The Swimming Pool Qs emerged from a late-1970s and early-’80s scene that spawned some of the South’s strangest and most enduring bands, from the B-52s and Pylon to R.E.M.
When the band comes to The Windjammer on Isle of Palms on Sept 13, singer, songwriter and guitarist Jeff Calder will experience a particularly nice bit of symmetry.
He grew up in Charleston.
“I lived there in the 1950s,” Calder told the Charleston City Paper in a recent interview. “My family moved to Florida in the ’60s and I eventually ended up in Atlanta.”
By the time Calder and lead guitarist Bob Elsey started the Swimming Pool Qs in 1978, Atlanta was becoming a place where a young band could make something genuinely weird and find an audience for it.
The problem was finding places outside of Georgia for the band to play its own shows.
“There wasn’t any new wave or punk music scene in the South in 1978,” Calder says. “We were really determined to get out and play.”
As hard as it might be to believe, given the time period, South Carolina was part of that early circuit, notably Charleston and Columbia.
“They took a chance on us,” Calder says of those cities. “And we developed a really strong relationship with them.”
Thanks to those early gigs, the band rose to a certain level of national fame within a year of forming, opening for Devo and the B-52s and touring with the Police.
At the time, the Qs fit into a peculiar Georgia musical ecosystem that produced artists who seemed to have little interest in following the rules of Southern rock. Calder traced it back to Atlanta’s punk culture, when you didn’t necessarily have to be a musician to play music.
“There were a lot of creative bands in Atlanta in the ’70s,” he said. “And a lot of the bands that we knew when we first began were full of artists of one sort or another,” Calder says. They were painters. They were people who normally would not have been in rock bands.”
In fact, at the time, Calder was a writer and vocalist Anne Richmond Boston was an artist.
Only Bob Elsey, Calder added with a laugh, “was actually a musician.”
That collision of personalities helped shape the Swimming Pool Qs’ sound — and Calder’s songwriting.
“I began to write some lyrics that were not necessarily about me,” Calder says. “A lot of the early songs we did were character-oriented songs, and they were sort of satirical songs. When I started writing songs for (vocalist) Anne Richmond Boston, that’s when I had to approach things on a much deeper level,” Calder said.
The band’s second A&M album, 1986’s Blue Tomorrow, reflected that evolution. Its first A&M record had been co-produced with Ed Stasium, the celebrated rock engineer whose credits included the Ramones and Talking Heads. For “Blue Tomorrow,” the band brought in British producer Mike Howlett.
“He worked totally differently from American producers,” Calder says. “British records production was very different from American record production.”
Howlett worked slowly and patiently, creating a record Calder describes as more sophisticated than its predecessor.
“The record has a very atmospheric sound to it by comparison with our prior record,” he says, pointing specifically to “Runaround” as a song that benefited from the approach.
The Qs made one more album before Richmond Boston departed. Her rich harmony vocals had been an integral part of the sound, and the band was eventually dropped by A&M. Though it became far less visible, Calder is insistent that the band itself never ended.
“We actually have never broken up,” he said.
Richmond Boston returned to the fold on the band’s expansive 2003 album The Royal Academy of Reality, and Calder says he’s working on a double-LP reissue of that album packed with rarities and outtakes. Meanwhile Richmond Boston just released her second solo album, I Should Be Happy.
That makes the 40th anniversary show for Blue Tomorrow less like an exercise in nostalgia than a chance to reconnect with the places the band was visiting when it was young, strange and determined to play anywhere that would have it.
Calder remembers South Carolina as one of those places. Which makes coming back all the sweeter.
“We have a lot of friends and family in South Carolina,” Calder said. “It really is great to be coming back to Charleston.”
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Doors open at 5 p.m. Sept. 13 at The Windjammer, 1008 Ocean Blvd., Isle of Palms. The show is free; the-windjammer.com.
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