These days the Q’s are more apt to wax philosophical, with song titles alone being telling; “The Earth Makes Us Feel Things,” “Yin Yang,” “What Is Beyond.” What kinks there were have long been ironed out and the band has a new epic--ten years in the making--The Royal Academy of Reality (Bar/None). While not taking a decade to put out a record, the Q’s have plenty of other things to do. Calder, who produces and plays with Glenn Phillips in Supreme Court, calls the band a “pretty well rounded bunch of nuts.” Bassist Tim DeLaney is in both the Sightseers and Kopernic; drummer Bill Burton is a noted cinematographer; singer Anne Boston designs book covers for Hill Street Press and guitarist Bob Elsey designs home interiors.

From his home in metropolitan Atlanta, Calder expounds on the old days and making a record on the installment plan.

Jeff Calder: Oh it’s a great day! I just got a call from Bar/None--there’s a bit on the Swimming Pool Q’s, a photograph and some kind of text in the new “Rolling Stone”! It’s a great day! (Laughs)

Kevin Wierzbicki: I remember the last time we spoke informally, you were less than happy with that magazine. Now it’s a different story.

Jeff: What was I thinking? I don’t know what I was saying! You must have misheard! (Laughs)

Kevin: Well you certainly deserve it. The more I listen to The Royal Academy of Reality, the more it grows on me.

Jeff: I knew when we put it out that it was going to be such a long record…

Kevin: So what’s the deal with that? Is it because it took you a decade to put this out, or is it because you’re so prolific, or are you just generous?

Jeff: You know, we just sort of ended up with it. At some point, we knew we had a lot of material. The last two or three years before the record came out, we toyed with the idea of making it shorter, maybe cutting it down to forty minutes or whatever. But it seemed like the record is the record that you have. Every time we fooled…we put a lot of thought into the original sequencing of the record, which was kind of important, how the songs go into one another key-wise and stuff like that because we did those cross-fades. We put a lot of thought into the sequence, then we lived with it for a few years, and of course we’re looking at a seventy-something-minute record. The people around the band who had lived with it were adamant that we shouldn’t change anything. It probably also does have something to do with the fact that we put so much time into it; over the course of that many years we just accumulated that much material.

Kevin: It seems that lyric-wise, you’ve pretty well developed the Tao of Calder.

Jeff: As the thing went along, it kind of thematically took shape. I’m just one of these people who has to have a reason to make a record. There are some writers who can just write songs. I’m not that kind of songwriter. These guys that go in to play in Nashville every day and go in the basement and just write songs for other artists or whatever. I need something to kind of write songs about.

Kevin: So what are your muses?

Jeff: The influences at the beginning of this record were to try and make a very positive record, without it being like a Hallmark card or something. A lot of alternative music was going in what I thought was a really negative direction, at least in my exposure to what alternative rock was becoming. You know, there’s a word called “heroin;” that’s what it seemed like was going on. It was a very nihilistic, dark path down which things were going, and I just really didn’t want any part of that. The reaction against that was an influence on the positive aspects of this record.

Also I was re-reading a lot of poets. As I was revisiting these artists I began to see, especially with French surrealism, no matter how angry they were as people, that as artists there was this very, very positive worldview--what they would have called in the old days a “life affirming” worldview. The Swimming Pool Q’s have always been a band that’s tried to do things a little bit different.

Kevin: Let’s flash back to a time when the world was first hearing that difference, when the Athens scene was taking over and people weren’t talking about just the B-52’s and R.E.M., they were talking about Swimming Pool Q’s and Love Tractor and Pylon and buying anything that came out just because it was on Danny Beard’s label (DB). How did you feel when you realized that you were part of something that was bigger than life?

Jeff: That was a great period and it was also the beginning of the band. So it was a whole new adventure. It was also a struggle and there were painful aspects to it, but overall I have really fond memories of that period. When I moved to Atlanta in 1978 to start the group with Bob Elsey, the B-52’s had been in existence for seven or eight months and they were just starting to get a reputation in Atlanta and Athens and New York City, and that was happening very quickly. But in Athens there wasn’t really a lot going on besides the B-52’s. There may have been one or two other art-rock bands. But in Atlanta, I knew the music scene. I had strong connections with the music scene, which had had a very creative, and original music scene going back to the late 1960s with the Hampton Grease Band and my friend Glenn Phillips. We were contemporaries of the Brains--we started right around the same time. There was a band called the Fans that had been in existence for several years, kind of Anglo-rockers who were very instrumental in getting the B-52’s to play in New York. You had an embryonic new wave and punk world here that over the course of the next two years developed into what people thought of as the Atlanta or Athens scene. It gave the Q’s and all of these bands a real momentum. It gave us opportunities to develop as a group much faster than it normally would happen. I look around now at the situation here, at least in Georgia and the Southeast and none of the bands, even the promising acts, ever seem to go anywhere because they don’t have the opportunity to play in front of large audiences. The grassroots club scene has been in shambles for years. We had those opportunities. In the case of the Q’s, we opened the whole region up to being a new wave band or original act and being able to develop our own audience. It was how we realized that this was more than just a hobby and that we had the potential to do some really good work. It gave us a feeling that we were an important band, and I think that really doesn’t happen very often. We felt like we were part of a community that was on a mission, even though we really didn’t know what mission we were on.

Kevin: And the makeup of the band…

Jeff: When Bob (Elsey) and I got together and began working on songs, we really didn’t have any notion of having a female vocalist in the band. I was the singer, and as a singer I didn’t really have much of a melodic sense. I was more out of a world of you got a bunch of words there, you just jam them into some sort of freaky little odd song structure and that’s a song. Melody didn’t really come into it at all. (Laughs) I can remember at one point (guitarist) Glenn Phillips saying to me, “Jeff, you ever think about writing a song with melody?”

Kevin: (laughs)

Jeff: So I’m like, “What are you talking about!?” But it’s the honest truth. I was really knowledgeable about music and popular music, but it never even struck me that that was something that you would do! So I got the words and I’m kind of singing them, kind of croaking them, I guess more of a blues-ish influence of some sort. Howlin’ Wolf’s a genius, but you don’t really think of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters as melodic singers, and I think that was more my approach to song writing at the time. When Anne (Richmond Boston) came into the picture, simply by playing a lot and going everywhere and trying to find a place for her in the group, it became clear that she was a very melodic singer, a really good singer and much different from me. That’s when I began to develop as a songwriter. I began to understand a whole other way of writing songs.

Kevin: Let’s talk about some of the personalities from the era. Let’s start with Michael Stipe.

Jeff: Even at the time, Michael Stipe seemed very, very young. The first time I met him was at an XTC concert at a short-lived club in Athens, and I think R.E.M. opened the show. I didn’t really know what was going on with the group.

Kevin: Was this during his back-turned-to-the-audience phase?

Jeff: I didn’t really see the early performances of the band. Danny Beard and I went to 688 (the now-defunct 688 Club in downtown Atlanta hosted many local and touring New Wave, punk and alternative acts in the ‘80s) and saw a performance on a Wednesday night that was a particularly bad situation, a bad performance. There were lots of technical problems, guitar strings…by the time we played with them nine months later on the album release of The Deep End (the Swimming Pool Q’s debut album, released in 1981) they had become a very strong club act. I remember talking with them before they had played New York, and they were discussing their plan. They were discussing their plan of attack on New York. They were going to play in all the places around New York. It was as if their plan was to have a ringed siege of New York! It just seemed ridiculous to me, but of course they were correct. That’s what happened. I think he was a very shy person, I don’t think that was an act. And he had a bad complexion. It’s quite an achievement that he was able to break out of that adolescent insecurity and become an important figure.

Kevin: Vic Chesnutt.

Kevin: I notice you play a lot of exotic instruments, or at least to western musicians what you would call exotic instruments, on the new record. What does your collection look like?

Jeff: My house is kind of small; let me give you an example of what my house looks like. This is a note that I have from my wife today: “My dad is spending Friday night with us, will arrive Friday afternoon, please clean up!” So if that gives you any indication. I’m looking in my room right now and it’s full. There’s an electric dulcimer, there’s a six-string bass, a ukulele, a marksaphone, five guitars…the place is a fuckin’ wreck. And I have instruments spread out all over the city at friends’ houses. It’s pretty extensive. I can’t say that they’re all pristine; they’ve seen a lot of wear. I’ve been collecting these analog keyboards since the 1980s. Not that I can play any of them! In making this record, there were plenty of times that we knew we needed somebody who could play a glass harp or really play the keyboards for this part, or play sitar or something. We would have to find people around for that, which wasn’t easy. We had to really hunt for people who could play these instruments with some facility.

Kevin: I see you play something called the chang on one cut. I looked it up in the dictionary and got a definition that it is some kind of Tibetan wine. I assume you weren’t jumping around the studio hopped up on Chinese booze.

Jeff: (laughs) In my younger days I consumed a considerable amount of sake. But no, the chang was the predecessor of the koto. The chang is somewhat shorter, but it’s almost identical to the koto. I played the chang and I can assure you I didn’t have any idea what I was doing.

Kevin: Tell me about the gong you borrowed from Phil Ehart of Kansas.

Jeff: There’s a great story about that. We ended up using it at the beginning of the song “For No Reason” and we couldn’t seem to get a good sound out of the gong. (Producer) Phil (Hadaway) and I were recording this down in Savannah and he says, “Try hitting it with your shoe.” So at the right moment I hit it with my shoe and he sped the tape machine up and you can hear the gong drop dramatically in pitch. It’s kind of a cool effect. But the good story is I was driving to Savannah to do the session with the gong in the back of my van, and these were lean times, and I didn’t have enough money to get a new tag. So halfway to Savannah the van broke down and I pulled to the side of the Interstate and realized I was in some trouble because the tag was expired. So I was able to use the gong to conceal the tag while I was waiting for some help, and it worked! I got out unscathed. The gong was really just a license plate concealer!

Kevin: Former Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker plays on the record. How long have you known her?

Jeff: I think since the early ‘90s. The Q’s toured with Lou Reed in 1984 but we never knew Maureen back then, although we knew she lived in this town in South Georgia called Douglas. She called me out of the blue when she wanted to make a record and wanted to know if I had any suggestions about studios and engineers. I suggested that she go to Savannah and do a record with Phil Hadaway, which is what she did. Sterling (Morrison, Velvet Underground guitarist) and her other musicians came in and she began a working relationship with Phil. One afternoon when she was leaving town at 3:00, we asked her around 2:45 if she would play on the song “The Wheel of the Sun.” She played a single tom-tom and I think a tambourine. We did it in one take. She didn’t really know the song; she just got the groove going. I sent her a copy of the record belatedly. I hope she likes it. Of course she’d say she liked it whether she did or not.

Kevin: Which brings us back to where we started and the “Rolling Stone” review.

Jeff: We’ve known (writer) David Fricke a long time. He’ll be very honest (he was—Fricke gave the disc a positive review—pg).

www.swimmingpoolqs.com / www.bar-none.com