Sax

The year was 1977. Jeff Calder and I shared a ramshackle shack and a converted garage in Brookhaven, a suburb of Atlanta, and haven for writers, artists and musicians. The rent was dirt-cheap and we were allowed to live peacefully, keeping odd hours and working various part time jobs to supplement our musical callings. The back yard of the property terminated along the eighteenth fairway of a sprawling golf course belonging to the Standard Club, an elite and very fashionable association for some of North Atlanta’s wealthiest movers of old money. The proximity to the golf course behind the house made for an expanded sense of space. Here, in the city, just steps away, were rolling hills and wooded thickets that seemed to stretch for miles.

Jeff had just moved to Atlanta from Florida with the hopes of starting a band; his wife Becky remained behind, temporarily, to run the family business. My wife, Janie, and I had broken up the winter before. I was playing bass with Glenn Phillips, and Jeff and Bob Elsey were starting to create the material that would later become the music for The Deep End, the Swimming Pool Q’s debut album. The atmosphere was one of intense creative energy, heightened imagination, and an “all or nothing” drive for excellence. This was the result of our youth, our enthusiasm, our burning intellects, and the absence of women in our lives.

Jeff is best known as a writer, guitarist and singer, but he can also play the tenor saxophone with some dexterity. But in those years he was still developing a technique on the horn. Practicing an instrument with such a volume of sound presented problems in our quiet Brookhaven neighborhood. The solution was simple. In the cover of darkness he would retire to the seclusion and open spaces of the golf course behind the house, practicing the instrument alone and unhindered, much like the great Sonny Rollins, who spent a year perfecting his chops in solitary practice on the George Washington bridge.

One evening I was sitting alone with a book and my thoughts, when suddenly the silence was split by the door bursting open, and there before me, framed by moonlight in the open doorway, was a wild eyed man in tattered clothes with a saxophone slung around his neck. His arms were scratched and leaves were matted in his hair. Realizing at last who it was I exclaimed, “Jeff! What happened!” Apparently he had been on the golf course conducting a nocturnal practice session when a guard for the country club, in a golf cart, had spotted him. A hot pursuit followed. As I remember it after all these years there was mention of searchlights and some kind of an animal, possibly an attack dog. Somehow Jeff escaped capture and made it home, shaken, but not disillusioned. To this day when I listen to “Rat Bait” I can still hear the frantic edginess from Jeff’s saxophone that originated, at least in part, from that harrowing night’s narrow escape.

After about a year’s time Becky was able to move to Atlanta and they found a house. The Q’s were starting to get noticed. Their fame grew and album followed album. With Glenn, Jeff, and the other members of the Glenn Phillips Band we formed the Supreme Court. All along, into the present, Jeff has followed a most interesting and expanding musical path. You know the rest. What’s past is prologue.