In the meantime, I had little preparation for being in a rock band. In high school I sold clothing in the afternoon and briefly managed a combo called The Prone Position. As "manager" I could occasionally land onstage and perform a song called "Torture Chamber" under the moniker the Black Cock. Later, in the mid-1970's, I put together a band in Florida named The Fruit Jockeys. That lasted two gigs because no one could stand the huge paper-mache globe-heads painted orange that I asked everyone to wear.

By 1978, though, I had become more serious about songwriting, which for me was an outgrowth of literary pursuits. Forming a real band became inevitable. Travelling through Atlanta on several occasions, I had met a prodigal teenage guitarist, Bob Elsey. We home-recorded some songs together and decided to call ourselves The Swimming Pool Q's. During this early New Wave period, band names were frequently were essay-length. As far as the name goes, marketing strategy was no consideration. The name the Swimming Pool Q's seemed appropriate for a band that was partially Floridian. We would spend years being asked to justify the name, but at the time it was a little less life-threatening than The Fruit Jockeys, especially in the South.

Something called Southern Boogie was still big at that time. The Swimming Pool Q's were one of the first groups in the region to stand in opposition to it. The wiggy twist that in 1980 I would have epithets hurled at me for having short hair by clodhoppers with long hair, who ten years before were hurling the same epithets at me for having long hair when they had short hair. Only this time it became important to savor the bating. At gas stations, for instance, the usual site of hayseed hassles, it's always fun to leap out of the car covered in lace and demand the location of the closest rare book shop.

Back then, the hip log-telegraph was pounding out signals in London and New York City. Some provincial ears were standing up, and with those ears arose the spirit of aesthetic opposition. Bands were formed by people who all seemed to come from the worlds of art and retail. Few had "musical backgrounds" or any knowledge of how to play their instruments. One learned along the way. Spirit was all. The word "career" wasn't in the vocabulary, and the prospect of making an album was about as realistic as time travel. I couldn't tune a guitar (not necessarily a disadvantage in this circle). My singing was croaking. My concept of "songwriting" was to jam showboat words and gags into an impossible musical structure with no sense of melody. There was no band, either, so we had to get one of those.

Our initial lineup was assembled from friends and disgruntled musicians (note: musicians are always disgruntled). Unlike most New Wave bands during this period (any band with the barest pretense to originality was considered New Wave) we always had great players. This would come to create problems. In the narrow world of the margin, self-conscious incompetence was
becoming sanctified. The spirit-was-all crowd held in disdain any display of technical mastery as a concession to faulty values.
   

The first thing to do with a band is to find something to do. At this point one initiates a chain of events to unfold in disorderly fashion over a five-year period, The Sphere of Work (booking and travel) which gets one to The Gig (the act of entertainment which is
both Work and Art) that ultimately transforms The Sphere of Art (song writing and musical ability), allowing for the creation of the first mechanical product (The Album). This process used to be called dues paying, a concept frowned upon during New Wave as a careerist. Nevertheless:

THE REHEARSAL
Usually a horrid nightmare. The less said about this the better. All it takes is one Bad Head to ruin a rehearsal, and at least one musician always has a Bad Head. Bad Head is usually the result of an unhip daytime job or a forever-failing love interest. Bands rehearse more often in the early days. After performing the material for awhile, they get together only to learn new songs. The first practice location is a parent's basement. This never lasts too long. The only alternative is to find a regular rehearsal space. This costs money. To get money, one must secure an engagement. This requires:

BOOKING

To cajole or con...Whatever it takes to achieve The Gig. This usually necessitates a telephone. Always remember, the telephone is your friend. Sometimes a friend must be punished. The punishment can take many forms (a hammer, the hand receiver, the back tires of an automobile) and usually occurs after a particularly nasty colloquy with a club owner:
"You're only as good as your last gig, and now I'm going to cut the wire!" Generally speaking, club owners don't care much about the music. They care about money. Money is generated by smashing as many human beings as possible into The Club. Both the club owner and you know that there's the possibility of a bad night. That's the club owner's cue to say,"Okay, I'll give you the guarantee, but if you don't make it back at the door you can just loose my phone number. You don't know me. You can forget I ever existed!"

Living by night is not the province of the dainty.

Booking, continued: a big part of booking is lying. Always lie. About what? Anything, from the weather and the number of cover songs you know to wheter or not you wear thin ties. In booking there are no moral or ethical consequences to lying. At the end of the engagement the club owner is going to pretend he doesn't remember anything you talked about regarding money, and you won't be able to find him anyway. Someday you'll get a big booking agency to handle the band and take the load off your
shoulders. That's when your problems really begin.

Our first engagement was on June 1, 1978. It was an art collective's fashion show called the Underwear Invitational. We weren't paid but received enough notoriety to con our way into a local club on a Monday night. Having almost no stage experience, it was to be an evening of terror and total confusion. It took months to feel comfortable on a plywood stage covered in dime-store carpet.