Jeff Calder
of the Swimming Pool Q's/The Supreme Court
photo by Steve Rucker/Digital imagery by Andy King
May 22, 2003- In the Madcap Studio
Jeff Calder: I think when we left off we were talking about New York City being the “music business.” In 1976-77 I had been to New York, and had seriously considered moving there to pursue a career as a rock writer. At that time, as I mentioned, I had met Charles M. Young at Rolling Stone, and a number of other rock writers, including Lester Bangs, who I ran into at an Ornette Coleman performance. Bangs was a very generous spirit. I wasn’t really a friend of his or an intimate, but I was acquainted with him. He was very nice to me, and there wasn’t really any reason for him to be so forthcoming, but that’s just the kind of person that he was. He was a very funny, bright, and an open persona. So, I had already had several experiences in New York in the middle Seventies
When we began playing our first dates outside of Atlanta in February, 1979, we played in New York. That’s where the B-52’s had gone and made a huge impression, and very quickly had been signed to Warner Brothers. They had a really good act. You went, you played CBGB’s and you played some other clubs like the Hot Club in Philadelphia, The Rat in Boston, you played these places in the Northeast, and it was frightening to some extent. We didn’t go up there to get a record deal; we went up there to play those places. We kept going up there, and record companies started paying attention to us, and we made a demo with EMI Records in maybe early ’82, I can’t remember exactly. So, to us, New York City was the music business. The first record companies I went to were in New York. It never occurred to me that there was anything in California other than the movie industry, or outposts for these New York record companies.
We started seriously pursuing a record deal in 1983. By then, I had connected with Glenn Morrow, who now has the label Bar/None Records, which “Royal Academy of Reality” is on. He was in a band called The Individuals, which was one of the great early Hoboken pop bands, like The Bongos and the brilliant Feelies. Still, to me The Feelies made four or five of the best records in the last twenty years. I certainly wish that group was still in existence. That’s when the Individuals had the Wygal sisters in the group. The Wygals were spectacular New Wave beauties. And Gene Holder was the bass player, he was from The DB’s, and it was a superb combo. They had a single called “Our World,” just a great song; anyway, I met Glenn Morrow in the early ‘80’s.
When I started going to New York, I stayed with Glenn and his wife, Elizabeth Van Italie, a very talented artist and designer, another smashing beauty. They were very nice to me and let me stay at their apartment, which was over a hot dog shop called Hot Diggety. I would go up there and try to get these record deals, and I’d stay at their house for weeks at a time. In this small little apartment in New York City, and it never occurred to me that I might be imposing on them at all. It didn’t seem like I was. I would tell a few jokes or stories and slept on the floor in the kitchen. This is when we had done a very serious demo that Glenn Phillips produced, four songs which later appeared on our first A&M record. I knew that it was really good. On a certain level, I didn’t really give a damn whether or not we got signed to a label because I knew it was good, and I think that attitude really helped in ultimately getting a record deal because I acted like I didn’t care, and I really didn’t. The songs were “The Bells Ring”, “Just Property”, “She’s Bringing Down the Poison”, and “The Knave”. Okay, maybe “The Knave” wasn’t all that good, but at the time it seemed like it was good. I’d had a lot of experience in New York taking around “The Deep End” and, before that, our first single “Rat Bait” / “The A-Bomb Woke Me Up” in 1979. I hauled that around to all the little stores—in one I met a composer I’d never heard of named Glenn Branca who played me a test pressing of his genius work “The Ascension” to see what I thought about the mastering!-- and I also went to Boston.
Even though the Swimming Pool Q’s were never accepted in New York City, in the New Wave and Punk world, to any great degree, I really enjoyed going there. So shopping this new demo in New York, I had become pretty cagey operator. I managed the group, booked the band, I had to do everything. We didn’t have a manager. So I had to learn to do all of those things from the ground up. I had to figure all that stuff out. It was very strange for an artist to be doing that, but I had to. Ultimately, as it turned out, we didn’t get that record deal out of New York City. Although our presence there shopping the record made a big difference. We got the deal out of Hollywood.
I can remember saying, “I’m going to Hollywood,” and everybody saying, “What, are you, crazy man? What’s out in Hollywood? Nobody’s going to sign a band out of Atlanta in Hollywood.” Well, it turned out that Hollywood was vastly more receptive to what we were as a group than New York. Even though by going to New York, staying with Glenn and Elizabeth, and meeting all these people in the music industry, I was able to get some sort of notoriety for the band’s name. We were starting to take off in the Southeast as an important act. R.E.M., Pylon, and Love Tractor, there was a lot of activity in the Southeast, even though it was mostly occurring in Atlanta and Athens. At least at the super creative level. All of those things combined, so when I flew to California, that’s where people in the business started responding to the group. That’s where they ultimately signed us at A&M. I knew Mark Williams, who is now the head of A&R at Interscope. We have a really had long relationship, dating back to the early 80s, when he was spinning records at 688 in Atlanta. Mark was working at A&M at the time, and he introduced me to David Anderle, who I didn’t really know anything about. I came to know a lot about him, he was a very important player as far back as 1966-67 when he signed The Mothers of Invention to MGM/Verve. As a producer he had a number of big selling records. They responded to us much more warmly in California than in New York City.
So we signed with A&M, and the first thing that we did when our record came out was go on tour with Lou Reed. We had gotten that tour because the person who wanted to be our manager had connections with Lou Reed’s manager, and Lou heard us, and liked it. There are so many ironies. Our manager had managed The Outlaws. They were one of these quintessential Southern Rock acts, and, of course, The Swimming Pool Q’s were completely at odds with Southern Boogie. It was just a giant-ass joke to us, and we made fun of it whenever we could. Naturally, he was the manager that The Q’s ended up with, and he did some good work for us for the first year of our relationship.
So, all of a sudden we were on tour with Lou, and he was having some success with the song, “I Love You, Suzanne”, the New Sensations record, and it was a big comeback for him. He had dealt with a lot of drug and alcohol problems, and he was recovering from those. He was returning to form, and he hadn’t been on tour in years. It was a high profile tour for us. There couldn’t have been a better tour for us. We began touring all over the United States. It really opened our eyes to how large this country is, and what a challenge it is to reach a place so huge. It was daunting and exhilarating at the same time. We expanded our recognition nationally and internationally.
Lou Reed was a very quiet person. It was only near the end of the tour that we began to really have much communication. He’s just that way. He was very nice to us, but very reserved, and not what you would think of as an intimate guy on the road. He was busy doing his thing. However, the lead guitar player was Robert Quine, and we got to be friendly with Robert, who was one of the great New Wave/Punk guitarists. He played with Richard Hell and Voidoids on “Blank Generation.” A genuine character. He was really kind of from ‘our world,’ whereas the rest of Lou’s band was more from the rock and roll world of the Seventies. We zeroed in on Quine. One of the great moments, we were onstage in Albany, New York, and we had come offstage, and it was one of the only times we played “Rat Bait” on the tour, and Lou came over and said, “ I like that new song you did with the saxophone.” Actually, Lou talks a little bit like Jerry Lewis. Billy Burton can just do a fabulous impersonation of Lou. So we came offstage, and then they went on, and it was during one of the songs where Quine was playing--it was loud as hell-- and he came over to the board, leaned over and said to Anne, Bob and me, “I haven’t liked anything he’s done since the Velvet Underground,” then went back to the solo. Just a great moment. Quine is a notorious hater. A great hater.
That tour took us everywhere. Minneapolis, San Francisco, L.A. twice. We played with R.E.M. out at the Greek Amphitheatre. Played with Sparks, who were huge in L.A. There were ten thousand people there. Once again, The Q’s went to another level of musicianship and playing. The band is documented at the 930 Club in Washington, a great performance. I should get the video and you can put it up on the site if you want.
Lisa King: The Q’s were always well documented in the press, were they not?
JC: I don’t know why but a lot of writers gravitated towards the band. As we were leaving a good bit of our past behind, the scene was changing and the New Wave and Punk world in the Southeast was turning into something else. Some kind of weird pop world. We began to leave behind aspects of our beginnings. We moved into uncharted territory. A number of writers liked the group, and we began getting serious consideration, finally, from all over the US, asking about the songs. The tracks on our first A&M record were very different from “The Deep End”, both lyrically and musically. That connected with a lot of writers, and Kurt Loder liked it, and he was a writer for Rolling Stone at that time. He was a very funny guy, and he wanted to interview me, so we popped around the corner from Rolling Stone to an Indian restaurant, and I don’t really remember eating anything, but we must have drunk almost a case of Indian beer between us on Rolling Stone’s tab. Indian beer was a novelty at that point, I guess. We were just smashed, and we ended up in Loder’s car, which I think was a terrible wreck of a Volkswagen. It had no shock absorbers at all. A few weeks later his profile of the group appeared in Rolling Stone. It was a short profile, but a very good one. At the end of all that Indian brew, we had whipped ourselves into a frenzy about a group called The Black Monks. They were a group of soldiers in West Germany in the mid- Sixties who had a Punk Rock band. In the last few years that record has come out on CD, documenting the greatness of The Black Monks, but at the time it was a very obscure thing, and we had jacked ourselves up, and I knew where a copy of the record was, which was at Glenn Morrow’s house. So Loder and I got in this Volkswagen, which was the biggest piece of shit, and the streets in New York were one giant pot hole. So we’re bombed, driving down to 42nd street, and really getting excited about this record, and my head was hitting the ceiling of his car…it was that bad. Loder has been chauffeured to work at MTV now for years, but not at that point. So we got out at Glenn’s, stinking drunk, jibber-jabbering and just barged in and demanded that Glenn play The Black Monks, which to his eternal credit he did without hesitation. So we got to listen to the record, and that was that. Somehow Kurt got home. It was the quest for the grail. That was a good scene at Rolling Stone then. David Fricke, Parke Puterbaugh, those were very knowledgeable writers, they knew where The Q’s were coming from, and, for the first time in our career, we had people in the national press trying to understand us on a very serious level.
And the same thing started happening in England. Reviews from New Musical Express and Melody Maker started coming in, and that was very important to us at that time.