Savannah Now: Diversions

Web posted Friday, November 16, 2001

The Swimming Pool Q's will unveil bits of "The Royal Academy of Reality" at Savannah Blues Friday

By Gene Downs
Savannah Morning News

Just to set the record straight here: The Swimming Pool Q's never, never, never disbanded. They've just been working on their new CD for 10 years.

Seriously.

Don't believe us? Hear the words from the horses' mouth - meaning no offense to singer and guitarist Jeff Calder, who is quoted, as follows, in answer to the question, "The band never broke up, right?"
"That's correct. We played in Savannah over the '90s a few times at Velvet Elvis, and in the early '90s at Congress Street Station. But we spent most of the '90s working on our next album. We worked a lot with (local producer) Phil Hadaway, and we worked all over Savannah and in Atlanta."
Take that! all you naysayers and doomsday pessimists who have long contended that the band was gone for good. Just goes to show how wrong naysayers and doomsday pessimists can be. Calder - along with vocalist Anne Richmond Boston, bassist Gary Brown, drummer Bill Burton and lead guitarist Bob Elsey - will perform Friday at Savannah Blues. Confusion about the band's fate may have arisen from the fact that they took a hiatus from performing during the decade, uncertain how they would fit into the fast-changing regional music scene.
"It was tough for us to find a place at that time, a consistent base of support for what we were doing," Calder said. "So rather than fold up the tent - the band was too good for that - we just chose a path I think very few people have chosen: to step back and work on a new record for a long-time commitment.

"And I can't really say that performing live continuously was something very rewarding artistically, and that's what we'd done up to that point. So, we felt that the best thing for us to do was just sit back and work on a new artistic direction. And it just took a long time to take shape."
A long time indeed - even more than the Q's originally envisioned for the creation of the record. Friday's show is part of an unhurried tour to promote the most unhurried of albums, a magnum opus titled The Royal Academy of Reality. Calder calls it, with a detectable note of pride in his voice, "a very elaborate record, and a departure, in many ways, from anything we'd done before.
"It took a long time, we had a very small budget, but ultimately, we were able to complete the recording and mixing, thanks to Brendan's financial support. And by the end of the decade, we had a complete recording and now we're trying to get it out." (The packaging, by the way, is by Savannah College of Art and Design graduate Ash Arnett, who also designed the reissued The Deep End.)
Calder and Hadaway met while co-producing songs for the now-defunct Savannah band City of Lindas. Hadaway knew the Q's music and had worked with Brendan O'Brien, an Atlanta producer who had worked with the SPQ's, as well as such notables as the Black Crowes, Pearl Jam and, more recently, Train. Deciding to head in a different musical direction, the SPQ's worked with Hadaway on three songs. And then one thing led to another and Hadaway will share the album's production credits with the band members. When Hadaway came on board, the project wasn't expected to be so huge and long-term. As time went on, however, the songs became increasingly ornate.

"Each track has a great deal of instrumentation," Calder said. "It's the band supplemented, at times, with as many as eight other musicians: string players, vibraphone players, exotic instruments. And we were pretty much on our own doing this. We didn't have a road map. That's one of the reasons it took so long." And when will we hear this great achievement? There are still a couple of mixes to sort out and the design to complete. If they really poured heart and soul into it, the band could have the album out by spring. But Calder doesn't think that will happen. You'll hear bits of it at Friday's show. Just not much more than a few tunes. For their live shows now, the Q's are still emphasizing the earlier work, which was simpler and more adaptable to a club setting.

"We have such a full catalog of material even without the new record," Calder said. "We can go out and play 24 songs in an evening and not even touch a lot of the stuff we've got. Certainly, people would expect to hear a lot of that older material. And the way I see it, probably any kind of performance we do after the release of the new record will incorporate the new material; some things we can do, some things we won't be able to do. I'm not that concerned about being able to reproduce a song live."

The release of The Royal Academy of Reality follows closely on the heels of the recent reissue of 1981's The Deep End that is supplemented with no fewer than 12 bonus tracks. Calder said the reissue gives some "historical perspective" of the band before the release of The Royal Academy.