of The Georgia Satellites. Brendan worked with us as the engineer and mixer on our 1989 album “World War Two Point Five”. Tremendoulsy funny guy. After hours, during the session, Bob Esley and he tracked a killer version of “The Cannon Theme”, from the William Conrad television series. He’s a very talented multi-instrumentalist. After we had completed the first tracks with Phil, Brendan financed the rest of the record. He rescued us from the tower. It was originally going to come out on Shotput/57 Records, but, as we approached the end of the record, Brendan wisely decided he didn’t want to do the label anymore. In a magnificent gesture of largesse, he let us have the album to complete. Such is the generous bolt of cloth from which the man is cut. But he played bass on three songs: “The Radio in Memphis,” “Pharaoh’s Rocket,” “The Do What and the Who What.” I think it is some of the most creative bass playing on the record. It was somewhat outside of anything I had heard him do before. I just think he sounds extraordinary. I would like to see him get some recognition for that playing. We could not have completed this record without him, on multiple levels. Not simply the financial level.

DJ Gnosis did some turntable work on the record. I don’t know why there are all these walls between different generations and types of music. This doesn’t make any sense to me at all. I did an interview about the record a while back, and people seemed to be surprised that there were turntables on the record. Why not? Who puts up these barriers between different kinds of music and different sounds…I don’t understand any of it. Turntables, chang, guitar, bone, it’s all the same to me. Some of the best music being made over the past ten years, is the music coming out of England and Europe that had a totally different outlook than what was dominating the American scene at that time. Very Utopian, atmospheric, and very positive by comparison. I think turntables and all these synthesizers sort of reflect that. On one of our songs “Yesterday’s Rain,” we incorporated The DJ. I think he really contributes to that. Tim DeLaney and I have since done a pretty spacey remix of the track.

I have a real community feeling, at least in Atlanta, about all of these musicians from different generations. So it was really important to refuse to acknowledge any of these barriers between musicians and instruments. I wanted to reach across different generations. It’s very easy to become out of touch when it seems like there is a lot of inactivity in your band. I would stay in touch with what was going on in the music world, even if it was doing things I didn’t particularly care for, I made an effort to stay involved and meet younger musicians and younger bands.

That’s why I did a little A&R work for a couple of years, first for Tom Whalley when he was at Interscope, and then for Brendan at his labels. It was a way of not becoming removed from the music world, which is something I saw happening with the other musicians from my age group. They became increasingly remote from the music world. Not going to clubs anymore. Who can blame them, but it’s almost like a discipline. You have to do those things, even when you don’t want to. I began meeting a lot of younger musicians whom I liked quite a bit. I was instrumental in getting a band called “The Sight-seers”, a very talented pop group from Talahassee that moved to Atlanta, signed to a label. I co-produced their first album, “Fun-Seeking With the Sight-seers” for Brendan’s Shotput label. On “Royal Academy”, their vocalist Zollie Maynard appears on some background singing. Tim DeLaney who is still the bassist for the Sight-seers, and now also The Q’s bassist, appears on a couple of songs. Another excellent Atlanta group from that period, #1 Family Mover, the leader of the band was Erich Hubner, an immensely gifted pop songwriter and musician. He went on to play with Man or Astro Man? and tour the world. Erich came in and sang on some of the songs. I like crossing those generational lines, and placing myself in situations that for some people would be uncomfortable. I don’t really mind being the oldest guy in the room. It’s not a problem for me. I’m sure I have many insecurities, but that’s not one of them. I really like meeting younger musicians like DJ Gnosis. I just got to know him. He was a young turntable DJ with a personality, very knowledgeable about film, who knew The Q’s probably from before he had carnal knowledge, and I asked him to make some racket on the record. Why not?

Now, Samarai Celestial was a drummer for Sun Ra. Samarai is dead now, circling with Ra out by one of the Gas Giants. But he lived in Savannah, and Phil Hadaway knew him. By all accounts, he was a very gentle person. We didn’t know where to go with a couple of songs. “What is Beyond” was one, and “Deep South” was another. These were uncharted territory, and they probably would have been fine without any drums at all, since we had already recorded them that way. But when the opportunity arose for Samarai Celestial to play on “What is Beyond,” he came into the studio, and it seemed like we might need his kind of space-jazz approach. We didn’t know whether it would work or not, but we tried him on those tracks, and it did. It sounded the way it should sound. Then there’s “Deep South”, which is more anatomical than geographical in its reference. Samarai appears, and Billy Burton added cymbal swells and percussion. It was nice having someone on “Royal Academy” who had played with Sun Ra, for symbolic reasons and for his special sound, to be sure.