The State/Columbia, South Carolina

Everyone Into the Pool:

20 years after The Deep End made

a splash, The Swimming Pool Q’s surfaces with reissued CD

“Restless youth, coming over the

rise. Restless youth, cut you

down to size. As long as there’s a

sun or a moon in the sky, restless

youth will never die.”

-From “Restless Youth”

by Jeff Calder (1981)

by Michael Miller

Twenty-five years ago, Southern rock was ruled by the Allman Brothers Band, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and other deep-fried, blues based acts. If you had a mind to make music outside this “boogie alliance” as Jeff Calder of The Swimming Pool Q’s calls it, you didn’t have much chance of getting heard.

“That whole thing dominated musical culture in the South throughout the middle ‘70s,” Calder said. “It had become very repressive, especially for somebody like me and others who were interested in pop music with different intentions.”

But change was in the air. New sounds were coming from New York and London, and their influence was drifting south. Small pockets of punk and new wave were springing up all over, and Calder, who was a writer living in Florida at the time, discovered a particularly vibrant scene in Atlanta.

He moved there in 1978 and met some like-minded musicians. Bob Elsey was a free-spirited guitarist who channeled the ghost of Jimi Hendrix in this upstairs bedroom at his parents’ house. Robert Schmid was a daredevil drummer who had attended the same high school as poet James Dickey. Anne Richmond Boston was a pupetter, paste-up artist and occasional singer. Bassist Pete Jarkunas was another Florida refugee who used to play in a band called Duckbutter.

Together they became known as The Swimming Pool Q’s, and along with other Georgia bands such as The B-52’s, R.E.M., and The Brains, they changed the course of Southern rock and roll.

“There was a great deal of excitement then,” Calder said. “You could feel it, the same way you could probably feel it in the late 1960’s within the world that became psychedelic music. You could feel this enthusiasm building, and you could either take the approach of impersonating punk and new wave styles or you could come up with your own thing and create an audience for it.”

The Pool Q’s came up with their own thing, a quirky, literary pop-rock style that captured a zealous audience thanks to enigmatic, stick-in-your-ear tunes such as “Stock Car Sin,” “Big Fat Tractor,” “Rat Bait,” and “Restless Youth.” In May of 1981, the band released The Deep End, its first full length album of these tunes, and now 20 years later, it has been reissued on compact disc for the first time. The Deep End CD comes wit an engaging 28-page booklet and 12 bonus tracks.

“The bonus tracks are from multiple sources, from cassettes to four track tapes.” Calder said. “It’s a wide variety from that period. I wanted to represent stuff from before there was even a band.”

Early songs such as “White Collar Drifter,” “Going Through the Motions,” and “Stingray” revealed Calder’s caustic, witty writing style and served as precursors for tales to come. As the Pool Q’s gained momentum, their songs of Southern weirdo hayseeds, tent preachers and evil stock car racers attracted a loyal following of fans in search of something more intellectual stimulating than the usual pop fare.

“Something about him makes a

dog’s ears stiff up. He’s ugly as

homemade sin. Ain’t no

stormfencing hold him in. His

real name is Roy. Roy Rat Bait…

He suffers from dyspepsia…”

-from “Rat Bait”

by Jeff Calder and Bob Elsey

When Calder was going to high school in the late ‘60s in Lakeland, Fla., he worked part time at a men’s store managed by “a button-down Bohemian” named John Dickson, who “painted, wrote poems and drank real wine,” Calder said. “When things were slow in the store, Calder would blast away on a harmonica while Dickson made up rude folk songs and played an autoharp.

Later at the University of Florida, Calder would study creative writing under novelist Harry Crews, whose books were populated with the kind of characters Calder often encountered in real life.

“When I began to write songs, I saw that this could be the substance of my subject matter,” Calder said of the influential impact of those two men. “That’s why a lot of songs on The Deep End are about characters like that.

As Calder developed his lyrical voice, the Pool Q’s were becoming a tight, exciting performing unit that rocked with an angular, disjointed rhythm welded to the melody of Elsey’s blistering electric guitar.

Crowds grew bigger, and bigger at Pool Q’s shows, and before long the band was going on tour with big-time acts such as Devo and The Police.

“There wasn’t any idea of having a big career,” Calder said of the Pool Q’s goals at that time. “It was something that you were going to do, and you were going to do it seriously, the same way you’d pursue any kind of artistic project.”

The band’s artistry earned glowing reviews and a strong reputation in the Southeast, and in the mid-1980s, major labels came calling. The Pool Q’s released two albums on A&M Records, a self titled disc in 1984 and Blue Tomorrow in 1986, and one for Capitol Records, World War Two Point Five in 1989.

The band’s personnel has fluctuated over the years as members have come and gone. During the mid-‘80s to early ‘90s, a strong Pool Q line-up included drummer Billy Burton and bassist J.E. Garnett. Following the release of Blue Tomorrow in 1986, Boston left to pursue a career as a graphic artist, but she returned in 1998 and appears in performance with the band and on a yet-to-be released CD of new Pool Q songs.

The band’s current lineup includes Calder, Richmond, Elsey, Burton, and bassist Tim DeLaney.

“We’ve begun assembling a new record,” Calder said. “The most important thing about The Deep End reissue, it will get the band’s head above the radar and we will be able to put this new record out and hopefully will have immediate access to some attention.

“Your baby is a big fat tractor,

three wheels of steam and rust.

Your baby is a big fat tractor,

ride him you must. A big fat, big fat,

big fat, big fat, a big fat tractor

riding down the rows in the dust.”

-from “Big Fat Tractor”

by Jeff Calder and Bob Elsey

Looking back at The Deep End from 20 years down the road, it sounds as fresh, brash, and provocative as it did in 1981. In fact, the hot mixes engineered by Bruce Baxter at the time are more vibrant and defined in the digital format.

“I think the record holds up well,” Calder said. “It’s a very unique record by a very unique band. I think we were always a very forward-looking act, and we had that built into our concept from the very beginning.”

For all the Pool Q’s who were involved in The Deep End and subsequent projects, artistic intentions always superseded the desire to simply rock out.

“I think that’s why we’re still doing this,” Calder said, “and I also think it’s why The Deep End still sounds so fresh to people. We were pursuing this kind of personal, really unique collective vision.”