Stomp and Stammer

Stomp and Stammer/Atlanta, GA.

June 2001/V.6 No.8
Swimming Upstream

Reflections On The Deep End

by Jeff Clark

It was not the first independent album released by and Atlanta band in the post punk/new wave era…but it was close, and it was likely the most significant and well-received. Heck, it was the first album by an Atlanta band I ever bought, and they were the first Atlanta group I really latched onto when I began going out to see bands in clubs in the early eighties. Not that that adds a thing to its/their notability! But The Deep End by The Swimming Pool Q’s, originally released on Danny Beard’s DB Recs in 1981, represented an important turning point in Atlanta music. Along with the release of The Brains’ first Mercury album a year earlier, these records made a case, on a regional and national scale, for Atlanta’s burgeoning new wave/club scene at a time when all the media spotlights were focused solely on Athens. Granted, Atlanta never did establish itself nationally as a musical enter with as much allure and personality (that is, until the urban music industry of the ‘90s), but that’s due to many factors, not the least of which was a lazy national music press which continued to identify bands like the Q’s throughout the ‘80s as “Athens bands.” But we lived here, grew up with it, and we know. And The Swimming Pool Q’s were, for a number of very colorful years, the best band in town.

Calling attention to the group’s arrival on the scene with a splash, The Deep End is a diverse and zany collection of idiosyncratic tunes, embracing the oddball distinctions of Southern living and irrigating them with an off-center Beefheartian musical spin. And it remains a thoroughly satisfying listen twenty years on, baring few of the telltale trademarks of datedness that sink many recordings from the same era. As group founder Jeff Calder puts it, “it’s one of the early expressions of a kind of different sensibility from the South.” He’s not really bragging-it’s just the truth.

Finally released on CD for the first time, The Deep End has been remastered, appended with a 20-page booklet chock full of never seen photos and a typically irreverent and informative history of the band’s early years by songwriter, guitarist and vocalist Calder, who founded the group in 1978 with guitarist extraordinare Bob Elsey; together with vocalist Anne Richmond Boston, who joined up shortly thereafter (with a break between ’87 and ’98), they remain the core of the long lived group to this day.

The reissue of The Deep End has long been brewing in the back of Calder’s brain, but the basic components of the project started coming together two years ago: remastering the original tapes, finding and choosing the extra material, gathering old photos and memorabilia and putting together the deluxe package. Calder, who wrote for a variety of newspapers and magazines in Florida after his graduation from college in 1973 (he still pens occasional pieces for a number of publications), was used to poring over piles of clippings and documents for research. Still, he says, the research for his essay/history in the CD booklet “became exhausting. I went through every single Creative Loafing from 1978 to ’82, every Atlanta Gazette, and I went even a little further back…I was surprised about how much I remembered, but also I was surprised by how much I’d forgotten about certain events…[And] there was nothing-nothing!-going on anywhere in the South except Atlanta. And maybe I know that because I was friends with Glenn Phillips you know, as early as say 1974, and I’d come up here to see what was happening, and to somebody like me, it seemed like a helluva lot going on, even though to the people living here, it was the usual backbiting and conflicts, just typical kind of smalltown stuff, but it was extraordinary, by comparison, to anything I’d seen in Florida or any other place in the South. I mean, forget it. Chapel Hill? Ralliegh? You gotta be kidding! I mean, I think that the dB’s and Mitch Easter and those guys were kind of around, but that didn’t really fall into place until later.

“When you look at the new wave and punk era, you’re talking about people who were actually a little older,” Calder points out. “Like when The Deep End came out, I was almost 30 years old. When we toured with The Police in the spring of ’79, Sting and I were the same age. He’s actually a little older, and remains so. We were all in our later twenties. We had sort of developed our ideas and personalities and so forth a little more, and had come from different backgrounds. I mean, Talking Heads, you’re talking about people that came from an art school background. Patti Smith, Richard Hell, they came from more literary backgrounds. I mean, I don’t know where the B-52’s came from at all, but is seems like it was not people who grew up playing Skynyrd songs. And all of us who had kind of drifted into this world were like that. I mean, look at Anne Boston, who is a naturally good singer, but really, she was an artist. When I first went to her apartment in 1978, it was staggering! This sensibility, it was just walls of these toys and I mean, I had never seen anything like that in Florida. I never knew anybody, male or female, that had walls of toys and art objects and shit. And those are the kind of people that made this sensibility come together, that I don’t really see that much anymore. I see it a little bit. But you know, there really wasn’t much of a tradition of that in pop music, at least as far as I knew. People that were in bands just seemed to sorta come from…it’s like they were in high school, doing Cream cover songs, and they just somehow formed Lynyrd Skynyrd or the Allman Brothers. I mean, I know what kinds of backgrounds those people had, and a lot of them were poor backgrounds, and a lot of them were lower middle class backgrounds. The people that made up the new wave world in America were all either middle class or upper middle class, and had all these benefits of class, and it’s one of the things that gave that era so much character.”

It also infused the Q’s-who had coalesced with bassist Pete Jarkunas and drummer Robert Schmid by the time of the Deep End sessions-and other more art-minded regional bands of the day with a sense of intent. “The period of the B-52’s, the Swimming Pool Q’s, The Brains, Pylon, all this stuff really, especially in the early days, was functioning in the big picture-and in the South in particular-as an oppositional culture. What was going on there wasn’t really happening anywhere else. Especially, I think at that level of creativity and artistic intention,” recalls Calder. “In Florida there were a handful of, I don’t know, glam bands that all of a sudden decided to get kinda punky. It wasn’t as tough there weren’t any punk groups or new wave bands of some sort in the middle ‘70s, even in Florida. But nothing that had that level of artistic intention and a kind of a work ethic, and ambition not so much to be big stars, but an ambition to succeed at what we were trying to do. So that brought a real intensity to this experience here, and I mean it was really at odds with the dominant culture in the region, which was purely still Southern rock, all over the place.

“When we came along, for two years before, from 1978 to ’81 when we made The Deep End, we worked probably more that any other…I’m sure way more than any band in Atlanta, at all. Touring, and playing and rehearsing, all the time,” Calder declares. “I mean, none of these new wave or punk bands in Atlanta were interested in going anywhere except New York. I mean, nobody was. Even look at the B-52’s-they had the common sense not to do anything but play Atlanta, Athens, and New York until they became a household name. They woulda been killed in fuckin’ Alabama. We just had certain things that allowed us to be accepted, to some extent, in these more hickish regions,” he laughs. “But we worked constantly, it was unbelievable. And it’s evident in The Deep End because it’s essentially a recording…I mean, there are overdubbings and so forth, but it sounds basically the was the band was. And there are plenty of flaws there, but it does sound pretty good.”

Indeed, it does. And aside from the subsequent single “Stingray” (appended as one of the bonus tracks on the Deep End cd) and occasional later tracks like “Firing Squad For God,” the Q’s emphasis on wacky absurdity and quirk-filled arrangements (best exemplified on Deep End tracks like “Walk Like A Chicken” and “Ratbait”) gradually was replaced in favor of more emotionally rich writing and a statelier pop sound. Even their remake of The Deep End’s classic “Big Fat Tractor” on Blue Tomorrow, the Q’s second album for A&M Records, is nowhere near as brash and ludicrous as the original, tacked onto the later album’s pastoral songs of love and longing, it also sticks out like a big fat thumb.

“I’m really struck when I go back and listen to the A&M records-which I’m now going to try and deal with that period of the group-how really tragic and extremely emotional those records are, and it’s like, how could a band that had this nutty sensibility on The Deep End- it’s kinda dominating on that record-how could that same band do this?” asks Calder. The answer, he says, was Boston’s growing role in the group.

“The whole concept from the beginning of the band was to be this kind of continually evolving group. And not to become sort of stuck with one mode of expression,” he explains. “I mean, we never had any fucking idea about getting a girl to sing in the group. She just started singing in the band, and all of a sudden, as a song writer, I guess, and conceptualist, and lyricist, and so forth, I had to sort of write these songs, and I didn’t know how to deal with that. Because Anne was a completely different personality and singer that I was. I didn’t really know how good of a singer she was. She just was a neat young woman. And gradually it became apparent that she was a great melodic singer, which I was not. So I had to begin to develop these songs, like “Little Misfit” and my favorite song on The Deep End which is “Overheated.” I began writing these songs and I increasingly began to comprehend the importance of vocal melody. Which I couldn’t sing at the time. And the minute we began doing material like that, and trying to develop that material, and it began to work, that’s like a whole new vista opening up before you that you never knew existed before. And I think on the A&M recordings, you begin to see that happening. And it’s very different material from this kind of male oriented nuttiness. I mean, remarkably, it’s somehow still there, and we tried to find a way to make it all work during those middle years and still try and find ways to make it work, but that’s something that Anne would never be very convincing at. Anne could never have sung ‘Stingray.’ And so what she was very good at was ultimately these songs that were in the middle period of the band, that were very emotional…There’s a continuity from my perspective, between those records, and what I was trying to do on The Deep End was to demonstrate that continuity-I’m not sure if I succeeded-but to demonstrate that continuity, so that when our A&M records are reissued, with additional tracks and so forth, you can see this transition kind of taking place. See, it’s interesting that outside of this area, the further you get outside of the Atlanta area, it’s a completely different perspective that people have, and the only thing they ask from me now when I talk to these people, it’s ‘Yeah, this is nice-when are you gonna get the A&M records out?’ he laughs.

So,…when are those A&M records coming out again? Well, Calder doesn’t even own the rights to them, so that’s a hurdle; also A&M Records as it existed in 1985 is extinct-it’s now an icon under the Interscope banner, which is a subhead of the Universal Music Group, etc…But, he says he has some contacts at the company-one of whom will be well known to local scenesters from the Pool Q’s heyday-and he’s hoping they’ll help him talk A&M’s pricetag for the tapes down from the $10-20,000 they’re asking right now-and which Calder promises…soon.

But that’s all another 28-page booklet-or more. In the meantime, for old fans, as well as younger gups who thing they know it all about the Atlanta scene, the newly restored and expanded version of The Deep End is essential listening, a glimpse at a moment in our city’s pop culture history when the lines were clearer, the cliques were fewer, and the new rule books had yet to be written. The floodgates were yet to burst open.