The State

FROM THE STATE NEWSPAPER IN COLUMBIA, SC:

The Royal Academy of Reality is, possibly, the most progressive American rock record of the new century. It sets an artistic standard few bands will be able to match.
A 10-year wonder
Chalk up a hypnotic, psychedelic hit for the Pool Q's

By MICHAEL MILLER
Staff Writer

The Swimming Pool Q's: Bill Burton, left, Anne Richmond Boston, Tim Delaney, Bob Elsey and Jeff Calder


Jeff Calder of The Swimming Pool Q's is wearing a headset and weaving through downtown Atlanta traffic. It's midnight, and he's talking about his band's new album, The Royal Academy of Reality. "It's a fairly thoughtful record," Calder crackles digitally from North Highland Avenue. "It took a long time to assemble.  Hold on, I've gotta make a tricky maneuver."

Midnight is like mid-day for this 52-year-old night owl, and he's right at home talking about his music from the streets of Atlanta, the city he and the Pool Q's have roamed since 1978. When he says it took a long time to put  Royal Academy of Reality together, he's not kidding.  A seamless blend of hypnotic rhythms, seductive melodies and splashes of psychedelica, the album was begun 10 years ago and represents the band's first release since 1989. This isn't too surprising. The Pool Q's have never really behaved like an ordinary rock band.

Be advised, the word "rock" is used here merely as a point of reference. The Atlanta collective could be likened to Claude Debussy, John Coltrane, Joni Mitchell, Captain Beefheart or any other artist who has felt the form in which he or she worked was just too dang limiting.  For a quarter of a century, the Pool Q's have wiggled free of rock's tight confines and made music that is poignant, provocative and downright fun. However, Royal Academy of Reality, released May 20, is unlike anything the band has ever recorded.  It's a deeply textured, highly ambitious project that weaves lyrical insights, studio wizardry and impeccable musicianship into a kind of philosophical and sonic whole. Not a concept record, it's a high-minded work nonetheless.

"We recorded the basic tracks for three of the songs - 'Light Arriving Soon,' 'For No Reason' and 'Sky Land' - on an afternoon in December 1992," Calder says. "We tracked them in a little studio in Savannah called Reel Time where our producer Phil Hadaway works."

The three songs were recorded by the band's basic core - Calder on guitar and vocals, Bob Elsey on lead guitar, Billy Burton on drums and the band's bassist at the time, Gary Brown. (Tim Delaney is the Q's' current bass player.)

"Those songs were recorded in one take, in a matter of 60 minutes," Calder says. "They had a certain feel, a certain thing we wanted. When those three songs were completed around mid-1995, we had a working model for the rest of the record."
Calder and Hadaway took the basic tracks and turned them into elaborate songs. Numerous keyboards were added. Exotic instruments such as sitar, vibraphone, xylophone, hammered dulcimer, even bagpipes were used. They even trotted out old-school synthesizers such as the Mini Moog, Oberheim Expander and the ARP String Ensemble.

"It's a challenging record for people to listen to because so much effort went into it," Calder says as he veers into a parking lot. "We were constantly trying to avoid the dangers of over-production."

The Pool Q's wanted to make a sophisticated record with a homemade approach, Calder says. It was more about artistic integrity than commercial potential.
"This record was about a feeling."

NO MONEY, BUT LOTS OF TIME
It's almost 1 a.m. when Calder pulls into the parking lot at Manny's Tavern. Constant cracks about the sights and sounds of late-night Atlanta - cop cars, crowds, paramedics, curious parking lot attendants - are peppered between his comments about the Pool Q's' music.
"This is crazy," he mutters. "2003."
You can picture Calder peering through his windshield, keeping a sharp eye on the ebb and flow of the world around him.  A former journalist who studied creative writing at the University of Florida, Calder is the CEO, guiding force and troop leader of the Pool Q conglomerate. He consistently has approached rock 'n' roll from a distinctively cock-eyed perspective, and the musicians he has met since moving to Atlanta have shared his exploratory nature.

"We've always been a band that liked to change and evolve in different ways," he says.

The band's first full-length album,The Deep End, was released in 1981. With songs such as "Stock Car Sin," "Rat Bait" and "Big Fat Tractor," its zany-but-literate pop rock captured a zealous audience in the Southeast. The Pool Q's soon found themselves opening national tours for acts such as Devo and The Police.
Big labels came calling, and the Atlanta band recorded two albums in the mid-1980s for A&M Records. In 1989, the Pool Q's recorded World War Two Point Five for Capitol Records. It would be the band's final studio output before releasing Royal Academy of Reality two months ago.

"From the very beginning, this record was a pretty big leap forward for an American guitar band," says Calder, who says he feels a closer kinship with English bands such as Radiohead and Coldplay than his American peers. "When we struck out on this road in 1992, it was very lonely. Our contemporaries were either throwing in the towel, going grunge or they were doing the same things over and over. There wasn't a lot of American guitar bands who were thinking quite the way we were at that point."
There still aren't. The Royal Academy of Reality is, possibly, the most progressive American rock record of the new century. It sets an artistic standard few bands will be able to match. But then, how many bands spend the better part of a decade on a single project?
"So many records are made now because of the production process, because of the industry," Calder says. "You have to honor a contract. You only have so much time in the studio. In modern recording, there are so many pressures against you, and I think that contributes to a lot of the bad work that's out there."
Calder says he and the Pool Q's took advantage of a disadvantage - they didn't have much money, but they had a lot of time.
"We wanted to make something that defied expectations. What did we have to lose? It wasn't like we were going to alienate an audience of 10 million fans like Springsteen, The Who or Sting."

PLUG IN THE HEADPHONES
Angular and atmospheric, The Royal Academy of Reality was painted on a "gargantuan canvas," Calder says. Songs such as "Deep South," "Sky Land" and "What Is Beyond" float along on an almost ambient sensibility, enticing the listener to delve deep. "Out of Nothing" sounds like a lost "Magical Mystery Tour" outtake; "The Do What and the Who What" is the album's closest thing to the Pool Q's' old "Rat Bait" cheekiness; and "Yin Yang" is the closest the band gets to gettin' funky.
Guitarist Bob Elsey's solos are not as prominent as in the past but are no less remarkable, and longtime Pool Q singer Anne Richmond Boston contributes her rich, distinctive vocals to three tracks, "The Radio in Memphis," "Nocturnal Transmission" and "The Wheel of the Sun." It's a multilayered, mesmerizing collection, but Calder and his bandmates weren't experimenting just for the sake of being experimental. There's an intoxicating method behind their madness, from the spaceship-sounding segues between songs to the lyrical imagery Calder conjures with his verses.

"I wanted to step away from narrative storytelling and write lyrics that didn't use those techniques as a crutch," he says. "I wanted to address philosophical issues, to be aware of the importance of language, the importance of poetry. I wanted to break away from the things I might have written about when I was younger."
The Royal Academy of Reality might not confuse a fan base of millions, but it just might win the band a whole new generation of admirers.

"This record was made for the right reasons," Calder says. "It wasn't made to fulfill a contractual obligation. There was no money there for us, no shower of dollars as an incentive. None of those things were there. It was just a commitment to make something we thought might be good."

With that, Calder pulls back into the Atlanta traffic and signs off for the night. Light will be arriving soon, and tomorrow will be another day for The Swimming Pool Q's.
Who knows? Maybe another 10-year project is waiting in the wings.

Where to find the Q's' Royal Academy
The Swimming Pool Q's' new CD,  Royal Academy of Reality, can be purchased at Sounds Familiar, Papa Jazz and Manifest Discs & Tapes. Keep an eye on www.swimmingpoolqs.com , where a new feature, "The Royal Academy of Reality Samples," soon will be up and running with 60-second snippets of the CD's songs. The Pool Q's have a long history of performing in Columbia, having graced the stages of The Township, Russell House ballroom, Greenstreet's and Rockafellas' in the past. Jeff Calder hopes the band can schedule a gig in Columbia in late summer or early fall, when the Pool Q's are planning a trip up the East Coast to New York.