SPIN MAGAZINE – Bigger Than Jesus: 25 Rock Deities, Rap Messiahs, and Would-Be Golden Gods #22 Swamp Dogg
Likely the most obscure entry on our list, this prolific soul-music oddball (and recent SPIN feature subject) has made a long career out of playing the underdog. (See, among many others, his 1989 album I Called for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock.) Sometimes that pose tipped over into a persecution complex, as on the insane album cover for 2007’s Resurrection. “Jesus Christ had all these people around him that supposedly had his back and one or two of them got together for a few pieces of silver and had his ass nailed to a cross,” said Swamp when we asked him about the cover. “You can’t trust nobody.” D.M.
http://www.spin.com/articles/bigger-than-jesus-rock-stars-god-kanye-west-beatles/?slide=22
NASHVILLE SCENE (Nashville weekly) – Best Local Rock Songs Ever, Part 17 [Marshall Chapman, Swamp Dogg, Chelle Rose, Brittany Howard and Ruby Amanfu, Megan McCormick]
Swamp Dogg, “Redneck”
Listen: YouTube
I just read Hidden In the Mix: The African-American Presence in Country Music — which is an important book, by the way — and it reminded me about Jerry Williams Jr., aka Swamp Dogg (see contributor Edd Hurt’s recent interview with Swamp Dogg here). On his first solo album, Total Destruction to Your Mind — which Alive Naturalsound Records just released in a remastered version — he covered Joe South’s racist-bating song “Redneck,” and ratcheted up both the tempo and the piss and vinegar. I mean, check it out: He’s snarling, shouting and smirking over a hot, hard-driving boogie. That was some bold shit in 1970.
http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashvillecream/archives/2013/05/09/best-local-rock-songs-ever-part-17-marshall-chapman-swamp-dogg-chelle-rose-brittany-howard-and-ruby-amanfu-megan-mccormick
WORLD MAGAZINE (Christian bi-weekly news magazine) – Positive CD review in Notable CDs
Because of his 1972 rendition of “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” Al Green usually gets credited with discovering the soul potential of Bee Gees ballads. But Jerry Williams—a.k.a. Swamp Dogg—actually discovered it first when he wrapped his voice around “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You” on his 1971 album, Rat On!, which along with two other early-Swamp Dogg longplayers, Total Destruction to Your Mind (1970), and Gag a Maggot (1973), has just been reissued by Alive Records.
Part of what has made Williams an underground legend is his capacity for explosively soulful unpredictability. Part big-voiced belter, part Fred Sanford, he exemplifies what “diversity” meant (or at least sounded like) before it became a humorless, oxymoronic talisman of the left. And although not every Swamp Dogg out-of-the-box lyric qualifies as wisdom (Williams wouldn’t inveigh against “killing babies in the womb” until 1981), his “total destruction to” the box itself just might.
http://www.worldmag.com/2013/05/notable_cds_0
OFF THE RACK (online music site) – Positive album mention with cover art
Swamp Dogg: Rat On!
Alive Records/Southbound
For his second album under the Swamp Dogg persona Jerry Williams Jr, songwriter/producer/soul singer, won praise via backhanded compliments; the record regularly turning up on worst album cover of all time lists. And it’s something Williams is proud of, as he puts it in the liner notes this is a big part of the reason that the record keeps getting discovered. Picked up on by hip-hop heads the album has some sweet grooves (Remember I Said Tomorrow) and the funky cuts suit the high happy croon of Swamp Dogg.
The killer on this album is the cover of The Bee Gees’ Got To Get A Message To You and there are several Curtis Mayfield/Baby Huey-esque political funk tracks.
The debut Swamp Dogg record, Total Destruction To Your Mind, has also been reissued. Vinyl and CD. These records, released in 1970 and 1971 respectively, continue to work well as a one-two. So much of the Rat On! material – take God Bless America For What – is so at odds with that absurd cover. It’s almost a disservice to the music. But you have to admire Williams’ rosy outlook all these years one, a bit like those ad-execs that turn up proud with their Worst Ad of the Year awards, or actors celebrating earning a Razzie.
Both this and Total Destruction are well worth having.
http://www.offthetracks.co.nz/swamp-dogg-rat-on/
TIMES PICAYUNNE (New Orleans daily) – Positive album mention with cover art
Irma Thomas to play intimate concert at Old U.S. Mint Performance Hall
By Alison Fensterstock
The elegant R&B veteran Irma Thomas mostly performs, these days, at large outdoor festival events. A concert Friday evening at the Old U.S. Mint Performance Hall, the Louisiana State Museum’s acoustically state-of-the-art new venue, is a comparatively rare chance to see the Grammy winner perform beloved New Orleans classics like “Ruler of My Heart” and “It’s Raining” in an intimate, seated space. It’s a prime opportunity for a date night, and tickets are limited, so grab your sweetie, make some dinner reservations in the Quarter, and ink it on your calendar.
irma thomas in between tears cover art.jpgThomas’ 1973 album “In Between Tears” was recently re-released on vinyl.Alive Naturalsound Records
Of interest to Irma fans, by the way, is a recent reissue from the Alive/Naturalsound Records label. Thomas’s 1973 deep soul album “In Between Tears”, co-written, arranged and produced by R&B firecracker Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams (who performs at the Ponderosa Stomp, at Rock n’Bowl in October) was re-released on vinyl, remastered with new liner notes, May 14. Give it a listen: the songs capture a raw passion and authority in Thomas’ voice that makes you wonder why it’s not considered an essential part of her catalog.
http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2013/05/irma_thomas_to_play_intimate_c.html
KCRW (Los Angeles Public Radio radio) – Irma’s “In Between Tears” aired on Anthony Valdez’ Eclectic24 show May 21st.
http://newmedia.kcrw.com/tracklists/?channel=Simulcast&date=2013-05-21&hour=00&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+KcrwLiveChannelTracklist-Last10SongsPlayed+%28KCRW+Live+Channel+Tracklist+-+Last+10+Songs+Played%29
WFMU (NJ radio) – Irma’s “You’re the Dog (I Do the Barking Myself)” aired on Therese’s show May 20th and “She’ll Never Be Your Wife” aired on Daniel Blumin’s show May 18th and “What’s so Wrong With You Loving Me” aired on Zzzzzero Hour with Bill Mac May 18th and Swamp’s “I Couldn’t Pay for What I Got Last Night” aired on Surface Noise with Joe McGasko May 19th and “Wifesitter” aired on Zzzzzero Hour with Bill Mac May 18th
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50728
https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50709
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50703
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50710
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/50703
WMSE (Milwaukee college radio) – Swamp’s “Wifesitter and rma’s “Coming From Behind (Monologue)” and “Wish Someone Would Care” aired on Andy turner’s Zero Hour show May 10.
http://zerohourradio.blogspot.com/2013/05/playlist-for-51013-baby-we-all-gotta-go.html
MONKEY PICKS (UK online music blog) – Positive Swamp & Irma album reviews with cover art.
GAG A MAGGOTT by SWAMP DOGG and IN BETWEEN TEARS by IRMA THOMAS (1973)
Following Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971), two more reissues from Alive Records bring the spotlight back on the inimitable Swamp Dogg.
Gag a Maggott (that extra ‘t’ is annoying) was Swamp’s fourth album and after the previous sleeves depicting him wearing orange shorts sitting on a dump truck and riding a giant white rat, this one sees our hero inside a garbage can with maggots on his face. The cover he says “was designed to make you puke and possibly shit yourself.” Swamp Dogg wasn’t your average 70s soul man.
Once again, in between sessions of hard partying, he cut an album of soulful funk infused with his offbeat humour and natty way with words. “Wife Sitter” is a prime example and one of his best songs as he chortles away at his antics of taking care of other men’s wives. “Don’t worry about your kids, I’ll treat them kind, after all, half of them are mine” His infectious laugh makes such behaviour almost sound commendable.
“I Couldn’t Pay For What I Got Last Night” is another in-the-pocket groove (Little Beaver on guitar) which give credence to Swamp’s claim that “the album is so funky it’ll gag a maggot” and his rearrangement of “Midnight Hour” breathes fresh life into the original album’s only cover. Maggott isn’t quite up to the standard of the previous albums and has one horrible calypso track – “T T” – but it still shows Swampy as a unique talent, perhaps only now getting his dues. As his says in his new liner notes, “Hell, I was great back then, but I was the only one who knew it or gave a goddam”.
The vinyl reissue is faithful to the LP and the CD version features two extra live tracks, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” and the Stones’s “Honky Tonk Woman”.
In addition to his own releases Swamp cut records on others; Doris Duke perhaps the best example (if you’ve not heard her I’m A Loser LP, get on it), and in 1973 he produced and wrote most of an album for Irma Thomas, In Between Tears; her first LP since her glory (such as they were) days at Imperial in ’66.
Gritty and strident, Thomas is in strong voice throughout. Some tracks, like “You’re The Dog (I Do The Barking Myself)” sound like a Swamp Dogg album with a different vocalist but the way she pours heart and soul into the extended raw blues version of her old hit “Wish Someone Would Care” is totally her own and the result spectacular. “Turn My World Around” is more danceable (reminiscent of Duke’s killer “I Can’t Do Without You”) and ends the record on an upbeat note. The cover artwork though is more ghastly than anything ever to adorn Mr. Dogg’s work.
This reissue also features a couple of bonus cuts on the CD and a story from Dogg how he and his band kept an eye on Irma whilst making the record. No wonder when he bumped into her years later she made out she didn’t know who he was. You’ll have to buy the CD to find out more…
http://monkey-picks.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/gag-maggott-by-swamp-dogg-and-in.html
HYPERBOLEUM (online music site) – Positive album review.
Irma Thomas: In Between Tears
After relocating from New Orleans to Los Angeles, soul queen Irma Thomas largely disappeared from public view for a few years. But a series of singles produced by Jerry Williams (a.k.a. Swamp Dogg) on the indieCanyon, Roker and Fungus labels led to this eight-track release in 1973. Williams had proven himself a talented musician and producer, and in the latter capacity he leaves behind the absurdist humor of his own records to bring Thomas a helping of Southern soul and West Coast funk. Thomas’ new material, much of it written by Williams, has plenty of bite, but it’s more personal than broad. The wistful drama of her early Minit and Imperial sides had given way to something heavier, more worldly-wise, weary and womanly. When she sings of broken relationships, it’s from the experience of being spurned rather than the hope of being accepted, and when she takes stock of her life, she’s not afraid to highlight problems with the balance sheet. The transition from her earlier work is particularly apparent in a remake of “Wish Someone Would Care” which evolved from heartbroken yearning to mortally wounded. Alive’s 2013 reissue adds two bonus tracks, including the pre-album B-side “I’ll Do it All Over You.” This little-known album caught Thomas in a fiery and outspoken mood, and its return to print makes a welcome addition to her better-known releases.
http://www.hyperbolium.com/2013/05/19/irma-thomas-in-between-tears/
STOMP & STAMMER (Atlanta monthly music magazine) – NEWS LEAK
Swamp Dogg, soul man of legend, is reissuing his “Gag A Magott” and “In Between Tears” LPs with bonus tracks on May 14. It’ll mark the first time both offerings have been available on wax since 1973, so set those turntables to stun…
AMERICANA MUSIC SHOW (Americana Radio Show) – Choking To Death, I Couldn’t Pay For What I Got Last Night, Midnight & Honky Tonk Woman aired on May 20th.
A lot of people that think soul music is reserved for ex church choir boys and girls cuttin’ loose after church. And then there’s Swamp Dogg. He writes soul music straight from the streets and bars. He’s just released a remastered version of his classic Gag A Maggot album. It’s a little shocking how un-PC he can be, but it rings so true and authentic you just can’t beat his take on southern soul. I’m adding “Choking To Death (From The Ties That Bind),” “I Couldn’t Pay For What I Got Last Night,” “Midnight Hour,” and the cover of “Honky Tonk Woman (Live)”
ROCTOBER (online music site) – Positive album reviews
Swamp Dogg “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” “Rat On!” “Gag A Maggott”
[GUEST REVIEW BY JAMES PORTER] (Alive) Swamp Dogg has released over a dozen albums since the 1970, 1971, and 1973 LPs that Alive is reissuing this year, but as outrageous and bizarre as many of them have been, nothing matches the mind-blowing power of these R&B/rock/protest/progressive masterpieces that musically kept pretty loyal to Southern soul but conceptually were like nothing else on the market (which is probably why they were relegated to bargain bins instead of Casey Kasem countdowns). In 2000 Roctober published our Swamp Dogg listener guide, and the following excerpts hold true today:
After bursting on the scene as Little Jerry Williams in the 50s, the Virginia native continued in that vein for years, with minor success as a producer, songwriter and soul singer, until 1970 when he retired the sharkskin suit and the love songs and finally gave the world a piece of his mind with these two albums that started the show. Looking back, “Total Destruction” is like a a total reaction to the plastic soul sound of the period. While other producers would assemble a vocal group, string and horn sections, and a wah wah guitarist (to get the white kids!) in one studio and let them battle it out, nothing is wasted to excess on Swamp Dogg’s debut. Yes, there’s the guitar obbligatos of Pete Carr, Swamp’s own Gospel piano, and the usual horn section, but it’s Robert Popwell’s bass playing that defines the sound. You can hear his forbidding pulse to best effect on “The World Beyond,” holding down the bottom while Swamp recites a scarifying tale of life after wartime, one of the LP’s several powerful, unique, political statements. “The Baby is Mine,” a child custody song not to be confused with “Mama’s Baby…Daddy’s Maybe” (a minor hit from the same LP, Swamp’s only non-Jerry Williams chart appearance unless you count a Kid Rock SD sample) is almost too much for one sitting: “When I come by the house/I’m quiet as a mouse/but he always starts something every time…I got my rights/she might be his wife/but the baby is mine!” While this album isn’t as out there as similar soul experiments like Funkadelic or Gil Scott-Heron, songs like “Synthetic World,” “Redneck,” and the title track are more authentic than (admittedly great) Motown trifles like “Ball of Confusion” or “Friendship Train.” Swamp Dogg was speaking his mind while the Motown songs were written to cash in on fads. “Rat On!” is slightly more normal — the protest riffs, with the exception of “God Bless America,” are less bitter and more generalized, and there are a few more cheatin’ and infidelity songs (“Creepin’ Away,” “That Ain’t My Wife”) than previous, but the Dogg is still in top form.
For years both of this LPs have been available on one CD on domestic reissues (the SDEG label is Swamp Dogg’s own) and from Charly in the UK, but not enough can be said about the cover art that ALive reproduces in full 12″ glory on the new vinyl reissues. “Total Destruction” has an outrageous sleeve (an out of focus Polaroid of SD in shorts and a mortarboard sitting in the back of a garbage truck) so raw and funny and strange and amateurish that the devastating soul rock it sheathes is all the more powerful, and “Rat On!” (Ratso’s fave LP cover of all time) has him riding a giant rat. If only to get the cover art restored to full size (even on the CD resissues it’s a full five inches instead of two mini-covers on the prior CDs) these loving reissues would be worth the price, but they also sound great.
“Gag A Maggott” from 1973 has also been reissued. As with “Rat On!” the protest overtones have been toned down in favor of his #2 specialty (cheating songs with a bizarre twist). Since Swamp’s label Stone Dogg was distributed by TK (the famed Miami soul label) he’s got damn near the whole roster pitching in. George McCrae (soon to record “Rock Your Baby”) and his wife Gwen (Rockin’ Chair”) and the underrated guitar of Little Beaver, who cut some fine jazz influenced blues discs of his own. Here he gets off some soulful strumming on “Please Let Me Kiss You Goodbye,” gets funky on “Choking to Death from the Ties that Bind,” and pretends he’s Jerry reed on the countryish “Plastered to the Wall.” There’s also an early attempt at Calypso (which Swamp embraced wholeheartedly decades later) and the infamous “Wife Sitter.” You can’t beat the bonus material here a stunning cover of “Honky Tokn Woman” and Swamp’s great “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.” Rat on, indeed!
http://roctoberreviews.blogspot.com/2013/02/guest-review-by-james-porter-alive.html
WHEN YOU MOTOR AWAY (online music site) – Positive album reviews of Irma’s album with cover art and audio streams.
Irma Thomas – The Soul Queen of New Orleans – Reissues In Between Tears
Alive Naturalsound Records has released the soul classic In Between Tears by Irma Thomas – the Soul Queen of New Orleans. Thomas’ third album was produced by Jerry Williams Jr (Swamp Dogg) and features Duane Allman on a couple cuts. Irma Thomas never received the first name recognition of other 60’s soul divas like Aretha, Patti, Martha, Diana and Tina. Much of this was due to the economic marginalization she experienced in her youth. Irma had her first child at 14 and by the time she was 19 she had been married twice and had three more children. Despite these roadblocks, Thomas managed to become noticed in the Crescent City music scene. Her first two albums were produced by NOLA legend Allen Toussaint. Her first album featured the original version of “Time is on My Side.” The Rolling Stones recorded it soon after without a tip of the hat to Irma’s vocal phrasings or Toussaint’s instantly recognizable arrangement.
Irma continued to work with Toussaint and other producers. Her biggest hit was the ’64 soul classic “I Wish Someone Would Care” which reached #17 on the Billboard R&B Charts.
Motown and Stax were the only labels with the infrastructure required for national distribution of music which had been, until recently, described and marketed as “race records.” Relegated to small labels with poor distribution and minimal promotion budgets, Irma Thomas was never more than a regional presence during the 60’s. In the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969, Irma left New Orleans to find a musical future in LA. This did not happen. Four years later she was back and looking to record.
Jerry Williams, whose production helped Betty Wright achieve national recognition. was selected to record Irma’s third album – “In Between Tears.” The album is the music of a strong woman reflecting the nascent women’s movement of the the early 70’s.
Eight of the ten tracks were written by Jerry Williams Jr, aka Swamp Dogg Track 8 – “Turn My World Around” was penned by Irma Thomas. The fifth track – “You’re The Dog (I Do The Barking Myself)” features Duane Allman on guitar. The album is a soul classic which will complete the collection of Irma Thomas’ early recordings. Enjoy these two cuts. Let them be your entry ino the world of the Soul Queen of New Orleans.
Irma Thomas makes multiple appearances every year at Jazzfest. I have been blessed to see her many times. She has not lost a beat. Buy this music now. It is a great substitute for enjoying the lagniappe of New Orleans in person. Go to Alive Naturalsound Records and order your copy. While you are there check out Swamp Dogg’s “Gag a Maggot.” It’s a musical twofer which should not be ignored.
http://whenyoumotoraway.blogspot.com/2013/05/irma-thomas-soul-queen-of-new-orleans.htmldogg-outsider-art-in.html
BLINDED BY SOUND (online music site) – Positive album review of Irma’s LP.
Swamp Dogg: Gag A Maggot CD Review
By Greg Barbrick
Swamp Dogg was once described by Dave Marsh as “Soul music’s chief eccentric.” It is a title he more than lives up to on his third full-length release Gag A Maggot (1973), which has just been reissued by the Alive Records label. With Swamp Dogg, the entire LP package was important, and he seems to have had a particular interest in creating the worst album covers ever. In the reissue’s liner notes, he even laments the fact that the artwork for Gag A Maggot (with him in a trashcan) did not get as many votes for “worst album cover ever” as his previous Rat On! did. Well, the giant rat was kind of special I guess, but as far as the music goes, Gag A Maggot is every bit is memorable as Rat On! was.
The album opens with one of Dogg’s funniest tunes, “Wife Sitter.” As is the case on many of the tracks, the horns of The Swamp Dogg Band add an outstanding element to the classic R&B sound. “Please Let Me Kiss You Goodbye” is another excellent example of his powerhouse horn section. One of the more surprising ingredients in such a funky setting is the flute, which is used to great effect on “Mighty Mighty Dollar Bill.”
One constant throughout Gag A Maggot, and throughout the music of Swamp Dogg in general is the piano. This is what he plays, and its presence brings a strong roadhouse feel to songs like “T T,” and the closing “Plastered to the Wall (Higher than the Ceiling).” The most unusual cut on the original LP has to be his cover version of “In the Midnight Hour.” The song was a hit for Wilson Pickett, who co-wrote it with Steve Cropper back in 1965. I have to say that this version is basically unrecognizable, as it has been “Swamped” by the group. That is to say that this version has very little to do with what we have come to know, save the lyrics, and everything to do with Swamp Dogg. I think he does much better when he uses his own material however.
This new release also includes two bonus tracks, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” and “Honky Tonk Woman.” Both were recorded live for a 1972 broadcast on San Francisco’s KSAN radio station. “Mama’s Baby” was co-written by Swamp (Jerry Williams Jr.) and Gary U.S. Bonds and appeared on the 1970 album Total Destruction to Your Mind. “Honky Tonk Woman” is the Stones classic, and is pretty strong. Both are very stripped down, especially compared to the album tracks. I imagine this is because of the radio broadcast situation.
All in all, this reissue of Gag A Maggot is another great example of some of the finest funk and R&B going in the early ’70s, and should not be missed.
http://blindedbysound.com/swamp-dogg-gag-a-maggott-cd-review/
WHEN YOU MOTOR AWAY (online music site) – Positive album reviews of Gag A Maggott.
Unchain your inner Dogg – Outsider Art in a Mainstream Package
Get it today! Earlier this year, Alive NaturalSound reissued Swamp Dogg’s first two albums – Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On. This present from the swamp funk gods was reviewed by WYMA here. Swamp Dogg is the product of early 60’s songwriter, producer, Nixon enemies list member and musical iconoclast Jerry Williams, Jr. Swamp Dogg’s eclectic taste is evident in the cover art for the first two albums.
For those of us who remember Swamp Dogg, these two reissues were not enough. Something was missing. It’s like Curly and Larry without Moe, Bosh and Wade without James or Billy and Frank without Dusty. Alive Natural Sounds has reissued the third album in this holy trinity of Swamp Dogg’s early 70’s releases. Gag a Maggott completes this musical triptych of swamp funk, country soul, and cross cultural irreverence.
Swamp’s impeccable production values and musical arrangements recorded at Miami’s TK Studios with the horns of the Swamp Dogg Band, Ivan “Breeze” Olander’s drums and Willie “Little Beaver” Hale’s guitar. (Little Beaver is a musician’s musician who inspired finger-picking god Leo Kottke to write an eponymous homage to Little Beaver’s finger picking skills.) The result is difficult to describe. Swamp is the ultimate musical and lyrical shapeshifter. He and his bandmates are whatever the listener wants them to be. Check out the requisite Swamp Dogg love song – “I Couldn’t Pay for What I got Last Night.”. As I listen it is alternately Memphis soul, Nashville Country or Texas R&B. The horn arrangements can change in a measure from the Memphis Horns to Ides of March “Vehicle.” Swamp is a master while having fun with our ears. He is constantly echoing The Contours famous lines…..”Watch me now, oh……Do you love me?” How can love not love Doggbrother Number One?
The remastered album includes two bonus tracks recored live in 1972 at KSAN radio: “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” and “Honky Tonk Woman”.
GAG A MAGGOTT TRACK LISTING:
1. Wife Sitter
2. Choking To Death (From The Ties That Bind)
3. I Couldn’t Pay For What I Got Last Night
4. Mighty Mighty Dollar Bill
5. Midnight Hour
6. Please Let Me Kiss You Goodbye
7. T T
8. Why Must We Fall (When We Fall In Love)
9. Plastered To The Wall (Higher Than The Ceiling)
10. Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe (Live) (CD & digital bonus track)
11. Honky Tonk Woman (Live) (CD & digital bonus track)
This is not some raggedy-ass reissue music deserving to remain buried in the dust archives of soul impostors. Swamp Dogg is the real thing. The usual rating systems only scratch the surface of the man, the legend, the Doggfather. 5 stars or 10 out of 10 are deserved for his entire body of work. Nobody has described Dogg better than himself:
“If your dog sleeps on the sofa, shits on the rug, pisses on the drapes, chews up your slippers, humps your mother-in-law’s leg, jumps on your new clothes, and licks your face, he’s never gotten out of character. You understand what he did, you curse while making allowances for him, but your love for him never diminishes. Commencing in 1970, I sung about sex, niggers, love, rednecks, war, peace, dead flies, home wreckers, Sly Stone, my daughters, politics, revolution, and blood transfusions (just to name a few), and never got out of character.”
So be the the first on your block to do it Swamp Doggystyle. Make your parents or kids squirm. Order it now as a digital download, cd, or the grandeur of a color vinyl pressing.
http://whenyoumotoraway.blogspot.com/2013/05/unchain-your-inner-dogg-outsider-art-in.html
LOS ANGELES EXAMINER (LA online music site) – Positive album review of TDTYM.
Schwindy’s indie music spotlight: Swamp Dogg
No, this review isn’t some new incarnation of Snoop Dogg. Swamp Dogg was here long before Snoop laid down his first rhymes.
I should say that when I first saw the title of this album, I thought it sounded like it could just as easily be a Funkadelic album. Then I heard the first lyrics: “Sittin’ on a Corn Flake, ridin’ on a rollerskate.” I don’t know about you, but the first artist that came to my mind with those absurd lyrics was Screamin’ Jay Hawkins. Vocally, on the other hand, Swamp Dogg sounds a lot more like Sam Cooke or Willie Hightower. Think about that. The bizarre meets the smooth. That’s a good way to sum up this artist.
If you listen to the lyrics of “Synthetic World,” you might not guess that it was written recently instead of 1970. He expresses his disdain and fatigue for a world where what’s real is a freak. It seems just as pertinent now that so much of our personal interaction is done on social media.
Swamp Dogg is a great combination of funk and soul that will get you moving and thinking simultaneously. His first two albums Total Destruction to Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971) have been remastered and re-released on Alive Naturalsound Records. Both albums are available now and if you like old-time soul, you should add them to your collection.
http://www.examiner.com/review/schwindy-s-indie-music-spotlight-swamp-dogg
BLINDED BY SOUND (online music site) – Positive album review of Irma’s LP.
Irma Thomas – In Between Tears CD Review
By Greg Barbric
“The Soul Queen of New Orleans” is what they call Irma Thomas, and after listening to her newly reissued In Between Tears, I can certainly see why. The album was initially released in 1973 on the homegrown Fungus Records label, so it has remained well under the radar for the past 40 years. As part of what is turning out to be a remarkable reissue program, Alive Records have just re-released In Between Tears. The record has been fully remastered, and two bonus tracks have been added. It is one of the finest examples of early ’70s soul I have ever heard.
The opening track is “In Between Tears,” and it is a literal blast of horns, courtesy of “The Swamp Dogg Band.” Swamp Dogg, a.k.a. Jerry Williams Jr. and his band are all over this album, and it is clear that they were one of the most underrated R&B outfits of the day. This is very much Ms. Thomas’ record though. Her powerful vocals reflect a woman who knows exactly what she is doing.
It is no surprise that Irma Thomas grew up in the church, for many of the best tracks have something of a gospel feel. This is most noticeable on “You’re The Dog (I Do The Barking Myself).” This track is also graced by the presence of Duane Allman. Apparently Allman just happened to be hanging out at the Capricorn Studios at the time, which worked out well for everybody. His guitar playing is most noticeable during the fadeout. To be honest, there are no real fireworks, but his performance on the album’s centerpiece is a very different story.
The twelve-and-a-half minute medley “Coming From Behind” (Monologue)/ “Wish Someone Would Care” is amazing. Thomas takes a cue from Issac Hayes’ classic “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” in the lengthy monologue “Coming From Behind,” and shows us that she is nobody’s fool. “I’m in love, but I’m miserable,” she states at one point, and Lord help the man who made her feel that way. This is no purring kitten, nor is she hardened and angry. No, she is a real lady, unlucky in love, but willing to work to make it work. To hear such brutal honesty on a record is a compelling factor to be sure, but the quality of the conviction in her voice is something else again.
Thomas wrote “Wish Someone Would Care,” which is the song that the monologue leads in to. She really lets loose here, and Allman’s contributions are the perfect compliment to her voice. The gospel-tinged “Turn My World Around” closed out the original LP, and once again the horns of The Swamp Dogg Band shine brightly.
The two bonus tracks are fine examples of early ’70s soul as well. “We Won’t Be In Your Way Anymore” and “I’ll Do It All Over You” were the A and B sides of a stand-alone single. They serve as great additions to the set.
When Alive reissued the first two Swamp Dogg albums a couple of months ago, I was impressed. Those were records that I had heard a lot about, but had never had the chance to actually hear. It seemed like a really cool find for them, and I really did not expect anything more. With the release of In Between Tears I am seeing a much bigger picture. There was some serious music going on in the original Dogg’s scene, and it was not just confined to his own recordings. The quality of the musicianship behind Irma here reminds me of the amazing house band at Stax, which is high praise. I sure hope there are more gems like this just waiting for our discovery. For now though, In Between Tears will do very nicely indeed.
http://blindedbysound.com/reviews/irma-thomas%20-in-between-tears-cd-review-/
ABOUT.BLUES (online bluesmusic site) – Positive album reviews with album art in New May Releases
Irma Thomas – ‘In Between Tears’ (Alive Naturalsound Records)
“Irma Thomas’ In Between Tears”Photo courtesy Alive Naturalsound Records
New Orleans music legend Irma Thomas had all but given up her career when she was coaxed back into the studio by producer Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams to record a series of singles for Cactus Records in L.A. in 1969 and 1970 that featured a young hotshot guitarist by the name of Duane Allman. Williams later convinced Thomas to record the full-length album In Between Tears, a lost classic of soul, blues, and gospel music sung as only Thomas could belt ’em out. Aside from the eight original album tracks, this 2013 first-time CD reissue includes Thomas’s 1971 single “We Won’t Be In Your Way Anymore” b/w “I’d Do It All Over You,” both songs featuring Allman, as well as new liner notes from Swamp Dogg himself. (Release date: 05/14/13)
“Swamp Dogg’s Gag A Maggott”Photo courtesy Alive Naturalsound Records
Gag A Maggott was the illustriously-named fourth album from cult R&B legend Swamp Dogg, a visionary collection of funk, soul, and blues music that was originally recorded in 1973 at TK Studios in Miami with a slate of talented players. The album featured a solid cover of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” as well as the original blues-burner “Choking To Death (from The Ties That Bind),” which would later be covered by Canned Heat. This first-time CD reissue includes two previously-unreleased bonus tracks recorded live at the KSAN-FM radio studios in 1972, and the CD booklet includes new liner notes from Swamp Dogg and a number of rare photos from the Dogg’s personal archives. (Release date: 05/14/13)
http://blues.about.com/od/bluescds/tp/Blues-CDs-New-Releases-May-2013.htm
ELSEWHERE (NZ online music site) – Positive feature/review with photos and album art.
SWAMP DOGG PROFILED (2013): Covering up his talents
The world of popular music is populated by lost prophets, wandering souls, damaged geniuses and those taken too young. There are also musicians who couldn’t handle the sudden fame thrust upon them, and those who couldn’t handle it when fame never knocked on their door or suddenly abandoned them.
This is a world of venal villains (record companies, managers and lawyers usually) and artists who were often their victims.
Swamp Dogg – born Jerry Williams in 1942 – endured some of the above and after a short career under his own name, adopted his new moniker . . . and it was all downhill as far as sales went.
His two early Dogg albums Total Destruction of Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! from the following year (in a hilariously awful cover of him riding a white rat) all but disappeared.
Their recent reissue allows us to hear an often exceptional soul-funk singer who had country music in his bloodstream. Proof of the latter is he and Gary US Bonds co-wrote the country classic She’s All I Got (a hit for Johnny Paycheck and much covered).
Dogg began his recording life as Little Jerry Williams in the late Fifties then became a songwriter and producer for Atlantic Records where he hung out with the likes of Jerry Wexler and Phil Walden. Good grounding for what would follow.
He continued to record with little conspicuous success but because he had grown up with country music his sympathetic ear for the style kept him in studio work as a writer/producer.
swamptotalHowever a name change to Swamp Dogg and a determination to deliver edgy soul mixed with country (not an unfamiliar idiom, see here) meant his Dogg debut was fittingly recorded at Capricorn Studios in Macon, Georgia.
By any measure it’s a remarkable record for its amalgamation of tough funk with horns, deep soul and slippery country. He covers Georgia-born Joe South’s poke at southern white racists on Redneck and These Are Not My People, Bobby Goldsboro’s post-apocalypse but trite The World Beyond, co-wrote three with Gary US Bonds and another with Dee Irwin on I Was Born Blue. The other five all came from him, among them Synthetic World which opens “Hey you, I come from the bayou”. You believe him, even though he was from inner-city Portsmouth in Virginia which is closer to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Appalachians than the swamp.
But he certainly knew his southern country, as you can hear in the horns and guitars which he arranged for the yearning ballad I Was Born Blue (which has some rather odd lyrics, it has to be said) and Sal-A-Faster about moonshine.
Although not a lost classic – the Goldsboro, despite Dogg’s soulful yearning, pulls it back – Total Destruction nails down some furious soul-funk (the title track) and showcases a true southern country-soul singer (check Dust Your Head Color Red) who deserved better than for it to fail.
His own The Baby is Mine is a heartbreaking account of a separated father whose child now has another father-figure in their life who jealously makes trouble when Dogg visits his ex-wife – whom he no longer cares for – and their baby.
swamp_dogg_rat_onHowever he did himself no favours with the awful artwork for Rat On! which is usually in any list of the worst album covers of all time (although it’s surprising the photo on Total Destruction doesn’t make the list also). Which was a shame because he was always a (mostly) serious artist and again touched on important topics like infidelity (Predicament #2, That Ain’t My Wife), politics (remember I Said Tomorrow) and race (God Bless America For What). He also covers the Bee Gees Got to Get a Message To You and Mickey Newbury’s country hit She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye.
In the liner notes he writes “produced, arranged, piano, vocal background and everything else of any importance Jerry Williams Jr” and also claims the cover concept. It was the cover, he writes in the reissue, that kept the album from disappearing into obscurity.
2009_swamp_doggHis penchant for crazy covers continued through his subsequent career (one equally odd one was for An Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year).
And although he continued to record albums, co-wrote a book about a fictional soul singer and had great if occasional success as a songwriter and producer, Swamp Dogg is a name that mostly exists in footnotes.
But these two albums capture a strong soul-country singer who was somewhat outside the mainstream, and one well worth investigating.
Never judge an album by its cover, huh?
By Graham Reid, posted May 6, 2013
Video
http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/absoluteelsewhere/5635/swamp-dogg-profiled-2013-covering-up-his-talents/
HOME OF THE GROOVE(online music blog) – Positive feature on Swamp & Irma’s Canyon Sessions
IRMA & SWAMP DOGG: The Canyon Sessions
Back in March, out of the blue, David Marchese from SPIN sent me this link to his impressive feature on Jerry ‘Swamp Dogg’ Williams, Jr., a truly independent and amazingingly prolific R&B artist, writer, producer, publisher, label-owner, and walking definition of “gonzo”. I knew various bits and pieces about the man and his career; but the article was a welcome and entertaining overview that taught me more. It is great to know he’s still alive and musically kickin’ it at age 70.
Kudos to David for conveying a sense of Swamp Dogg’s multifaceted personality, along with the talent and savvy that have kept him navigating the back alleys of the music business for over half a century (he cut his first record at 12). Lesser mortals might have packed it in long ago, but he’s maintained the spark and refused to fade away. Read the article and marvel at his, um, Doggedness.
As far as HOTG goes, Swamp Dogg has never had more than a tangential association with New Orleans music;; and 99% of that revolves around his brief but intense collaboration with one of the city’s most revered soul artists, Irma Thomas. In 1970, he was called upon to write, arrange and produce an album’s worth of material on her for the Canyon label, which folded before the LP could be released. Several years later, Swamp Dogg found the means to put it out, albeit briefly, as In Between Tears on his own imprint.
I found my copy in the bins of a Memphis used record store over 20 years ago, and have since picked up several reissues of it, as well as a few of the related 45s; but it took David’s solid nudge to get me motivated to investigate the backstory of the project and (slowly) pull together this post.
[Notes: Information herein has been gleaned from my own research and several significant sources: David Marchese’s “The Real Mother****ing Doggfather”, as mentioned and linked above, from SPIN, dated March 5, 2013; Jeff Hannusch’s chapter on Irma Thomas in I Hear You Knockin’ (Swallow Publications, 1985); Swamp Dogg’s notes to the 1993 Shanachie CD, Turn My World Around, and 2000 S.D.E.G. CD, The Little Jerry Williams Anthology (1954-1969); plus Tony Rounce’s fine notes to the excellent 2006 Kent Soul CD compilation, Irma Thomas, A Woman’s Viewpoint: The Essential 1970s Recordings. Also of extreme help is David Chance’s massively annotated Jerry Williams, Jr./Swamp Dogg Discography, not to be missed for you completists who don’t know about it already.
In Between Tears was first reissued on a Charly (UK) LP in 1981. The also now out of print Shanachie CD noted above contained Swamp Dogg’s Canyon material on Irma, but with certain of the original rhythm tracks replaced by him with newly recorded players. In 2007, he released Two Phases of Irma Thomas, on his own Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group label, a CD compiling the original album along with the 1993 version. Also, Alive Naturalsound Records will soon reissue the original album on vinyl and CD. So, find a way to add it to your collection.]
IRMA’S LATE 1960s DILEMMA
In my February post on Allen Toussaint’s 1965 career reboot, I mentioned in passing that Irma’s promising recording career had several setbacks in the mid-1960s. Imperial Records signed her after their parent company, Liberty Records, bought out Joe Banashak’s Minit label in 1963. Starting in 1964, she cut a string of good to excellent singles for Imperial, recorded mostly in Los Angeles, with at least four songs getting into the charts. Her self-penned “Wish Someone Would Care” was the most successful, becoming a Top 20 hit; but prospects cooled down by 1965, even when Imperial teamed her up with Toussaint back home for the outstanding “Take A Look”/”What Are Trying To Do” (#66137) and other tunes. So, the company let her go.
At that point, Irma went without a recording contract for over a year. As I said in that prior post, I’ve found nothing to indicate that Toussaint and his new partner in Tou-Sea Productions, Marshall Sehorn, attempted to sign Irma in the interim – a missed opportunity that has never been adequately explained. But, since she had no chance to record, Irma worked the Southern and Gulf Coast circuit playing club and college dates to support her family, also spending nearly a month in 1966 performing on tour in England. She had gone there earlier on the success of ”Wish Someone Would Care” and was still in demand.
Around the start of 1967, Chess Records signed Irma to their roster. The label had developed a prominent soul market presence with Etta James among others others on their roster, making the addition of Irma look like a very good move for all concerned. Spurred by Aretha Franklin’s success on Atlantic Records with the Muscle Shoals sound, Chess soon sent Etta, Laura Lee, and Irma for sessions at producer Rick Hall’s Fame [Florence Alabama Music Enterprises] Studios, backed primarily by famed house band, the Swampers. Irma’s sessions resulted in over a dozen finished tracks of fine material written by Dan Penn & Spooner Oldham, Otis Redding, Maurice Dollison, and Oliver Sain, among others. Her excitement at recording there plus the great musicians and gritty, very soulful material brought out some of the best performances of her career.
But, after releasing only three singles from the sessions, none of which were commercially successful, Chess summarily let her go. As Irma explained it to Jeff Hannusch, the company refused to promote her singles or release any more of them because she would not consent to have her gigs controlled by a budding music business mogul, Phil Walden. His agency in Macon, Georgia had a deal with Chess and other labels to book their artists; but Irma balked in particular at the large cut he took out of the performance fees (some of which probably got kicked back to the label). Though she made a brave stand, it meant that Irma missed out on a lot of helpful national touring exposure, as Walden also managed Otis Redding, and booked Sam & Dave, and, of course, Etta James, among many other names in soul music.
[I need to do a re-post on Irma’s Chess sides, it’s been almost 10 years since I briefly touched on them when all my vinyl was in storage after moving. So, they’re now on the list again….]
By 1968, recording opportunities at home had quickly deteriorated due to the bankruptcy and demise of the only significant local studio and associated distribution operation, both owned by the legendary Cosimo Matassa. Many of the independent labels in the area that he did business with closed down or went on hiatus, leaving Irma no chance to make a record in the once thriving scene. Gigs for R&B artists were scarce in New Orleans, as well, with rock bands ruling the roost and a shrinking list of venues to play. So, she went back to working along Gulf Coast, at least until the devastating Hurricane Camille came down hard on the area in the summer of 1969, shutting down or leveling many of the clubs she regularly played. In the aftermath, Irma parted ways with her band and moved to Los Angeles, working days as a retail clerk to make ends meet and doing pick-up gigs on the weekends, singing mainly cover tunes.
In L.A., Irma reconnected with some New Orleans expatriate musicians and artists who she had known early in her career, including Harold Battiste and Mac Rebennack. That led to some session work as a backing singer, and probably helped bring her to the attention of aspiring label-owner Wally Roker. A veteran of a New York doo-wop vocal group, the Heartbeats, he had subsequently worked around the business as a publisher, producer and promo man for various outfits, and was just cranking up an independent of his own, Canyon Records, as the decade rolled over.
Roker was swift to scoop up Irma for his new venture and put her in the studio with Monk Higgins (a/k/a Milton Bland) arranging and running the session. Higgins had made his mark on the Chicago scene as a saxophonist, writer, and producer/arranger before relocating to L.A. around the same time as Irma. The resulting tracks were issued as her initial Canyon single late in 1969 or early 1970.
“Save A Little Bit For Me” (Mamie Galore-Dee Ervin-Monk Higgins)
Irma Thomas, Canyon 21, 1969
“That’s How I Feel About You” (Vee Pee-Mamie Galore-R. Brooks)
Though displaying #21, this single was really only the label’s fourth release. Roker started numbering at 18, since it was commonly thought to be beneficial to give DJs the illusion that a record company had been around for a while. Higgins co-wrote the top side with his wife, who generally went by Virginia Davis or Mamie Galore on writing credits, and Dee Ervin (a/k/a DiFosco Ervin, Jr). Ms Galore is also acknowledged as writer of the flip along with one Vee Pea, which BMI shows as an alias for….Virginia Bland (she needed two alias on one song?). Ray Brooks (a/k/a Marshall R. Greathouse in the BMI database) also got in on the credits. Obviously, these folks were well-prepared to make an end-run around the IRS, should either of these songs have struck paydirt and generated royalties; but that contingency failed to arise.
While Irma did a fine job on the mid-tempo soul of “Save A Little Bit For Me”, which has a pleasant-enough, generic gospel feel, the song just doesn’t go much of anywhere musically. The real keeper to me is her take on the other side’s deeper and much more engaging “That’s How I Feel About You”. It is simply killer, sounding like something from her Imperial pop catalog in terms of style and instrumentation. Still, neither side registered enough airplay to trigger sales, and left Roker to consider another approach to effectively utilize and display Irma’s soulful assets.
To retool, he turned to a multi-faceted talent who had recently signed on to provide services for Canyon.
ENTER THE DOGG
He was one weird dude, but he knew how to take care of business. – Irma Thomas’ nutshell assessment of Swamp Dogg, as quoted in I Hear You Knockin’
Jerry William, Jr. came to Canyon in his late 20s after having worked for Atlantic Records’ new Cotillion label for a frustrating year or so. A recording artist since his teens, he had been on a succession of labels in New York and Philadelphia, and involved in writing and production, too. At Cotillion he cut a few singles himself and produced records for other vocalists, but scored no hits and was unable to deal with the corporate record-making mindset that had become the Atlantic Group status quo. So, he and they parted ways in 1969. Several LSD trips during the period left his creative spigot stuck open and tricked-out his already singular nature with a new attitude, inspiring Williams to write a bunch of new material and head South to record. In his recollections to Marchese, Swamp Dogg pegged the spot for those sessions as Muscle Shoals with the Swampers backing him. But it must have been a slip of the tongue, since they occurred one state over with a different band.
In his liner notes to Little Jerry Williams Anthology (1954-1969), Williams recounted how in 1969 he approached Phil Walden, who had just opened Capricorn Studios in Macon, Georgia, about a partnering in a production deal. They reached an agreement, and Walden gave Williams use of the studio and staff musicians (though not the Swampers, a few had played at Fame) to record artists doing his material to be placed with outside labels. The first projects were albums on Tyrone Thomas (a/k/a Wolfmoon) and Doris Duke. Williams placed the eponymous Wolfmoon LP with Capitol Records; but they soon had second thoughts and killed the deal. As for Duke’s album, Williams shopped it around without success, until he went to L.A. and found Wally Roker, who agreed to release it on his new Canyon imprint. The LP, I’m A Loser, and first single taken from it for radio play both charted. Things were starting to pop.
His next production session at Capricorn led indirectly to him doing an album of his own. After recording a local singer, JoAnn Bunn, doing two of his songs with disappointing results, Williams overdubbed his own vocals on the tracks and took them out to Roker, who gave him the green light to make his first-ever LP. He told Roker that he wanted to call himself “The Dogg” on the record to make a break with his earlier career; then, while back in Macon to cut the rest of the material, the session band described the Dogg’s sound as “swamp music”, which caused him to hatch the full Swamp Dogg moniker – at least that’s how he recalled it in 2000.
Swamp Dogg’s Total Destruction To Your Mind [newly reissued] came out on Canyon in 1970 along with two spin-off singles and met with near total broadcast indifference, or maybe it was stunned confusion at his Zappa-esque multi-genre approach. In any case, with no radio play to speak of, the records neither charted nor sold. Undeterred, he plunged ahead with productions on several other artists he brought to Capricorn, working almost non-stop on albums by Raw Spitt (a/k/a Charlie Whitehead) and Sandra Phillips (Too Many People In One Bed) that would also be released on Canyon with the same resounding thud of hitting a commercial brick wall.
Essentially the same rhythm section played on all those sessions: drummer Johnny Sandlin, keyboardist Paul Hornsby, guitarist Jesse ‘Pete’ Carr, and bassist Robert ‘Pops’ Popwell. All except Popwell had played in the Hour Glass with Gregg and Duane Allman a few years earlier. Sandlin and Hornsby were young veterans of the Alabama rock and soul scene, and wound up in Macon through their connections to the Allman’s, who had signed with Walden’s management company and were recording at Capricorn. Carr became a regular session player in Muscle Shoals around the time of these recordings, and was just doing some side work with his old bandmates.
Meanwhile back in L.A., Roker wanted to give Irma a better shot, and contracted with Swamp Dogg to take over the making of her next single, with a full LP to follow. There was no material at hand, so the ever-enterprising producer, as he asserted in the Shanachie CD notes, enlisted a friend, George McGregor, another A&R man, to come up with two good instrumental tracks that SD could write lyrics to and use for the 45 sides. McGregor obliged, supposedly creating and recording them the next day in Muscle Shoals where he was doing some sessions at an unnamed studio. I am assuming the recording was done at Muscle Shoals Sound, recently opened by the Swampers, because the Shanachie CD, which includes those sides, credits certain members of the MSS studio crew for playing on them, along with the Memphis Horns and pianist Spooner Oldham (a former Swamper). That would also explain the high level of playing.
In short order, McGregor caught a flight to L.A. to deliver the tapes to Swamp Dogg, who claims to have written lyrics for both sides within a few hours of getting them (with help from Troy Davis on the B-side). He then rehearsed with Irma for a couple more, cut her vocals, and delivered the masters to Canyon by the next afternoon. Even if he hyped that timeline just a bit in the telling, obviously Irma was right about his work ethic. Her second Canyon single hit the streets in a relative flash.
“I’d Do It All Over You” (Jerry Williams, Jr)
Irma Thomas, Canyon 31, 1970
That these songs have a country music feel to varying degrees is likely no accident. Williams may have ordered them up that way, as he has acknowledged being strongly influenced by country artists he heard on the radio while growing up in Portsmouth, Virginia. Generally, that manifests in the lyrics he writes with their down-home turns of phrase and strong narrative elements – characteristics that both country and soul music share.
For “I’d Do It All Over You”, McGregor [who, strangely, got no writing credit for either song] designed an upbeat, straightforward, rockin’ country sounding romp. The Memphis Horns pulled the feel over to the R&B side, which Irma reinforced with her own soulful, throwdown-hoedown delivery. Still, the song’s jokey title line hook kept it fairly lightweight.
“We Won’t Be In Your Way Anymore” (Jerry Williams, Jr – Troy Davis)
Once again, the B-side proved to be more impressive. Musically, “We Won’t Be In Your Way Anymore” has a great mid-tempo soul feel and arrangement, augmented by a repeating section with a rock progression and some hot lead guitar riffing that serves as the intro, the lead-up to the third verse key modulation, and the ride-out. Irma sounds perfectly in her element here, investing much grit and emotion into the song’s strong storyline about a marriage breaking-up, while she deftly navigated some tricky, at times prolix, wording. If indeed she only had a few hours to learn these songs before cutting them, her talent and professionalism deserve even more props than usual. She showed herself to be a worthy match for Swamp Dogg’s go-for-it attitude.
Upon completing the 45, the producer took Irma to his home in New York to work up material and rehearse for the forthcoming album sessions. [I can only assume that Roker was picking up the tab for all the production-related travel expenses Swamp Dogg and his associates were racking up.] They spent about a week in preparations, then went down to Macon for the sessions at Capricorn. As noted earlier, the studio band were pretty much the same players who worked with Swamp Dogg on his other Canyon projects there, with the addition of Duane Allman [uncredited on the original LP cover] on two tracks. The drummer, shown only as “Squirm”, is a question mark, though. I’m unsure if that was Johnny Sandlin, who was doing more engineering and producing for the studio and new Capricorn label. Bill Stewart might be another possibility.
Once the majority of the tracking was done, Swamp Dogg sent his boss a reference copy to hear; and, after reviewing it, Roker called Capricorn and cancelled any further sessions, declaring the album complete and perfect as it was. Even though some additional overdubs (“sweetening”) and a final mix had not been done, SD says his outsized ego led him to agree with Roker’s assessment; but, as it turned out, there was another motive for the sessions being cut off.
Canyon was deep in debt, its finances depleted. Before the album could be released, Roker took the company into bankruptcy and quickly out of business. The only Canyon/Swamp Dogg success stories had been Doris Duke’s album and first single [both still highly regarded by soul fans], which reached respectable levels on the charts; but sales were insufficient to cover the production costs for the label’s many other records that did not register at all with radio and the public. Not wanting to see his efforts go to waste, Swamp Dogg purchased the master tapes for Irma’s album from Canyon, probably at liquidation sale prices It would take several more years, but the ardent over-achiever kept hustling and eventually found a way to get it released.
At some point before the transaction, Roker managed to press up one more 45 on Irma, using two tracks from the Capricorn session tapes. He put it out on his own very short-lived, self-named label, seemingly set up in hopes of having a Hail Mary hit that would get him back into the black – the independent record business, of course, being nothing more than hard core gambling by another name.
“These Four Walls” (Len [sic] Farr)
Irma Thomas, Roker 502, 1970
This is one of only two songs from Irma’s Canyon sessions that Swamp Dogg did not have a hand in writing. Composed by Lynne [sometimes shown as Lynn, but simply misspelled on the label credit] Farr, it featured the same fine production treatment as the rest of the tracks and a top notch vocal by Irma. What the tune lacked was a truly engaging melody and structure that could have made it a sure-fire radio standout. As we will see, there were others to choose from that could have better fit the bill.
The flip side, “Woman’s Viewpoint”, was simply an excerpt from the extended monologue Swamp Dogg wrote for Irma that was part of a lengthy medley [discussed below] taking up the majority of the second side of the LP when it was finally released. Though the monologue wasn’t prime radio material either, Irma has used it as part of her stage act for many years.
None of the handful of singles on Roker, including Irma’s, brought about the desired miracle, each quickly falling by the wayside, as another label bit the dust. Yet Roker the man survived the ordeals and worked in the music business for decades thereafter.
Following the Canyon debacle, Irma had a rebound fling with Atlantic Records, whose Cotillion subsidiary came courting as 1971 rolled around. It is tempting to think that Swamp Dogg recommended her to the label; but I have no hard evidence to back that up. According to Tony Rounce, Cotillion recorded her at several locations over the next year, including Detroit (!?), where sessions for a potential LP took place, as well as Miami (at Criteria), Philadelphia (at Sigma Sound), and, finally, Jackson, Mississippi at Malaco. For reasons unknown, probably corporate dithering, out of all that tape, the only two songs Cotillion got around to releasing came from her one Malaco session. “Full Time Woman”/“She’s Taken My Part” appeared on a lone single (#44144) issued late in the year, and were decent tunes well-produced by Wardell Quezergue during his incredible run at the studio [covered here in 2011 and 2012].
Despite impressive performances from Irma, the record was not pushed and went nowhere. Rather than give her another chance and more promotion, Cotillion mysteriously showed her the door instead. From what Rounce relates in his notes to the Kent CD, her many other tracks for the label remain tied up in corporate legal limbo and probably will never be available for issue by anybody. We will never know what treasures there may be slowly oxidizing on some shelf.
BRINGING FORTH FUNGUS
Around 1973, Swamp Dogg somehow convinced the North American division of the BASF Corporation, a huge German chemical manufacturing company that made myriad industrial products, to back his new record label, Fungus. [How I wish I could have been at that presentation meeting. I imagine him promising that it would spread widely and be hard to eradicate.]. With a seemingly modest financial infusion from BASF, he was finally able to release the languishing Wolfmoon LP [which he has described as “pop gospel”] and Irma’s In Between Tears, plus a new album by Charlie Whitehead, along with several related 45s; but none took hold on the radio or in the marketplace. It appears that Swamp Dogg was not able to secure national distribution for his label or an adequate promotional budget to propagate his product.
Thus Fungus never thrived, persisting for only about a year before BASF, whose closest prior brush with the music business had been making recording tape, thought better of their tentative venture and cut off Swamp Dogg’s cash flow – a move that consigned the label’s few offerings to the realm of future collectables.
For Irma’s long delayed and finally realized album, the failure of Fungus was tragic. Despite trippy but amateurish cover artwork that didn’t well represent the content, In Between Tears held songs that effectively showcased her talents and deserved to be heard by the public at large. Here is some ample proof that she and Swamp Dogg were a good match in the studio.
“In Between Tears” (J. Williams, Jr – T. Davis)
Irma Thomas, from In Between Tears, Fungus 25150, 1973/1974
Another of Swamp Dogg’s collaborations with Troy Davis, this strong title song was worthy of Irma’s emotive, utterly engaging vocal treatment. It was also released on a Fungus single (#15141) in 1973, the second of only two spun off from the LP, and certainly merited radio play and a place in the charts. Instead it got the commercial cold shoulder, even though the entire album had a positive mention in the “Also Recommended” section of Billboard’s “Top Album Picks” during September, 1973, as well as a mini-review in their July, 1974 “Recommended LP’s” listings. Both rightly noted this song as one of the stronger offerings.
Listening to the cut on the original album, it is hard for me to fathom why Swamp Dogg later lamented that the album was “unfinished” and became so dissatisfied with his production work that he replaced much of the rhythm section parts with new players for the Shanachie CD some 20 years later. One can always second guess here and there, but the solid arrangements and session playing done at Capricorn still stand up well. Obviously (and thankfully), he had a change of heart, as his Two Phases of Irma Thomas CD in 2007 contained both the first version and its remuddled counterpart; and the latest reissue goes back to the source tapes with just up-to-date remastering.
“You’re The Dog (I Do The Barking Myself)” (J. Williams – G. Bonds – C. Whitehead)
Swamp Dogg wrote this punchy slice of Southern soul with two other of his collaborators, Gary “US” Bonds and Charlie Whitehead. He put it on the B-side of Irma’s first Fungus single, with the deeper “She’ll Never Be Your Wife” on the topside.
One of the first things you notice on “You’re The Dog” is a heavier grit that builds in Irma’s voice as the song goes along. The quirky lyrics call out the so-called man in her character’s life for not living up to his part of the bargain. As with many of the album’s other numbers, it’s theme relates to the emotions and resilience of a woman wronged in a relationship – a worthy concept perhaps inspired by Irma’s personal story. Another notable feature of this track is a taste of Duane Allman’s lead guitar playing. That’s him bending strings with a touch of distortion during the ride-out, counter-punching with Irma’s outright screams.
“What’s So Wrong With You Loving Me” (J. Williams – C. Whitehead)
Making a case for infidelity, this composition by Swamp Dogg and Charlie Whitehead strays from the general theme I just mentioned, but is one my two favorite cuts in terms of song structure and production values, ranking up there with the title track. The high class arrangement brought in a tympani drum; and the string section, used tastefully throughout the record, has a more prominent role here.
However gonzo Williams wanted to appear on his own records, with Irma he was a sympathetic producer intent on providing material and arrangements that would display her talent to its best advantage. In the case of “What’s So Wrong”, he again gave the music a radio-worthy, mainstream sound, while Irma’s earnest, soulful delivery of the subject matter kept the track real and relatable.
“Turn My World Around” (J. Williams – C. Whitehead)
This all too brief closing track of the LP comes after a lengthy (almost 14 minutes) medley on side 2 featuring the extended monologue, “Coming From Behind”, and an over 7 minute reworking of Irma’s own classic composition, “Wish Someone Would Care”, that gets so intensely deep that you almost need to be in a pressurized suit to listen to it.
On “Wish”, Swamp Dogg stretched her performance to the point of excess, pushing Irma to her vocal and emotional limits for the sake of the theme mentioned above; and she showed herself to have the incredible strength and stamina to take it that far. Impressive as that is, the long track makes for demanding listening, and does not lend itself frequent plays.
Instead of leaving the downtempo medley as the album’s final statement, SD used the much more upbeat “Turn My World Around” as the thematic closer. It’s no lightweight throwaway, even though the lyrics seem a bit more like an afterthought. The production values were as high and substantial as on any of the other cuts; and Irma’s performance is just as worth taking in – so much so that the fade-out really is at least a minute premature.
When considering the collaboration of these two great artists, one takeaway for me is that, ultimately, Swamp Dogg’s creative efforts and skills in crafting an album that allowed Irma to shine were undone by his lack of the marketing clout needed to get the best songs onto the national airwaves for maximum exposure. Irma’s old fans and prospective new ones lost out on some great music and the many pleasures of hearing her in her prime [which she’s still in, btw!]. It’s an all too common story of the pitfalls of independent record-making, where having a worthy product is only half the battle.
Had a larger label taken the record over from Fungus, repackaged and pushed it, In Between Tears might have given the singer’s career a needed boost during a decade of record-making doldrums.
How disappointing and frustrating it must have been for Irma to have cut great performances for a succession of labels, many of which were not released; with the ones that did make it to vinyl not getting heard, either. As Irma told Hannusch back in the early 1980s,
At this point I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll never have another national hit.You’ve just got to have big bucks. It’s been my luck to be with [either] a small company that can’t promote, or a big company that won’t promote. I honestly don’t know what to record anymore.
Fortunately, a few years after she said that, her world finally turned around. She began to fully come into her own as a recording artist and concert performer when Rounder Records, a rare breed of independent label with their own distribution network, came into New Orleans on a mission to lift some of its greatest musical artists out of their relative obscurity into the national spotlight. With their support and a gifted producer, Scott Billington, her popularity has continued to grow through a string of excellent albums; and in 2007, she received a Grammy Award for her Rounder CD, After the Rain.
It is also gratifying to see Swamp Dogg getting attention again, too, through new reissues of his own records and productions for others. His belief in the value of In Between Tears and enduring appreciation of Irma’s gifts kept the album alive in various forms over decades by way of licensing and repackaging. May the latest versions bring still more fans to both of them and finally win accolades for the masterful product of the serendipitous pairing of their soulful talents.
http://homeofthegroove.blogspot.com/2013/05/irma-swamp-dogg-canyon-sessions.html
ABOUT.BLUES (online bluesmusic site) – Positive album review with album art
Alive Reissues Classic Irma Thomas and Swamp Dogg LPs
By Reverend Keith A. Gordon
Alive Naturalsound Records takes another huge step next month in their campaign to rescue vintage soul and R&B from the dustbin of obscurity when they reissue two sadly overlooked classics of 1970s-era R&B by Swamp Dogg and Irma Thomas. On May 14th, 2013 the label will reissue Swamp Dogg’s Gag A Maggott and Irma Thomas’s In Between Tears for the first time on CD and on vinyl for the first time since their original 1973 releases.
New Orleans music legend Irma Thomas had left the city in the wake of Hurricane Camille in 1969 and headed to Los Angeles, largely eschewing the music business and working in retail. She dipped her toe back into the pop music waters with a series of singles for Cactus Records that were produced by the one and only Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams and featured a young guitar hot-shot by the name of Duane Allman. Williams convinced Thomas to go into the studio and record the full-length album In Between Tears, the producer coaxing eight incredible gospel-tinged performances from the underrated soul-blues singer. The Alive reissue of In Between Tears includes the 1971 single, “We Won’t Be In Your Way Anymore” and “I’d Do It All Over You,” both featuring Allman, as bonus tracks on the CD and digital release of the album. Swamp Dogg also penned new liner notes for the CD reissue.
Swamp Dogg’s Gag A Maggott LPSwamp Dogg’s reputation had preceded the release of Gag A Maggott, his fourth album of slightly-skewed Southern soul and blues that took the raunch ‘n’ roll of singers like Big Joe Turner and Andre Williams to new creative heights. Although the Dogg’s first two albums – 1970’s Total Destruction To Your Mind and the following year’s Rat On! – had enjoyed a modicum of commercial success, he was back on the indie circuit by 1973 and Gag A Maggott, where his unique artistic vision added elements of funk to his old-school soul and blues sound. The album was originally recorded at the legendary TK Studios in Miami with a number of talented players and featured a solid cover of Wilson Pickett’s “In The Midnight Hour” as well as a the original blues-burner “Choking To Death (From The Ties That Bind),” which would be covered on record by Canned Heat in 1974. The Alive CD and digital versions includes two previously-unreleased bonus tracks, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” and “Honky Tonk Woman,” both recorded live at the KSAN-FM radio studios in 1972, and the CD booklet includes new liner notes from Swamp Dogg and a number of rare photos from the Dogg’s personal archives.
Photos courtesy Alive Naturalsound Records
http://blues.about.com/b/2013/04/26/alive-reissues-classic-irma-thomas-and-swamp-dogg-lps.htm
OFF THE TRACKS (NZ online music site) – Positive album review with album art
Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction To Your Mind
Total Destruction To Your Mind
Southbound
Reissued after years of languishing, Total Destruction To Your Mind is the first album by Swamp Dogg. It was released in 1970. Swamp Dogg is one of a handful of pseudonyms used by Jerry Williams Jr, songwriter, record producer and recording artist.
The Swamp Dogg material comes over – in this day and age – like some imagined relic. You could probably convince someone, easily, that it is in fact Jackie Wilson singing for Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label. And in a way that is what Williams was doing, updating his own soul-crooning sound with some of the rock-influenced funk and soul of the era.
There’s an almost country-croon to the way Williams’ pinched vocal sounds out over subdued funk and soul. It’s quite beautiful. And there’s something in the sound that resonates today, far more memorable than the host of pretenders lining up to try to be James Brown (Charles Bradley don’t take a bow).
Total Destruction features hints too of the hippie/psychedelic era, so there’s protest music in with the preaching, a strange hybrid of psychedelic soul and subverted gospel music. There’s a purity in the singing that is almost hypnotising. And those backing tracks have shadows of Motown and Stax too. Check out the title track. Cool stuff.
http://www.offthetracks.co.nz/swamp-dogg-total-destruction-to-your-mind/
BMAN’S BLUES REPORT (blues music site) – News post (from press release)
SWAMP DOGG’S “GAG A MAGGOTT” & IRMA THOMAS’ “IN BETWEEN TEARS” OUT MAY 14TH ON ALIVE RECORDS!
http://www.bmansbluesreport.com/2013/04/swamp-doggs-gag-maggott-irma-thomas-in.html
MADD CHICAGO (Chicago-based music site) – Positive news post with album art and mp3s.
Swamp Dogg to re-issue two more albums
Long forgotten soul legend Swamp Dogg, is going through a bit of renaissance thanks to Alive Now Records who continues to re-issue the gonzo soulman’s long out of print albums. Back in February we told you about the first two Dogg albums (Total Destruction of Your Mind, Rat On!) to get the re-issue treatment. Next up is Dogg’s 1973 LP Gag A Maggot and Irma Thomas’ Swamp-produced soul classic In Between Tears. Both albums will be re-issued on vinyl for the first time since their original release with CD versions to include bonus tracks by both artists. Have a listen to previews of both albums above and below.
http://maddchicago.com/swamp-dogg-to-re-issue-two-more-albums/
MIDWEST RECORD (Chicago-based music site) – Positive SWAMP & IRMA REVIEWS.
IRMA THOMAS/Between the Tears: One of the music businesses headier hard luck and triumph stories, Thomas, (not to be confused with Carla Thomas), the soul queen of Naw-lean had already been chewed up and spit out by Imperial and Chess before hooking up with Swamp Dogg in the early 70s, just as tastes were moving away from the soul classics in waiting she was putting out. While she didn’t scale the heights, her Imperial sides are held up as classics, and her Chess sides took over 20 years to see the light of day when they were finally acknowledged as classics. This record was allowed to escape into the marketplace but in such limited quantities, it might as well be considered a lost soul classic. Sensing this might be her last shot, Thomas tore it up with the ferocity of anything coming out of Detroit or Memphis at the time making the kind of set that should have had Aretha looking over her shoulder. Coming from such a hungry place, this sound here was powered up to be timeless, and even if it isn’t in fashion for today’s R&B, it’s a mind blower anytime you hear it. Killer stuff that just couldn’t be held back any longer. Check it out.
SWAMP DOGG/Gag a Maggot: Swamp Dogg’s debut was a mind blower for any white boy who thought Sly Stone was too commercial. The record label tried to round off some of the edges for the second album by sending him to Muscle Shoals. That wasn’t what he needed. Dogg’s third album found him on his own again, taking it down to TK where things were funkier in the Florida sunshine. The TK crew kept it funky while smoothing out the rough edges, but there was nothing they could do to smooth out the lyrics, and that’s where we find Dogg doing total destruction to your mind once again. Loaded with fat funk that samplers would have to kiss the ground where Dogg walked for a long time to come, this is outsider music done right that just doesn’t fit any format. Crazy stuff then and crazy stuff now. Check it out.
http://midwestrecord.com/MWR635.html
ESQUIRE MAGAZINE (national men’s magazine) – Positive inclusion of Swamp with album art in the “Songs Every Man Should Listen To” online feature.
Songs Every Man Should Listen To
By Andy Langer
“Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” Swamp Dogg
Until now, vinyl scavengers places a premium on Total Destruction to Your Mind, this R&B eccentric’s 1970 debut, because it somehow hadn’t made the transition to CD, let alone iTunes. With a belated reissue, it’s as endearing and enduring as advertised, but mostly these paternity-tesy blues are simply hilarious.
http://www.esquire.com/features/songs-every-man-should-listen-to-20#slide-10
WRIR RADIO (Richmond, VA Community Radio) – New remastered version of “The World Beyond” aired on April 11th.
http://wrir.org/index.php?/blog/entry/10251/
WESU RADIO (Middleton, CT station) – New remastered version of “TDTYM” aired on April 4th.
http://spinitron.com/radio/playlist.php?station=wesu&playlist=4200#67522
VINYL UNDER REVIEW (online music blog) – Positive album review
Swamp Dogg – Total Destruction to Your Mind / Rat On
Welcome reissues of overlooked ’70’s soul/funk classics
Artist: Swamp Dogg
Record Title: Total Destruction to Your Mind / Rat On
Label: Alive Naturalsound Records (“Total Destruction” – 0141-1) (“Rat On”- 0142-1)
Genre: Soul/Funk/Psyche/Country
Format: LP (black vinyl, 33 RPM)
Release Year: Reissued in 2013; originally released in 1970 (“Total Destruction”) and 1971 (“Rat On”)
Misc.: 250 copies on purple haze vinyl (“Total Destruction”) and 250 copies on Atomic Orange vinyl (“Rat On”); “Total Destruction” also comes in a gatefold sleeve and contains a poster.
Grade:
“Total Destruction”: Music: A- / Package: B+
“Rat On”: Music: A- / Package B
The best music reissues combine obscurity and quality in equal measure. While I find it almost always interesting to check out reissued albums from long lost, barely known bands, occasionally it can be obvious why these artists slipped through the cracks of music history. Listening to an unearthed record from, say, a ‘60s Scottish psyche band can be a better experience in theory than in reality.
I’ll confess to having known absolutely nothing about Swamp Dogg, the moniker adopted by musician/songwriter/producer, Jerry Williams, Jr, prior to hearing his first two albums, which Alive Naturalsound Records recently reissued. And I’ll admit to initially wondering if these reissues would be another case of novelty trumping substance. Let’s face it, a record cover that features the artist riding on the back of a giant white rat can lead to legitimate concerns about the merit of the music contained within.
Fortunately, both records can – and should — be mentioned alongside the best soul/funk of its era. Recorded in Macon, Georgia and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Swamp Dogg’s distinctly southern take on the genre would have sounded at home on Stax Records. Originally released in 1970, “Total Destruction to Your Mind” comes racing out of the starting gate with the thumping title track before transitioning into the slower, soulful “Synthetic World.” Side A closer “I Was Born Blue” is in a similar vein to the latter track, showing Swamp Dogg to be very capable of heartfelt, expressive vocals. The pulsating side B opener, “Sal-A-Faster,” gains momentum as it gets deeper into its groove – perhaps my favorite song on the album. Displaying diversity in his sound, “These Are Not My People,” written by Joe South, has elements of sunshine pop. The album ends with two lyrically related songs, “The Baby is Mine” and “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” both of which deal with the issue of paternity.
1971’s “Rat On,” originally released on Elektra Records, isn’t much of a departure from its predecessor, though the songs are a bit more conventional. If Swamp Dogg’s debut is more original than its follow up, “Rat On” is perhaps slightly more realized. “God Bless America for What” is definitely the most provocative song title on either record, expressing blunt sentiments of protest. Album closer, “Do Our Thing Together,” features excellent horn arrangements and a swagger made for the dance floor. A superb track to wrap up another fantastic album.
Both of these records are full of top notch material, have great recordings and socially conscious lyrics, and even though it’s a thrill to discover this lost music 40+ years after it was released, it’s also a shame that it wasn’t widely appreciated during its time. Jerry Williams, Jr. was already a successful producer/songwriter before Swamp Dogg, but that didn’t translate into mainstream appreciation for his alter-ego. Regardless, it’s encouraging that this music, which is most definitely worthy of being discovered or rediscovered, is readily available again.
The album covers are memorable – the aforementioned artist on ratback (did I just coin a new word?), and “Total Destruction” shows a washed out/overexposed Swamp Dogg, clad in a t-shirt and boxers, sitting on a couch in the back of a garbage truck. My copies are on black vinyl, but limited color pressings (250 copies) of each record exist. “Total Destruction” is a gatefold cover and also comes with a promotional poster. I would say “Rat On” contains no such bells and whistles, but in my opinion the front cover is, if not the bells, certainly the whistles. Liner notes with background information about the artist and records would have been a great addition.
I don’t think of Alive Naturalsound Records as a reissue label (of course, they release far more new music than old), but given how they’ve been instrumental in reintroducing The Nerves, The Plimsouls and now Swamp Dogg to music lovers, it’s clear they have impeccable taste in past sounds that need to be heard by new audiences. We could all use more Swamp Dogg on our stereos, and “Total Destruction to Your Mind” and “Rat On” are guaranteed to make any record collection better.
Wax On
4/9/13
Links:
http://www.alive-totalenergy.com/x/?page_id=3848
http://www.swampdogg.net/
https://www.facebook.com/SwampDogg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamp_Dogg
http://www.vinylunderreview.com/?p=214#more-214
STOMP & STAMMER (Atlanta monthly) – Lengthy feature interview with Swamp & Lee Bains.
They’ve Come to Get Me From the Lost and Found”
Swamp Dogg: Not Just Another Motherfucker
Written by Lee Bains III
Another noontime morning packed into the van. Hacking up, onto the back of the bench seat, all of last night’s cigarettes. Fumbling to get another one lit. Start it again. It is early fall. And early fall loves Athens. Wisps of white smoke carry the smell of slow-cooking pork, just as the trains of black carry their hopes for a victory over Bama to the stadium. Later that night, from a bar in Macon, the rest of the Dexateens will watch as their beloved Bama whips Georgia’s ass in the game that will always be laughingly referred to as “The Blackout.”
For now, we are trying to get right. Shake out the nerves, pinch the sleep out of bleary eyes. Matt Patton, riding shotgun, voice ragged and torn up from a night at the Caledonia, reaches up into the front seat, a CD stuck between his grimy fingers.
“Y’all GOT to hear this…”
And then, seconds later, BOOM. A sonic blast, not so much derived from anything as contrived as tone or volume or tempo, but of sheer human force, true soul. Not “soul,” simply in the Otis Redding sense; no, soul, as in animus, that which differentiates us from the beasts of the field – “soul” in the Thomas Aquinas sense. PURE RAW SOUL.
“TOTAL DESTRUCTION TO YOUR MIND, MIND, MIND, MIND…”
We are baptized in sound; we are set on a path of righteousness; we are gone.
Swamp Dogg has been doing that, destroying the complacent mind and nurturing the shithead soul, for so long he can do little else. Swamp Dogg, that bold motherfucker (his favorite word) who croons against THE MAN (in all his myriad, snaky forms) with the voice of a pissed-off Joe Tex, an unhinged Clyde McPhatter, is also Jerry Williams, Jr., the humble, rotund son of Portsmouth, Virginia who wrote songs for the always-sweatered pop star Gene Pitney [“Count the Days”] and the roughneck country twanger Johnny Paycheck [“(Don’t Take Her) She’s All I Got”].
Hell yeah, he knew Gary U.S. Bonds. (They were best friends from running around the Tidewater.) Hell yeah, he knew Otis Redding. (Ol’ dude left him holding the bill at a Holiday Inn once.) Hell yeah, he knew Duane Allman. (Swamp had him play on a Doris Duke session he produced.)
But, just as importantly, they knew Swamp: a songwriter’s songwriter, a musical adventurer, a shit-hot hit producer, an immutable force of honesty, the perpetual menace to THE MAN’s agenda who nevertheless kept a constant place at the boardroom table.
A few years later, I find myself in that same van, with that same can’t-get-right feeling, scraggling into Detroit. My new band The Glory Fires has been commissioned by Alive! Natural-Sound Records to cut a single, a cover song, with Jim Diamond. We’re struggling. We were frozen in Toronto, and hassled at the border. And then, as if it has been encased in a glass box, a tiny hammer suspended at its side, I pull out Total Destruction to Your Mind. Within moments, blood is rushing, talk is resumed, synapses fire like sparkplugs. We’re back.
Patrick, who runs Alive and talks to me like an exasperated teacher does his favorite underachieving student, had never heard of Swamp Dogg until he heard our cover. Shortly thereafter (again, moments is all it takes for most of us), Patrick had uncovered a genius. He is reissuing two of Swamp’s most innovative and inspired albums (Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On!), along with a handful of similarly brain-warping soul records he produced in the Seventies (Raw Spitt, Wolfmoon, and Irma Thomas).
If you’re one of the uninitiated (and let’s face it; you probably are), then unplug your earholes, and listen to what Swamp has to say. You might can afford not to, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Swamp Dogg: “I saw your YouTube the first time you played [‘Total Destruction to Your Mind’] after you put it out. You did the song, and you said, I think it was you, you said, ‘Some motherfucker calls himself Swamp Dogg…’ And played the song any goddamn way! And I thought, ‘I’m going to reach through the screen and choke him!’”
Lee Bains III: Hahaha!
“Naw, I appreciate you. I appreciate you even acknowledging my song, much more cutting the motherfucker. I really do appreciate it. I thank you.”
Aw man, I appreciate you. I’m a really big fan of you and your songs, and you’ve been a real inspiration. So anything I can do to even slightly repay you is no thing.
“Naw, you paid me good by doing the song, by making people aware. People always talk about how good a song it is, but nobody records it much. It’s only been recorded five times, I think. I can only name three times, and one of those is me. Now, you is four. I can’t remember what the fifth one is.”
Well, I’m a (relatively) young dude from Alabama who makes what I think of as Southern music. And part of the reason I love your music and am inspired by it is that you seem to continually honor and draw from Southern traditions, but just as much so, you subvert them, and challenge them. So, I want to ask you about how you came by those traditions. I know your folks were musicians, right?
“Yeah, my mother is a drummer, a keyboardist and a vocalist, and as a matter of fact she opens my show for me. She’s 91-years old.”
What kind of music were they doing when you were growing up?
“They were what you would call a lounge band – a cocktail band. The same thing you’d call a Top 40 now. All they did was sing all of the hits of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s. It was a quartet: guitar, bass, drums and organ, usually. So that’s what they did; they worked all the time. But it was always clubs, and they didn’t make a name.”
Did you grow up exposed to music in church? Was that part of your background?
“Part of it. Because I was Baptist for a minute, and then I became Catholic. But, you know, it’s hard to get inspired with Gregorian chants! That don’t make you want to jump up and do the do.”
Hahaha! Yeah, I grew up partly in the Episcopal church. They call it Junior-Varsity Catholic. I know what you mean.
“Yeah! But I got a lot of things out of church. Because those were my first experiences standing in front of an audience and singing. That is what quelled my nervousness. You had people encouraging you. You’d be singing, and it’d be the WORST thing that everybody had heard, and they’d say, ‘Awwwwww, Jerry, you were soooo good.’ And they’d come by the house, and tell your Mama, ‘Awww, he was sooo good!’ When you were off-the-scale being bad! But those were the things that gave you encouragement, that those people in church would lie like a motherfucker. But that was a time when you needed lying. Because the truth would’ve killed you! It would’ve stopped you in your tracks. And then, as you continue to grow, you look back, and say, ‘My God, was I awful.’ But you appreciate the people for doing the way they did to you. You got to keep that ego away from you. I meet some guys now, professionals, saying shit like, ‘Aw man, I killed ’em out there. I slayed ’em. Can’t nobody follow me.’ And I’m sitting there thinking, ‘This motherfucker is so mediocre, and he don’t even know it.’ I’ve never said no shit like that, and I never will say shit like that.”
And you dug on country music, too, right?
“Most of what I got came from country. I remember the first two talent shows I was on as a kid in grammar school; the first one, I sang ‘Peace In The Valley’ by Red Foley, and I came in at Number Two. And the second one, I sang ‘Hadacol Boogie’ by Bill somebody. I can’t remember. [Bill Nettles, a Louisiana rockabilly/country singer active in the ‘40s/‘50s.] I came in first that show. I was raised up on country. The black music came on around nine or ten at night, and, by that time, I had to go to bed. I had a little radio in my room. I used to turn it on, but the whole family was hip to what I was doing. So, it wouldn’t be long before somebody came up there: ‘Turn that damn radio off!’ I’d have it on so low, you could hardly hear. That was my exposure to some black music. And then John R. and them out of Nashville.”
You know, it’s funny you say that. My mama grew up in Birmingham, and would talk about how, growing up, she would hide under the covers and listen to the R&B station at night, and how that, along with seeing black bands play in the early and mid ’60s, was a big factor in her realization of the deep problems with segregation and Alabama’s racial attitudes. Did you feel like being a musician allowed you to transcend racial boundaries at all during that time?
“It’s funny. For some reason, I didn’t really have a full knowledge of what was being done. I was raised like, if a white man was walking down the sidewalk, and you were going towards him, then I don’t give a fuck if it was an Indy 500 driver coming around the corner, a black stepped off into the street and let the white man go by. And you know this is crazy; I didn’t think nothing of it. It’s hard sometimes when you’re brought up into something, and you’re told ‘this is what you do’ by the people who you love and trust. ‘Well, okay, I don’t know. I guess I’d better step off this fucking sidewalk.’ You know, ‘You never stare a white man in the eye.’ A whole bunch of bullshit. But, as I grew older, I understood the bigotry and all that bullshit.
“I worked in a pharmacy called Washington Pharmacy, and I was a delivery boy. A lot of times, I worked behind the counter. They would make the black women customers wait there at one table sitting in the back. The black men had to wait out in the hallway to wait on their shit. If you were gonna make a sundae for a black person, you didn’t use quite as much ice cream as you were supposed to for a white person. A buddy of mine that I was working with, when the black people would come in, and ask for a soda, he would go in the back and make the sodas. Well, for some reason, the people who owned the drugstore didn’t care that we were getting it from the back. Actually, every time we would bring the ice to the front, and pour it in the receptacle, we’d done pissed in the ice. We’d piss in the ice, and then we’d bring it up, and people would be, ‘Awww God, you make a good Coke!’”
Hahahaha!
“And we’d done pissed in the ice! The first couple times I saw my friend doing it I said, ‘Man, what the fuck are you doing??’ But he’d piss in it, and then take it up front. So we’d make all our sodas in the back. You should’ve seen the restrooms. The one for black people had ‘Colored’ on the door, and that’s where we kept the mop and the buckets and all that shit. And the bathroom for whites looked like it was built by King Tut. It was laid like a motherfucker. They would have us in the prescription room, and we used to put the short count on white people. That was our way of getting back. Let’s say if your prescription was 50 pills, we’d put in 47.”
It was y’all’s small act of rebellion.
“Yeah, some of those people used to call up, ‘Hey, goddammit, you shorted me three pills.’ So I’d have to hop on the bicycle and ride on down there and take them people their motherfucking pills. But it didn’t really get that bad down there, mainly because of all the military installations, Navy and Army. We didn’t do like Mississippi or Alabama and call ourselves the Sovereign State. I remember my man – Governor Wallace – declared Alabama another country. You’re gonna need a passport to get in his shit. Crazy motherfucker.”
Yeah, absolutely crazy.
“But, I’ll tell you, I admired him for one thing…”
What’s that? What could you possibly admire George Wallace for?
“For running with his beliefs. I mean, we knew he was wrong, but here’s a motherfucker that really thought he was right. And he took it as far as he could – as far as people would allow him to take it… That’s all. I admire him for being a motherfucker who would stick. If he had been a musician, I believe he would’ve been one of the top musicians in the world. Mainly because he would’ve laid with it. He didn’t want blacks doing their damn thing in Alabama aside from working and being second-class. I mean, that’s more of a left-handed compliment. I mean, naw, I don’t have no damn admiration for George Wallace.”
Well that’s amazing. It’s a testament to your open-mindedness and observations that you could see it at all from that perspective. Did you feel like playing music opened any of that up? I know you said you listened to country music, but did playing music break those racial boundaries down a little bit?
“I noticed all over the country that, whatever kind of musician it was, whatever genre he was into, if you walked in as a black guy and wanted to sit in, you never had a problem sitting in. The club owner might come up and raise hell, saying, ‘Y’all gotta get that nigger out of here.’ But the musicians really didn’t care. And it’s always been like that. As long as you can make some good music, then come on! I wish sometimes – of course we’d more than likely be starving to death – that the world would have the attitude of musicians. We’ll live together. One musician never meets another musician that’s a stranger. And we’ll meet a lot of other strangers in other walks of life. But you never meet a stranger who is also a musician.
You know, there’s definitely a humility I’ve noticed in your songwriting that I think is interesting, because your music tends to deal with calling out what is wrong with the world. Whether that’s the government’s treatment of black people, or the growth of consumerism and globalism, or the way one man mistreats his family. But you address it all with enough humility and honesty to keep them thought provoking rather than pompous. What inspires you to talk about these things? Do you feel like, as a songwriter, you have a responsibility to the world to talk about these things?
“Naw. Just like I’m talking to you right now, I’m just saying what I believe. These are my opinions. A lot of things are observations – that are really happening, or have really happened. Like, I keep referencing that line in ‘Total Destruction’: ‘They find out how to tax the grass/ Now watch them get the law passed.’ And that’s what they’ve done! Let me tell you something, man. You can do anything in the United States you want to do as long as you let Uncle Sam be your partner. I mean, you can run drugs… Just let him be your partner. That’s all he wants.”
That’s the truth… So how can you address these heavy questions, and give these insights, but then humbly say, “I don’t claim to know the answers here”? How do you avoid preaching?
“I guess that’s just not my personality. If you say, ‘Hey man, Lee Bains is going to do this,’ and I don’t believe in it at all, just because I don’t believe in it, does not mean that you’re wrong. So, I’ll give you the encouragement to follow your mind, and do it. It’s just like bungee jumping. I wouldn’t do it. But if you feel you should do it, then do it! And I don’t care what you do in life, somebody could get hurt. You could be home in your bed, and a motherfucker could break in and hurt you. So, there’s no such thing as staying completely away from danger and negativity. So, that’s the way I write: ‘This is what I think.’ But, you know, if you don’t go along with it, that’s cool. I was onstage one night, and I was talking about Nixon. And some motherfucker way in the back screamed up there – and it was the first time and the last time – and he was pro-Nixon. Well, you know what, I said, ‘Hey man, I’m just telling you how I feel. I ain’t getting in no argument with you. You may very well be right.’ And I didn’t hear no more. But I didn’t say nothing else about Nixon, either, that night. And that’s when I was doing ‘Sam Stone.’ And I knew exactly what I was singing about. That song caused a lot of controversy. John Prine wrote the dogshit out of that song. And that’s another thing. I will give recognition to any songwriter I think is great. Any songwriter whose song you hear me sing I feel they are a better writer than I am. I’m singing a song that I wish I had written. ‘Well, since I didn’t write it, goddammit, I’m going to sing it!’”
Well, now you know why I recorded your song! And I wanted to talk some about how, on Total Destruction to Your Mind, you covered two Joe South songs.
“I love me some Joe South! For some reason, he disappeared. I think he may have died.”
He sure did. He passed away recently, unfortunately.
“A writing motherfucker.”
Well, y’all remind me of each other.
“You know, he opened a hell of a door for me: to be able to use the word ‘nigger’ in my songs. Because every time I’d say ‘nigger,’ most of the complaints would come from white people in Cadillacs. Bleeding hearts and shit. And I said, ‘Hey! Joe South wrote that song! ‘Niggers, dagos and Jews.’ Before I ever said ‘nigger,’ I HEARD ‘nigger.’”
Yeah, you didn’t invent that word!
“No! I didn’t wake up one morning, and say, ‘Hey! Nigger!’ But I have been awakened by ‘Hey, nigger!’ So… shit!”
It’s interesting because both “Rednecks” and “These Are Not My People” seem to speak to an experience of being a stranger in your own country, and observing others. In one song, it’s racist, obnoxious assholes, and in the other one it’s bougie hipsters putting on airs.
“Right.”
And in spite of trying to reconcile yourself to them, you just can’t do it. How did you relate to those songs personally?
“Mostly traveling around the country. Like, in Charlotte, North Carolina in 1965, I got arrested. The cops beat me up and shit. They broke in my room. I was staying in a hotel called the Alibi, of all places. They broke in my room, guns drawn, threw me down on the bed, and handcuffed me and shit. I’m asking, ‘What did I do?’ But I also knew not to ask a lot of shit, and not to say a lot of shit. Because them fucking guys was ready to just do anything to me. Because they wouldn’t tell me why I was being arrested. When I got down there, they put me in the cell and whooped my ass, all bloody. They whooped my ass after they put me in a lineup. It’s like Richard Pryor said, ‘Boy, if you ever get put in that lineup, and get picked, it’s your ass.’ See, what I was accused of was being somebody named ‘Little Joe.’ And I had beat up an old white man and wife in a trailer park, and took their money, right?”
Holy shit! And you’d been playing a show or whatever… not even in Charlotte probably!
“Yeah! The only way I was able to prove it wasn’t me is that I just happened to be in jail in Macon, Georgia!
Do what!? Are you serious?
“Yeah! I was supposed to start opening for Otis Redding. He was supposed to pay my hotel bill, but he left. So, I skipped out of the hotel, the Holiday Inn. They called the police. I’m just walking down the street, back to Otis’s office, the Redwall building [Redding and then-manager Phil Walden’s business HQ]. Otis is gone, and I tell Phil Walden, and he says, ‘Man, I don’t have nothing to do with what you and Otis did.’ He didn’t give me the money. I must have owed every bit of $70. I’d been there about two or three days. Anyway, that was the proof. And when the guys let me out of jail, as they were walking me down the steps, they told me, ‘Don’t let us catch you around here no fucking more.’ And I wanted to say, ‘I ain’t done a goddam thing!!’ But I said, ‘Yessir.’”
Wow.
“Then I go over to the radio station who had brought me in there, WGIV, and they had this lady disc jockey. She was the heaviest thing down there. Big-headed bitch. Looked like she had a big old watermelon on her neck. And that bitch had the NERVE when I walked into the studio… She had stopped playing my record those couple of three days I was MIA. And she said, ‘I’m canceling the show.’ I said, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Oh, you’re the worst thing ever happened to Charlotte… I’ve never been so embarrassed in all my life. And I’m canceling the show.’ I said, ‘You big-headed bitch, I don’t give a fuck! You’re gonna give me my money!’ I think I was making about a hundred and a quarter a night. Long story short, I did the show, I made my money, and she quit playing my record. And I had a little thing called ‘Baby, You’re My Everything’ that, if it wasn’t number one, was top-five most places. And she was calling up the record company, telling them what happened, what I did. But it just so happened I was working for a record label owned by gangsters, so they didn’t give a shit. Fucking motherfuckers up was their hobby!”
Is it right that you moved from Portsmouth up to Philadelphia and New York?
“Well, first I moved to Newark, New Jersey. Because I was afraid to go to New York. I would catch the bus to the Port Authority in New York. I would get off, walk about five or six blocks up the street. And they had a place that sold a good Polish dog. And I’d buy a Polish dog, and I’d look through the windows and shit, and then I’d go back, and get on the bus, and go back to Newark! I was afraid to go past that! So, finally, I got involved with a promoter that got me into the middle of things up there. But, no, in ’66, I moved to Miami. I went down there to play a show. I had just closed the Christmas show at the Apollo, starring Solomon Burke. And I did ten days, five to six shows a day.
A day?!
“Yeah! For 300 motherfucking dollars. But, if you hadn’t played the Apollo, you hadn’t done shit! It was almost worth paying the motherfuckers that owned the Apollo to play there. Because motherfuckers would say, ‘Oh, you were at the Apollo?!’ Yeah, but they don’t know you were the worst thing on the bill! They just know you were at the Apollo. But when the plane started to land [in Miami], all these niggas out there with short-sleeved shirts with big old flowers all over them, and fucking straw Panama hats and shit. I said, ‘Where the fuck is this?? I hope the plane didn’t crash, and I’m dead!’ I got off the plane; it must have been 85 or 90 degrees. I said, ‘Baby, I ain’t going back there. You get the kids together, and you’re coming to Miami. Motherfuck Portsmouth!’”
Hahaha!
“So, I got to Miami, and I worked, and I made a little money. I was a celebrity. And then my next record came out, and it didn’t sell. Due to the fact it didn’t sell, now I’m working with a motherfucker named Wild Man Steve. He was a disc jockey from Boston. We were on a gig one night, this band called the Magnolias out of Atlanta, and me. We go on out to play a banquet room at like a Holiday Inn. And we’re getting off the bus, and he says, ‘Look here, you guys are the Four Tops!’”
What!?
“I said, ‘What!?’ I said, ‘Well, fuck it. I need my money.’ But now here’s the funny part. I’m supposed to be Levi [Stubbs], right? Here I am 5’5”, and Levi’s seven foot tall. And I’m out there singing. I knew the songs. The whole audience was white. And I look over to the left, and there’s a black guy leaning against the wall. And he’s got his jacket over his arm, and he kept looking up there. And I told Calvin – the leader of the group – I said, ‘Calvin, we got a problem with this motherfucker over there. He just told somebody, ‘That ain’t the Four Tops.’’ And all a sudden, hell breaks loose in there. We take off, running like a son of a bitch. We get to the bus, and that motherfucker Steve’s got the money, got the bus, and taking off ahead of us. Anyway, we caught up with him. He stopped the bus, and we got on. We never did get paid, because he said he left without the money. We never did believe him, but anyway… As I think about it at this moment, he might have been the one that spread the word we weren’t the motherfucking Four Tops.
“So I ended up working at a car lot. And my job was to be there every morning at 4:30, and to wipe the dew off the cars so they would shine. He called himself the biggest car dealer in Miami. I think he might have been bigger than he said he was. I’ve never seen so many cars in my life! So I found another job. I didn’t stay at no job over a week. The only reason I was working was my wife was sick. So as soon as she got well, I was like, ‘Fuck it; I’m off again!’ But I worked at a place where all they did was make boxes. All I was supposed to do was take this special hammer and hit the motherfuckers on the edges, and those little perforated pieces of cardboard would come off. So that was my job, to knock that off. They had me doing it, and I said, ‘Shit, this is one smooth motherfucking job, here.’ You know I Love Lucy, where she’s working on the conveyor belt?”
Yeah, and she’s eating the chocolates or whatever?
“Yeah! Well, them boxes started coming down twelve of them at a time. And you got to hit them all just right and just hard enough… And I had boxes and shit all over the floor. Because all these motherfuckers had to stop their jobs and come help me. And motherfucker asks me, ‘Can you drive a forklift?’ I couldn’t even drive a car! He says, ‘Can you drive a forklift?’ I said, ‘Yeah man!’ So that motherfucker put me on that forklift. And I picked up a big ol’ pack…or a box…you know, you stick the prongs in the…uh…”
The pallet?
“Yeah, the pallet! And, man, I raised that motherfucker up, and my boss must’ve seen something right away. He knew I hadn’t ever driven one of those motherfuckers. And he jumped right up on that son of a bitch, and pushed me to the side, because I was getting ready to drop boxes on everybody. So he told me, ‘Man, we can’t use you.’ And I said, ‘Man, I need this job.’ So then what he did was put me on the midnight shift, which was real slow. There were some places I worked for such a short time that I didn’t even get my check. Like down at the Norfolk Community Hospital?”
Uh huh?
“Them motherfuckers still owe me thirty-something dollars. They made it sound pretty good. ‘You’re gonna be on landscaping.’ They put me out there, pulling up grass by hand where the lawnmower couldn’t get it. Here’s the thing. There was a bus stop where I was working. And seemed like every motherfucker on the bus knew me. And when the bus would stop in the morning… ‘Jerry! I thought you was in New York! Ain’t you a star?! Sitting there picking grass!’ Laughing and shit. Three days later, I was gone.”
That’ll keep that ego in check, won’t it?
“Hell yeah! But, so from Miami, I moved to Queens, New York, and then to Hempstead, Long Island, and then out here to Northridge [California].”
You were producing records up in New York for Atlantic, right?
“Yeah.”
And then you decided to undergo the name change to Swamp Dogg. Did you just come up with doing Total Destruction in Macon? Was that your idea?
“Yeah, it was my idea. I was sick of Atlantic. It was a whole political reason I was there, and I didn’t even know it… When they called me upstairs to let me go at Atlantic, I had been trying to leave there for about six months, and they wouldn’t let me go. And it wasn’t because I was all that good, it was because the NAACP and the Fair Play Committee was all over the motherfucker for not having a black staff producer. There were plenty of blacks out there in the field producing music, but they did not have one in-house. So when I came along, I thought they hired me because I had my shit together. But they hired me strictly for political reasons. That’s the reason they didn’t want to let me go. Me and Gary Bonds went down to Miami, and spent a ton of money – for that time – we must’ve spent maybe 10 or 12 grand cutting a couple singles…
Hell, that’s a lot of money now, so I know it was then…
“Yeah, so we were at the Sheraton. Had a convertible Cadillac, and a convertible Lincoln Continental. Throwing parties at the studio. We got back, the comptroller said ‘Man, fuck all this.’ So they gave me my severance check. Which was more money than I’d had at one time since I’d been at Atlantic. I think I was making $600 a week. And they gave me a severance check for like $2,400, and some other little monies that had accumulated…”
So you were doing pretty good.
Yeah. So, I took that money, and went home. I told my wife, ‘Look, I’m going to produce my own shit. I can’t be controlled that tight.’ I can be controlled, but I got to have respect for what the fuck you’re saying.”
Sure, yeah, I’m the same way.
“I called Phil Walden and made a deal. I said, ‘You supply the studio and the musicians, and I’ll do the talent and the productions. And, after the studio costs, we’ll split the money 75/25,’ with him getting 25. ’Cause I knew he was gonna jack the studio up any motherfucking way. And we split all the publishing 50/50. And he said, ‘Fine.’”
After living all over the East Coast, moving back and forth in the music business, you’re back in Macon where you had been arrested just a few years prior. Did you have a sense of unease, since you’d been away from the Deep South for a few years?
“Naw. It was … [pause] … Let me tell you … I like the South. It just is not… naw, I ain’t going to say that … [pause] … About three years ago, I had bought a house – or was going to buy a house – in Huntsville, Alabama. I was going to go down there, and revamp my shit. And get people into the Southern soul music, and work out of there. But it didn’t work out. I haven’t ever been reluctant to go to the South. As a matter of fact, I ran into a Ku Klux Klan parade in Montgomery, Alabama. We were coming out of Florida. We had Florida license plates. I think that helped us. And the KKK was out there practicing or doing some shit. We had to stop while they went by. And they looked at us, looked at the car. And they ain’t fuck with us. And for some reason, I didn’t get nervous. I’ll tell you, when I get in situations, I get nervous. I have anxiety attacks, all kinds of silly shit. I fear flying, but I do it all the time. Once I get on, and it takes off, I say my prayer, I carry my ass asleep, and I say, ‘What the fuck? If this is it, this is it.’ It’s the same thing I say with the Ku Klux Klan. I said, ‘Well, they’re either gonna leave us alone, or fuck us up. And we can’t stop them. There’s only two of us.’ And they didn’t fuck with us… [pause] … It’s just that a lot of shit that bothers other people doesn’t bother me. Because I know, at the end of the day, I have to complete my mission. I’m willing to give, help, be involved. But I still got my mission which is – was at the time – my family. So, whatever it took for me to take care of my family, that’s what I did. If I had to take a lot of racial bullshit… Hey, man, wasn’t nobody more racist than Phil Walden!”
Is that right?
“Fuck yeah. I mean, shit, as soon as Otis died, that name ‘Redwall’ came off the building, and everything became ‘Walden Enterprises.’”
But I guess you were still cool enough with him to record there in Macon?
“Yeah! I mean, I guess if I’d been treated any other way in the South, I would’ve been suspicious. I would’ve said, ‘These motherfuckers got something waiting for me up the road.’ And you also know in the South… or you knew at that time… who didn’t like you. So, you know who to avoid, who to stay away from.”
I remember reading Malcolm X saying in the ’60s that he preferred dealing with Southern white people to Northern white people, because with Southern white people, you knew where you stood.
“Yeah. See, whites on the West Coast and the East Coast would stick a knife in your back. Where, most of the Southern bigots would tell you right away, ‘Nigger, I don’t like you.’ ‘Well, cool. I’m gone. Fuck it.’ But, I’ll tell you, while I was in Muscle Shoals, Alabama…There was a white man by the name of Howard Roberts, and he came by the studio two or three times. He was driving an old Toronado, and he was smoking a cigar. This old beat-up car. Looked like he’d have to scrape mud off of it before he could drive it. And I said to David [Johnson, then owner of Broadway Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama], ‘David, who is this motherfucker that keeps coming in here?’ He’d be watching, saying things like, ‘Hey Swamp Dogg, I love your singing. I love your this, I love your that.’ David said, ‘One of the richest men in the state of Alabama.’ I said, ‘No shit.’ He had built some big bridge, and all that kinda shit. He was a pilot in World War Something. He owned zillions of dollars, alright? He bought me a Cherokee Six airplane. He bought me a houseboat that I used to live on when I was down there. He bought me a house, but I never did move down there in it. And it was in an all-white neighborhood. The church he went to was all-white. He took my wife and I one Sunday. Big old church. They sat us in the front pew, and the pastor announced who we were, had us to stand up. People applauded. I said, ‘How come there ain’t more niggas in this motherfucker?’ He said, ‘You’re a different type of nigger. We love you… The niggers down here ain’t worth shit.’ And I said, ‘Well, shit, that’s his opinion.’ I don’t agree with him, but I was making money, and getting money out of that motherfucker. I was getting everything out of that motherfucker. We were doing it. I had a banker down there who would cash newspaper! You just had to tear off the top – the circulation – and however much the circulation was, that’s how much money he’d give you. Just sign the newspaper!”
I want to ask you about recording in Macon. There was a record that came out around the same time. It’s a different sounding record, but it’s Johnny Jenkins’ Ton-Ton Macoute. Y’all are very different singers and songwriters. But the ways the albums were approached are similar to me in that there’s a liberated sense of playing with different styles and genres. They’re both almost like singer-songwriter albums more than traditional soul or R&B records. Did you run into him or any of the Allman Brothers while you were down there?
“Yeah! Yeah, as a matter of fact, Duane played guitar on three cuts on Doris Duke’s album. Rhino-Warner has a seven-CD set coming out on Duane, and they use one of my songs – “Ghost of Myself” by Doris Duke. Yeah, Duane and them came in off the road in the morning, and he didn’t feel like going to bed. He was wide open. So he came by the studio, and he walked in, and he said, ‘Swamp Dogg, now, you mind if I sit in?’ I said, ‘Fuck no!’ He sat down and started playing. I said, ‘Let him play what he wants to. That’s Duane Allman. Whatever he plays is gonna be good.’ And Johnny Jenkins, I met once. But, Martin Mull, he was down there. Remember, he was making records?”
Yeah.
“A lot of people I would run into down there. They’d come to the studio, because there wasn’t nowhere else to go! Not unless you left town.”
Charlie Daniels’s first record has a song called “The Pope and the Dope,” and it includes these lines:
What if Eldridge Cleaver was to devise a plan,
For the Black Panther Party of America to be merged with the Ku Klux Klan,
And if Richard Nixon made Spiro Agnew
the new ambassador to Timbuktu?
If he was to do it well, do you guess
It’d improve his relationship with CBS?
And then you have these lines in “Do You Believe?”
Do you believe in integration?
in liberation?
sex relations?
conversation?
Do you believe in the NAACP
or the Ku Klux Klan?
in the Panther Party
or in Uncle Sam?
In both of those songs, it seems like you and Charlie Daniels are addressing some of the same partisanship and division that was present in the country and the world at that time. And, instead of taking sides, you’re asking questions.
“Right!”
It’s particularly interesting, because y’all are two guys from the same generation, but from different parts of the South; he’s white, and you’re black; he comes from a country-music background, and you came up playing Rhythm & Blues. But y’all seem to be getting at a similar thing. Did you feel that kinship at the time?
“Let me tell you. I LOVE what you just read, but I’ve never heard it before. And I dig me some Charlie Daniels. I love me some Charlie Daniels.”
Do you think there was something about growing up in the South when y’all did that shaped the way you perceived the world? That made you ask questions rather than make declarations? I mean, this was the era of protest music – when people were saying, “This is the way it is, and this is the way it should be.” And you always had a more nuanced way of inquiring…
“Yeah, because when you walk into a situation, when you open a door and walk in, you see something, but you don’t really know what you’re looking at until somebody explains it to you. So, I had questions first. You walk by somewhere, and there’s a car accident, and a guy laid out there dead. You don’t right away say, ‘Oh yeah, he always drove too fucking fast. No wonder he’s dead.’ Only to find out that a motherfucker was drunk with a truck, and hit him as he was crossing the street at normal speed. Do you get the parallel?”
Yeah, I do. So do you feel like there’s something about growing up in the South that made you more quick to see other people’s side?
“Yeah. And growing up in a family that had picked cotton… My great-great-great-grandmother – I knew her – she was 102 when she died, and she had definitely been a slave. And almost everybody else but my Mama had been through that slavery thing. The kind of pride they had was like, ‘I pay all my bills. I go to the place and pay my bills. I don’t want no white man coming to my house.’ I mean, a bunch of white people came by for one reason or another. And they weren’t treated cruelly; it’s just that the black people were standoffish. They didn’t trust white people. And I’d hear all of this talk. They told me, ‘Don’t you ever, don’t you EVER fuck with no white women. They’ll get you hung, they’ll get you hung like a black motherfucker.’ Like, I got a friend down in Nashville, and he and his wife are so good and cool with me. And sometimes she’ll say, ‘Come on, Swamp. I’m going shopping.’ And I’ll be in the grocery store with her or something, and I still feel a little uneasy because I don’t want nobody to think it’s my wife. And their last name happens to be Williams, also. But she and her husband are so motherfucking cool.”
Your song “Synthetic World” includes the lines:
Hey you, I’m up from the bayou,
Where wildlife runs free,
You could say that I’m country.
But let me tell you what I see.
Your world is plastic.
Can see through to the otherside.
Your cities are made of wood,
Antiques are what you’ve got inside.
Houses are paper but folks don’t hear a word you say.
Friendship’s like acid it burns as it slides away.
So you see, my patience is growin’ thin.
With this synthetic world we’re livin’ in.
And then there’s Lynyrd Skynyrd’s song “All I Can Do Is Write About It”:
Do you like to see a mountain stream a-flowin’?
Do you like to see a youngin’ with his dog
Did you ever stop to think about, well, the air your breathin’?
Well, you better listen to my song
And, Lord, I can’t make these changes
All I can do is write ’em in a song
I can see the concrete slowly creepin’
Lord, take me and mine before that comes.
It seems like you and some of these other bands were able to take your Southern, somewhat rural background as a weapon against an impending threat. And I don’t know if that threat is consumerism, or industrialization or what. How did you see that threat in “Synthetic World”?
“It narrows down to honesty, fairness and truth. And those were the three things that had been swept under the fucking rug. And nothing was going to happen until we pulled that rug up, and put that shit that we’d done swept under it in the trash.”
And you go on to say, (and I love these lines):
Now I find I’m out of place
If I only have one face.
All my friends have more than two
No longer must you be you.
With the way that the Internet and social media allow anybody to create their own identity out of thin air, this song could take on many more levels of meaning. Do you think that the sentiments of this song are relevant today?
“You know, I never thought of that. Yes, I do. I mean, it’s still like that. It’s still phony. I think lying is at the top of list – that lying takes on other aspects just as bad as lies. I mean, we can’t believe anything the government tells us. Not a damn thing. The reasons we’re at war, the reasons the gas is so high. I mean, I don’t understand it. And they don’t mean for me to understand it. And when I say, ‘I,’ I’m speaking for nearly every non-political citizen of the United States. We don’t know what the fuck is going on. We can’t figure this shit out. That’s because we don’t have the information, and we’re not gonna get the information. You know, 40 years from now, somebody will present some paperwork and open it up to the public. But, shit, at that time, something else will be going on.”
You talk a lot about honesty, and something that I hear a lot in your songs is a plea for honesty. You have a very honest tone in your songwriting. But I’ve read in an interview that part of the reason you decided to change your recording name to Swamp Dogg was that you wanted to say things that Jerry Williams wouldn’t be comfortable saying.
“Right.”
Do you think that, as an artist, taking on a persona can actually inspire honesty?
“No.”
No?
“I think you either feel, think or act in an honest way, or you don’t. I mean, you can call yourself ‘Jesus Christ,’ and, if you a dirty motherfucker, you’re still a dirty motherfucker. I didn’t become Swamp Dogg for honesty or any of that shit. There were things that I wanted to do, and ‘Jerry Williams’ is a soft name. If you try to scream the name: ‘JERRY WILLIAMS!’ It diminishes on your ass. By the time you get to the end of Jerry. The only way you can make it happen is with a hell of a soundsystem. ‘Swamp Dogg?!’ Boy, you can say that so loud! It screams! It screams out of your mouth.”
As a man, Jerry Williams, you’re a friendly, considerate, humble kind of dude. And, I’m wondering if, in some way, being Swamp Dogg makes you feel a little bolder.
“Yeah, it does. I go from Clark Kent to Superman. And, then after a while, I got to go back to Clark.”
Has there ever been a time when Swamp Dogg was in danger of creeping in on your real life as Jerry Williams?
“Oh yeah. I started getting a big head. I was being not as nice to my wife as I should have been. I mean I never hit her or nothing like that. Well, I did. I slapped her one time, and she balled up her first like she was Mike Tyson, and hit me in my fucking face. Hurt like a sonofabitch! I said, ‘Fuck this! I ain’t fighting this woman!’ That took away all that chastising shit I was going to do. Anyway, it did seep into my life. I became something in my mind that I really was not. This new identity did interfere with the real Jerry Williams. Because Jerry Williams was the husband, the family man, the provider, the motherfucker with some level thinking, the motherfucker who would listen. Swamp Dogg ain’t listening to nobody about shit! I could see myself becoming that, and couldn’t stop myself. I mean, at one point, I had nine fucking automobiles. All kinds of luxury automobiles. Rolls Royces, Lincoln Continentals, Eldorado Cadillacs. I don’t need all that shit! I can’t even drive all that well. It’s funny now, but I developed a phobia, about 1980, where I’m afraid to drive on the freeway! Ain’t that a bitch!”
Hahaha!
“Aw man, I thought I was everything that I wasn’t! My wife helped me find myself. But in order to find myself, I had lost myself to the point that my wife had to send out a search party. Who turned out to be a Dr. Tanner who was in the Who’s Who of Psychiatry. He helped me find myself, and then it was up to me to keep a tight grip on myself. Now, I keep a tight grip on myself. Over time, you find out that you’re just another motherfucker!”
http://www.stompandstammer.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5302&Itemid=51
THE RECORD CHANGER (online music blog) – Positive album review
SWAMP DOGG’S SOUTHERN SOUL
There’s something about the sound of southern soul records that suggests a pool room on a Saturday night, and a Baptist church on Sunday morning. The best southern soul artists can take you to both places on the same record – sometimes in the same song. Southern soul records sound a little rougher and not as sophisticated as the records that come out of the metropolitan areas up north. There’s usually a distinctive guitar that plays stinging licks, a deep-fried organ, horns that testify, and a rhythm section that could keep perfect time in the middle of a hurricane. The lyrics touch all the bases – politics, the economy, substance abuse, Jesus, sin, sex – just about anything that touches the lives of everyday people. The records coming out of labels like Atlantic, Stax, Hi, Excello, Malaco and several others all had that sound in common. Artists like O.V. Wright, Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, James Carr, Otis Clay and others made the kinds of records I’m talking about. Those records sound as good today as they did when they were brand new.
That’s why the reissues of Swamp Dogg’s 1970 Total Destruction To Your Mind and 1971’s Rat On! albums by Alive-Natural Sound are cause for celebration. Swamp Dogg is Jerry Williams – one of the most talented singers, songwriters, and producers of his generation. Born 70 years ago in Portsmouth, Virginia, Williams has been making music professionally since the age of 12. He’s never really had a hit under his own name, but writing hits for others like Johnny Paycheck and Gene Pitney kept him going. Anyone can tell you, though, that you don’t hang around for six decades in any business unless you’ve got talent to burn.
Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! are textbook examples of genuine southern soul. They’re records that sound familiar the first time you hear them. And they never age. They’re the kinds of records you don’t bother to file because you’re playing them all the time. In this age of lies, somebody’s got to tell the truth. And the truth is as close as your turntable. Swamp Dogg is back. Everything gonna be alright.
Available from Alive-Natural Sound Records at Bomp.com in vinyl or compact disc formats. Also, check out this interview with Swamp Dogg at Aquarium Drunkard and keep an eye open for more Swamp Dogg coming soon from Alive.
http://therecordchanger.blogspot.com/2013/04/swamp-doggs-southern-soul.html
ROLLING STONE (Spanish version of the magazine) – Rat On! Featured in their worst album covers in history.
The worst album covers in history
Swamp Dogg, Rat on! This could be the first cover-hieroglyphic history: rat + on.
http://ow.ly/jT7x2
WMLB RADIO (Atlanta radio station) – New remastered versions of “I Was Born Blue,” “Do You Believe,” and “Do Our Thing Together” on April 6th on The Stomp & Stammer Radio Hour.
http://www.stompandstammer.com/index.php?option=com_content&id=68&Itemid=51&limit=9&limitstart=0
WMBR RADIO (Cambridge, MA college station) – New remastered version of “TDTYM” aired on April 3rd “That Ain’t My Wife” on March 14.
http://pipeline.wmbr.org/archives/late-risers-club-playlist-april-3-2013
http://www.phonographblues.com/2013/04/lost-found-playlist-for-31413.html
CKUW RADIO (Winnipeg, Canada college radio station) – New remastered version of “TDTYM” aired on April 9th.
http://www.earshot-online.com/charts/ckuw.cfm?intChartTypeID=1&dWeekOfID=2013-04-09
WXDU RADIO (Durham, NC station) – New remastered version of “TDTYM” & Do Our Thing Together aired on April 2nd. “Got To Get A Message To You” also aired on April 6th. “Remember I Said Tomorrow” aired on April 8th
http://www.wxdu.org/plmanager/world/printplaylist.php?show_id=25854
http://www.wxdu.org/plmanager/world/printplaylist.php?show_id=25855
http://www.wxdu.org/plmanager/world/printplaylist.php?show_id=25889 http://www.wxdu.org/plmanager/world/printplaylist.php?show_id=25917
THE NEW ZEALAND HERALD (NZ daily) – Positive album review
Album reviews: Swamp Dogg
By Scott Kara
No, not Snoop Dogg, but Jerry Williams (aka Swamp Dogg), a soul man and American music cult hero who had his heyday in the 70s and early 80s. These reissues are his first two albums, with 1970 debut, Total Destruction to Your Mind, a near classic. It’s at its best with the hard-out grooves, blasts of brass, and Dogg’s effortless and wild delivery on the title track and the cheeky and tough Red Neck with lines like “Hey Red Neck, God said brain, you thought he said rain, and you ran for cover”. But he can slip into slower soul crooner mode on The World Beyond, which sounds like a Maori show band tune, and the lovely lilting and loping serenade of I Was Born Blue. The highlight though is Sal-a-Faster, because from the moment it hits, with its low-slung funky bass line, simple incessant guitar hook, and the wending and winding vocal , it’s what makes this album a magical – yet somewhat sadly overlooked – slice of 70s soul.
Meanwhile, Rat On! is a continuation of Total Destruction’s blend of soul, funk and rock ‘n’ roll, but it’s not quite as vital and dynamic, with songs like Predicament #2 a little whiney and his cover of the Bee Gees’ Got to Get a Message to You aimless and basic. But never fear, because you can get your “rat on” to opener Do You Believe and closer Do Our Thing Together which will have you pulling you best soul man moves, and sliding across the floor.
Ads by CouponDropDown
On She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye he delves into his country music influences, but overall Swamp Dogg is a funk soul brother.
Stars: 4/5
Total Destruction to Your Mind
Stars: 3.5/5
Rat On!
– TimeOut
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=10875644
THE RECORD CHANGER (online music blog) – Positive album review
SWAMP DOGG’S SOUTHERN SOUL
There’s something about the sound of southern soul records that suggests a pool room on a Saturday night, and a Baptist church on Sunday morning. The best southern soul artists can take you to both places on the same record – sometimes in the same song. Southern soul records sound a little rougher and not as sophisticated as the records that come out of the metropolitan areas up north. There’s usually a distinctive guitar that plays stinging licks, a deep-fried organ, horns that testify, and a rhythm section that could keep perfect time in the middle of a hurricane. The lyrics touch all the bases – politics, the economy, substance abuse, Jesus, sin, sex – just about anything that touches the lives of everyday people. The records coming out of labels like Atlantic, Stax, Hi, Excello, Malaco and several others all had that sound in common. Artists like O.V. Wright, Percy Sledge, Otis Redding, James Carr, Otis Clay and others made the kinds of records I’m talking about. Those records sound as good today as they did when they were brand new.
That’s why the reissues of Swamp Dogg’s 1970 Total Destruction To Your Mind and 1971’s Rat On! albums by Alive-Natural Sound are cause for celebration. Swamp Dogg is Jerry Williams – one of the most talented singers, songwriters, and producers of his generation. Born 70 years ago in Portsmouth, Virginia, Williams has been making music professionally since the age of 12. He’s never really had a hit under his own name, but writing hits for others like Johnny Paycheck and Gene Pitney kept him going. Anyone can tell you, though, that you don’t hang around for six decades in any business unless you’ve got talent to burn.
Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! are textbook examples of genuine southern soul. They’re records that sound familiar the first time you hear them. And they never age. They’re the kinds of records you don’t bother to file because you’re playing them all the time. In this age of lies, somebody’s got to tell the truth. And the truth is as close as your turntable. Swamp Dogg is back. Everything gonna be alright.
Available from Alive-Natural Sound Records at Bomp.com in vinyl or compact disc formats. Also, check out this interview with Swamp Dogg at Aquarium Drunkard and keep an eye open for more Swamp Dogg coming soon from Alive.
http://therecordchanger.blogspot.com/2013/04/swamp-doggs-southern-soul.html
EXTRA MUSIC NEWS (online music site) – “I Was Born Blue” #74 on their April Top 100 Promo Chart (Best New Tracks):
TOP 100 Promo Chart – April 2013
MIDWEST RECORD (Chicagoland music site) – Positive album s.
ALIVE
SWAMP DOGG/Total Destruction to Your Mind: The original classic Swamp Dogg that set the standard and the pace for what would follow. Little Jerry Williams was having a melt down but still had to shake his money maker. The generation gap was widening and the cities were burning. Funkadelic had yet to launch maggot nation. What to do? Williams became Swamp Dogg down in Macon and came out with a set that bridged both sides of all the gaps that were widening and served up a funk, rock, political tour de force like no one had ever seen before. And it wound up on Elektra which had transitioned from being a folkie label to a rock label in the wake Doors success but now had to fill that widening gap. They certainly get points for being the one to take a chance on this. Dead solid perfect outsider music loaded with elements that would soon become mainstream and not be fully recognized until many years later when sampled on records routinely selling over 10 million copies. This is one of the top reasons to go digging in the old school crates. Still as wild now as it was then.
SWAMP DOGG/Rat On!: The original Macon sessions for this set were scraped and the date was moved to Muscle Shoals to be mid wifed by those funky white boys that knew their way around soul. The Muscle Shoals gang tried to keep it commercial but Dogg had other ideas, and he certainly made a set that stood out. A stand out example of outsider soul wielding a political cudgel full of lyrics that made you wonder what that was. Wild stuff that anyone who was never impressed with the top 40 of any genre will know was made for them. And it only took 40 years for them to find it. Another wild ride loaded with moves Swamp Dogg would never made as unbridled again.
http://midwestrecord.com/MWRBlog.html
WFMU RADIO (East Orange, NJ Freeform radio station) – New remastered version of ” Remember, I Said Tomorrow ” aired April 1st.
KDHX RADIO (St. Louis, MO Community radio station) – New remastered version of ” Everything You’ll Ever Need” aired March 29th on Steve Pick’s Sound Salvation show.
Swamp Dogg “Everything You’ll Ever Need” from Total Destruction to Your Mind SINGLE (Alive 1970) —The first two Swamp Dogg albums are getting the reissue treatment they deserve, at long last.
http://www.spinitron.com/radio/playlist.php?station=kdhx&plid=11393
Contact: Steve Pick – salvation@kdhx.org
THE VOICE 88.7 RADIO (Sacramento, CA Community radio station) – “Got To Get Message To You” aired March 1 on Paul Hefti’s Semi-Twang show
Contact: Paul Hefti – semitwang@yahoo.com
THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN (Santa Fe, NM daily) – Positive album review with album art and videos.
Dogg is my co-pilot
By Steve Terrell
Great news for fans of the soul man known as Swamp Dogg: Alive/Naturalsound records has just re-released Mr. Dogg’s first two albums, Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On! Both have been out of print for years.
I know there are members of the cult of Swamp Dogg among my readership. But there’s a good chance that the vast majority of readers have no idea who he is.
Born Jerry Williams in Portsmouth, Virginia, more than 70 years ago, he began recording in the mid-1950s under the name of Little Jerry and later “Little Jerry Williams.” His Swamp Dogg persona didn’t emerge until 1970 with Total Destruction to Your Mind. Rat On! followed the next year.
Despite having a wonderful, sometimes piercing high voice, Swamp Dogg managed never to become a mainstream success. His biggest success is probably being the co-writer — along with fellow soul-belter Gary “U.S.” Bonds — of “She’s All I Got,” a huge country hit for Johnny Paycheck in the early ’70s.
But Swamp Dogg was intent on forging his own path in the music world. Years before it was fashionable, he bolted the big labels and started his own independent company, Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group, even though that meant leaner record sales and relative obscurity.
Another possibility is that these albums didn’t go platinum because of the covers, which were punk-rock in spirit years before punk.
The cover of Total Destruction features a fuzzy photo of Swamp in his underwear with what might be a saucepan on his head, sitting on what looks like a garbage truck. Rat On! has a picture of Swamp Dogg wearing a snazzy black-and-white pimp cap and matching shirt and riding a large white rat the size of a horse.
(The strange, sometimes off-putting Swamp Dogg album covers never stopped. His 2003 record If I Ever Kiss It … He Can Kiss It Goodbye shows Swamp Dogg in a rather conservative suit surrounded by oversized disembodied tongues and lips. Then in 2007 there was Resurrection, which had a cover depicting the singer nailed to a cross, clad only in an U.S.-flag loincloth.)
But you can’t judge a record by the cover, so those who skipped the early Swamp Dogg records because of the album art did themselves a disservice. Especially when it comes to Total Destruction to Your Mind.
The title song opens the album, with Swamp making an overt “I Am the Walrus” reference (“Sittin’ on a corn flake …”). It’s an upbeat, gospel-infused tune, but despite the surreal lyrics and some subdued wah-wah guitar, I wouldn’t call this a “psychedelic” soul song as countless other writers have. It’s just good-time Southern soul. Swamp refers to “psychedelic music to blow my mind” in the next song, “Synthetic World.” But the music on this tune is sweet and mellow.
I can almost imagine the late Richard Manuel of The Band singing the song “The World Beyond,” a lament taking place in some post-apocalyptic reality. (Believe it or not, this was written by Bobby Goldsboro, most famous for the sap masterpieces “Honey” and “Broomstick Cowboy.”) And I’m not sure which reality “I Was Born Blue” came from. In the refrain, Swamp sings, “Why wasn’t I born with orange skin and green hair like the rest of the people in the world?”
One of the harder-edged tracks here is the slow-burning, swampy “Sal-a-Faster,” which starts out with Swamp confessing, “I just hafta always stay plastered …” But the song in which he seems to be having the most fun is “Redneck,” which was written by Joe South. That’s one of two South songs here, the other being “These Are Not My People,” which is about a young woman who falls victim to the temptations of the wild side of life.
Total Destruction ends with a couple of tunes that perhaps should have been called “The Paternity Suit Suite.” “The Baby Is Mine” is about tensions between a guy and his ex-love’s husband. “You can bet your life, she might be his wife/but the baby is mine,” Swamp sings. The next tune, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” is a straight-up blues about a “wild” woman married to a brown-eyed man who is worried whether his blue-eyed child is really his.
Rat On! starts out with “Do You Believe,” which has Swamp pondering the political landscape of the day. “Do you believe in the NAACP/Or the Ku Klux Klan/The Panther Party/or in Uncle Sam?”
But the theme changes to personal domestic matters in the next song. “Predicament #2” is about a guy with a loving wife and child as well as a mistress on the side. “One woman keeps my heart and the other keeps my family,” he sings.
Later in the album, he sings about a more unusual situation. “That Ain’t My Wife” is about a guy who walks into his old house and watches a couple making out on the couch. He leaves, gets some booze at a liquor store, and goes back to the house just to make sure.
Two of my favorite songs on Rat On! are covers. Swamp Dogg does a stirring version of The Bee Gees’ “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You.” But even better is his soul-soaked take on a Mickey Newberry classic, “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye.” Right now I can’t decide whether I like this song best by Swamp Dogg or Jerry Lee Lewis.
http://www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo/columns/terrells_tuneup/article_a61719f4-97f9-11e2-915a-0019bb30f31a.html
OTHER MUSIC (NYC record shop’s music blog) – Positive album review.
SWAMP DOGG – Total Destruction to Your Mind & Rat On!
Everyone get down on your knees and give thanks, for these two magnificent albums are back on store shelves once again. Swamp Dogg is one of my personal favorite soul singers and songwriters, a man who has written for and worked with such luminaries as Irma Thomas, Doris Duke, and Gary U.S. Bonds, and who has repeatedly over the years been given a bum deal thanks to his absolutely wicked early material getting bootlegged and illegally distributed countless times over. These official reissues of his first two solo albums, 1970’s Total Destruction to Your Mind and ’71’s Rat On!, are a godsend. The Dogg, born Jerry Williams Jr., takes the slinky groove of Sly Stone or Invictus-era Parliament and combines it with the biting wit and fiery guitar burn of Frank Zappa, cemented together by a vibe that blends country soul with bayou musk. His albums sound like no one else yet ring oddly familiar, pulling no punches yet serenading you with tender platitudes. He straddles the line between commercial promise and cult obscurity, never letting one side win out over the other, and it’s precisely that extreme dedication to his craft and creative voice that has made his LPs highly desirable amongst diggers worldwide. Fans of everything from Betty Davis to last year’s Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters electric reissues owe it to themselves to pick these up PRONTO. The man is an icon who places trash and treasure in equal measure, and if the idea of Bobby Womack fronting the Mothers of Invention sounds like a good time to you (and trust me, it should sound good to all of you), I cannot recommend these two albums enough. I say get them both at the same time, because if you dig one, you’re going to want a hit of the other one right away. Trust me on this one… you need some Swamp Dogg in your life. Destroy your mind! [IQ]
http://othermusic.com/2013march14update.html
KSFR RADIO (Santa Fe, NM radio station) – New remastered version of “Total Destruction…” aired March 24th on Steve Terrell’s’s show.
http://steveterrell.blogspot.com/2013/03/terrells-sound-world-playlist_24.html
AQUARIUM DRUNKARD (popular L.A. based online music blog) – Feature/interview with Swamp photo, album art and two mp3 streams.
Swamp Dogg Speaks :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
Jerry Williams Jr. didn’t adopt the handle “Swamp Dogg” in the early ‘70s in order to confuse, obfuscate, or mislead anyone. To hear the man tell it, he took on the name because it was imperative to do so. “It was born out of a necessity, to find myself, my identity,” the 80-year-old singer says via phone from his home in Southern California. His voice is pitched high, laced with a strong Southern accent that betrays his Georgia roots.
“I didn’t know who Jerry Williams was for a while. That’s when I started having a lot of acute anxiety. Here I had agoraphobia and claustrophobia, at the same motherfucking time. Swamp Dogg wasn’t afraid of anything, where at that time Jerry Williams was afraid of his shadow. I knew Jerry Williams was still the motive for Swamp Dogg; it was like putting a Chevy motor in a Rolls-Royce. That’s what made it run. It’s not really a Rolls, you know? It’s a Chevy that looks like one.”
This month sees the re-release Swamp Dogg’s gonzo soul classics Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On!, via California-based label Alive Records. Originally released in 1970 and ‘71 by Canyon Records and Elektra, respectively, the records exhibit the organic change from “Little” Jerry Williams – who’d recorded R&B platters and worked for a short stint as a staff producer at Atlantic – into the wild and feral Swamp Dogg.
MP3: Swamp Dogg :: Creeping Away
Total Destruction’s title track roars with amplified funk boogie, with guitarist Jesse Carr and drummer Johnny Sandlin providing fuzz and a gutbucket beat. The song establishes Swamp Dogg as a character on the same wavelength as rock’s avant garde, with gritty, hard-edged melodies, and a clear admiration for blue-collar country. But it’s not all bombast: Rat On! delivers a couple exquisite weepers, like the tender Bee Gees cover, “Got to Get a Massage to You” and “Predicament #2,” where Swamp mourns a bad situation: he’s got a great wife, but he’s also got a great mistress. Why can’t one woman be both? “Back then, people were like, ‘Why would someone call themselves a dog?’” he laughs. “People would come down on me because I named myself Dogg. People would say, ‘Why would you name yourself that? What’s your real name? I’m not going to call you that! I’m going to call you by your real name,’ and I said, ‘You can call me by Kiss-My-Ass, you know? I am Swamp Dogg, you motherfucker, and that’s it.”
Swamp’s boldness couldn’t be better exhibited than the cover of Rat On!. Jerry Williams – whose “concept” was to “make the ladies want to buy some records, that’s all,” probably wouldn’t have gone for a record sleeve as bizarre. Featuring a proud Swamp, arms raised atop a white rat, the cover has earned a slot on more than a few “Worst Album Covers Ever” lists, a fact that he’s very proud of. When asked who came up with the outlandish cover idea, he scoffs.
“Me! You wouldn’t hire anybody to do that, would you? If they did, you wouldn’t pay ‘em. You’d be like, ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ I didn’t know what a ‘Swamp Dogg cover’ was really supposed to look like, because I really hadn’t totally figured out who Swamp Dogg was, or what he was supposed to be.”
Nearly everyone else had a hard time figuring Swamp Dogg out, too. Rat On!, with its mix of politically minded lyricism (the “for what” in “God Bless American For What” was initially censored) and ribald numbers, was more conventional than Total Destruction to Your Mind, but it was still too freaky for some.
“I would use a curse word every now and then in my songs,” he says. “I said things that were ahead of their time. There’s a line in Total Destruction which is, ‘They found out how to tax the grass, watch ‘em get the law passed.’ In 1970, people were still going to jail for grass. Now, they found out how to get the taxes, so all of the sudden they legalize it. So, that’s it.”
His occasional radical talk endeared him to Jane Fonda, and along with the actress, he allegedly found himself on Nixon’s “enemy list.” Not that he’s ever seen it. “I don’t know if Nixon had anything to do with it. That may have been some J. Edgar Hoover shit. But it’s like Elvis said. Well, I’m quite sure that somebody said it before Elvis Presley, but it gets attributed to Elvis: ‘I don’t give a fuck what you say about me; just spell my name right.’”
Rat On! tanked, and records for Island and Takoma followed. Swamp was nearly close to signing with Mercury for a country record, but the deal fell through. “Cause I was black,” he says. “I’m not playing the race card. I was black and they were scared.”
MP3: Swamp Dogg :: If I Die Tomorrow
But unlike so many cult figures, he didn’t fade away. He launched his own imprint, the Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group, to issue his records and production work. Plus, he’s had money coming in from licensing his songs. Kid Rock, Talib Kweli and Hi-Tek, and others have sampled him. He considers himself more of a soul purist, with an all-analog studio save for an electronic drum kit, but he’s a fan of hip-hop.
“I’ve had hit records with it! Let me tell you something — I am so thankful for rappers and hip-hop artists, I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I won’t sit with sons of bitches talking about, ‘Man, that ain’t real music. They get the songs and they fuck ‘em up,’ and this that and the other. Here I’ll be sitting on a 17-million seller from Kid Rock. Ah, shit! Y’all kiss my ass. I’m getting out y’all’s way before lightening strikes you motherfuckers.”
Samples aside, he was proud when Alive Records approached him about reissuing his fist forays as Swamp Dogg. He says they’re the first of many Swamp Dogg releases the label is planning, and he’s happy to be working with people who “exude integrity,” unlike the bootleggers worldwide he’s certain have been making millions of Swamp Dogg recordings.
“You can tell that these motherfuckers are right,” he says. “It’s just like when you meet a woman and you say, in one night, ‘This is the bitch. I’m going to cultivate this motherfucking relationship.’ Usually, she turns out to be the right one.”
He chuckles. “Unless you meet her under the wrong circumstances. You meet her at an orgy or some shit. You don’t take that bitch home to mama. But no, they’ve been great. I mean shit; they treat me like I’m Rihanna or Britney Spears or something. Rihanna! They treat me like a fucking star. I don’t know about a super star, but they treat me like a star.”
In the liner notes of Total Destruction, Swamp goes out of way to thank himself: “I owe all my present success to a very dear person..a person whom I love, worship and admire beyond any shadow of a doubt – ME!!” But in a more reflective mood today, he chocks up his unique triumphs to good karma, too.
“When people do things to me that’s not cool, I keep on going, based on what people say is in the Bible,” he says. “I’ve never read it, because I don’t understand it. But you know, you’ve got all these people that understand it, and they say vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I’m like, ‘Okay, I don’t need to stop for revenge.’”
He pauses, and thinks for a moment, before adding: “There is such a thing as sweet revenge – I’ll employ that – it depends on what the situation is.” words/ j woodbury
Swamp Dogg Speaks :: The Aquarium Drunkard Interview
BLINDED BY LIGHT (online music blog) – Positive album reviews with art.
Review: Swamp Dogg ‘Rat On!’, ‘Total Destruction To Your Mind’ Re-Issues
By Greg Barbrick
“I am very proud of the fact that this album cover has been considered and nominated as one of the top ten ‘Worst Album Covers’ in the history of album covers. The left-handed accolade has helped this masterpiece to sell and avoid obscurity.” Those are the opening words of Swamp Dogg’s a.k.a. Jerry Williams Jr.’s liner notes to the Alive Records reissue of his second album, Rat On! (1971)
In reading his statement, the first thing I thought about was his great sense of humor, but he is also quite correct. I have been aware of Swamp Dogg for years, and the cover art of Rat On! is definitely one reason, but I had never had the opportunity to listen to him until now. With a name like Swamp Dogg, one might reasonably expect the music to sound kind of, well “swampy.” I was thinking maybe Creedence or even a genuine Cajun such as Doug Kershaw.
There is not much “swamp” in Mr. Dogg’s music though. This is fairly straight-forward Stax-ish early ’70s R&B. I must say, ugly cover artwork or not, it is pretty great. Actually, referring back to those classic Stax albums of that era is a compliment, but it is not altogether accurate. On both Rat On!, and its predecessor Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970), there is a lot more going on than “just” rollicking rhythm and blues.
The legend that has developed over the years about Swamp Dogg was that he was some sort of musical idiot savant. I’m sorry, I did not come up with this, it is just something I had read (in a few sources). Allow me to apologize for such a terrible misperception, for it is as wrong as could be. My guess is that the people who described him that way took the cover art at face value, and never even listened to the music. Because once you do hear the music, you realize that this guy should have been a star. There is some fantastic stuff on these records.
The first indicator for me that there was way more going on with Swamp Dogg than “just” great R&B came with “Creeping Away,” on Rat On!. I kept trying to place it, and finally I realized that part of it reminded me of “Up On Cripple Creek” by The Band. Not a direct cop mind you, more in that whole “Americana”-type feel that The Band did so well.
His cover of the Bee Gees’ “Got To Get A Message To You” was what really sold me though. This guy knows his stuff, inside and out. If you did not recognize the lyrics, you would never know that the Brothers Gibb wrote this track. It is so funky, and the way he makes it is own is so perfect that the song just knocked my socks off.
Rat On! really is a lost classic, and one that was ridiculously overlooked in its time. Just to add to what I so enjoyed about this music, some of it also shares some qualities with that of what Van Morrison was doing at about the same time. Almost every Morrison fan I know can agree on one thing during his spotty career. He was at an absolute peak in the early ’70s. Swamp Dogg uses horns very similarly to the way Van did on albums such as Moondance and Tupelo Honey. A couple of examples of this on Rat On! include “That Ain’t My Wife,” and his version of Mickey Newbury’s “She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye.”
To get an idea of just how fantastically eclectic Jerry Williams Jr. is, check out those cover artists again. The Bee Gees and Mickey Newbury! Those two do not easily sit side by side. Yet, here they do. Hearing those and his own originals done up in a sweet soul style, with horns and funky chicken-scratch guitars is sheer brilliance if you ask me.
As I mentioned earlier, Total Destruction To Your Mind was Swamp Dogg’s debut album, and while the cover art is not quite as bad as that of Rat On!, it is right up there. The cover features a terrible picture of Mr. Dogg, apparently at home. He wearing a weird silver hat that sort of looks like a graduation mortar-board, a white t-shirt, shorts, socks, and Beatle-boots. He is sitting on a funky old couch, with his foot up on what appears to be an oil-drum/coffee-table.
Alright, so once again, the presentation is not exactly enticing. In the Alive reissue notes, the artist has included some quotes. The first one is almost identical to what was once said to Frank Zappa. In Swamp Dogg’s case “A Very Big Man at Canyon Records” had this to say: “No commercial possibilities.”
Just like Rat On! though, it is obvious that nobody actually listened to the album. Well, some did, because original copies of these albums sell for big bucks to collectors. But again, he has produced some phenomenal music. The previously mentioned Stax-influenced R&B sound is a lot more prevalent on Total Destruction than on Rat.
There are also some very impressive collaborations with one Gary “U.S.” Bonds. He and Jerry Williams Jr. co-wrote three tracks on this album. They are “Dust Your Head Color Red,” “Everything You’ll Ever Need,” and the closing “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.” The songs are definite highlights of the set, but there is much more going on as well.
Actually, if forced to pick one, I would call the opening, title track my favorite. I love the powerful way this song blasts out, and the guitar solo in the middle just kicks ass. It reminds me of what I miss so much about Black music of the early ’70s. I’m a white-boy who was just a child at the time, but I loved what I heard then, and love it still.
I guess it is something that I have repeated over and over in this review, but it is a fact. Both of these albums are excellent. The covers are ugly as hell, but you know, so what? I guess back then though, that was enough. Hell, I have read the original Rolling Stone review of Funkadelic’s stone-classic Maggot Brain, and they hated it, mostly based on the cover art. So what chance did Jerry Williams Jr. have?
To lay my cards completely on the table, based on what I had heard about Swamp Dogg over the years, I had expected Rat On! and Total Destruction To Your Mind to be camp classics. The only thing that had me questioning this assumption was the fact that they were being reissued by Alive, who are a “no bullshit” label in my opinion. Rhino are very happy to release campy old albums, but I have never seen this from Alive. Now I know. They released these albums because they are truly great, nothing more, and nothing less.
To write a balanced review, I always try and find the “best” songs on a disc, and if there is a particularly “bad” one, I will point that out as well. There are ten songs on Rat On!, and twelve on Total Destruction To Your Mind. 22 tracks in all, and I swear there is not a single one that I would call a “dud.” That is somewhat incredible when you consider the situation. Both albums appear to be basically homemade, without a penny of major-label funding as far as I can tell. To have maintained such a high level of quality through both is mighty impressive.
Swamp Dogg’s sound is very much his own, but the reference points I have included are important for those who have never heard him before. If you have a taste for (what I consider at least) the best music of the early ’70s you need this. There are very definite elements of Stax-Volt R&B, the Americana of groups like The Band, and the one of a kind “Celtic soul” of Van the Man in Swamp Dogg’s music. And there are even some “swamp” sounds, most especially during “Sal-A-Faster.”
These albums should have been re-released years ago, and I thank Alive for taking the plunge. There is no question in my mind that Swamp Dogg was/is a brilliant musician. Forget anything you have heard, and ignore the goofy artwork. This is some of the finest American music not only of its time, but of all time. I love both of these records.
http://blindedbysound.com/reviews/swamp-dogg-rat-on-and-total-destruction-to-your-mind-cd-reviews/
WFMU RADIO (East Orange, NJ Freeform radio station) – New remastered version of “That Ain’t My Wife” aired March 14th on Matt Fiveash’s show.
STEREOGUM (popular online music blog)
The Week In Music Writing: 3/3/13 – 3/9/13
Welcome to the fourth installment of The Week In Music Writing. Every Sunday, we’re gathering an unranked list of five recommended music-related pieces from the past seven days. We’re bound to miss an excellent article from time-to-time, so definitely leave links to others in the comments. This week, check out five pieces from ego trip, Pigeons & Planes, Grantland, SPIN, and the Huffington Post.
Tha Real Motherfucking Doggfather by David Marchese for SPIN
Indie listeners still have a big heart for R&B sounds, but this week, SPIN’s David Marchese spoke to the man who worked with so many artists whose rock albums were influenced by the genre. Swamp Dogg is responsible for a legion of records, including Kid Rock’s Devil Without A Cause. If that’s a deterrent, Marchese’s prose and the commentary on how to work with a Wurlitzer make this one of the most engaging pieces that was published this week. Lovers of the word “motherfucker” best get to reading, too.
The Week In Music Writing: 3/3/13 – 3/9/13
RUST MAGAZINE (Atlanta based online music site) – Positive album review with cover art and two mp3s.
Swamp Dogg Re-Releases
In 1970 Jerry Williams Jr. changed his name to Swamp Dogg, released his album “Total Destruction To Your Mind” and a legend was born. The next year he secured his place in soul music history when he released “Rat On” and now the kind folks at Alive/Natural Sound Records have remastered and re-released both albums, giving contemporary audiences a fresh window into that magical moment of super soul legend. Though most people probably don’t have an immediate recognition of the man or the music, hopefully these re-releases will introduce new – and future – generations of listeners to his funky deep soul sound.
The take-away here is that these albums are the real deal. Swamp Dogg lays down authentic R&B soul that sounds even better today than when it was released, thanks to mastering by Dave Cooley at Elysian Masters. This is the kind of music that you always knew was out there, but maybe you never knew where to find it. Maybe you heard one of his songs on the radio, maybe on a dusty old jukebox at a bar on the wrong side of the tracks or at a family gathering when grandma or grandpa put on one of their “old” albums. Filled with smooth grooves, heartfelt emotion and… well… lots and lots of soul, it’s a special moment when exceptional works like this are refreshed and re-introduced.
These albums are jewels from another place and another time, and they remind us that there is a lot of great talent from this era that has almost been forgotten. Beyond the function of preservation, what these re-releases ultimately accomplish is to communicate to people today the value of the art – from this person at this time – on both a specific level of the artist as well as the movement as a whole. Swamp Dogg has a whole lot of soul, and through his music he created an amazing moment. Now we get to share it again. After 40 years, Swamp Dogg’s music is as relevant, heart-felt and authentic as ever, and through the re-issues of “Rat On” and “Total Destruction To Your Mind” fresh and future generations will be able to reach back through time and get schooled on what the term “old school soul” meant to one of its core artists. Essential.
http://www.rustzine.com/Swamp_Dogg.html
PASSION OF THE WEISS (online music blog) – Positive album review with cover art and two mp3s.
The Psychedelic Soul of Swamp Dogg
If you don’t want to listen to a slept-on early 70s soul platter from a man named Swamp, pictured riding a Secret of NIMH-sized white rat on his album cover, then you and I are qualitatively different human beings. This is Swamp Dogg Williams, a musician who I had not heard of until David Marchese dropped this spectacular 5,000 word Spin profile earlier this week. The best articles are not only entertaining, but they teach you something you new. Not only did the piece put me up on the the existence of the recently re-issued Rat On and Total Destruction, two low-profile, high-personality masterpieces from the Nixon years. It also serves as a glance at a vanished era of the industry and another tributary in the alternative history of music. We focus on the Ray Charles’ and Marvin Gaye’s for good reason. But equally interesting are the stories of the forgotten greats, those who smoked through the cracks of history, threw Eyes Wide Shut orgies in upstate New York, and used the word “motherfucker with the meticulousness of Miles Davis. Swamp Dogg is one of those deities. Who else could write a line like “Friendship is like acid, it burns as it slides away?”
So learn you some things, buy the records, and download some foetid and free funk below the jump. Get weird, ride the rat to the swamp. Etc.
The Psychedelic Soul of Swamp Dogg
ALL MUSIC (online music site) – Positive album review
Swamp Dogg – Total Destruction to Your Mind (CD – Alive Natural Sounds #141)
The title track is a slam-bangin’ chunk of rock and funk that’s pushed by a great session band including guitarist Jesse Carr and drummer Johnny Sandlin, and is easily Dogg’s finest moment on record. But the rest of this is great too, ranging from the consumer nightmare “Synthetic World” to the paternity blues of “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe.” Plus, Dogg is a great singer, and his dizzying range gets a workout on these songs.
http://www.allmusic.com/album/release/total-destruction-to-your-mind-mr0003881132
WHEN YOU MOTOR AWAY (online music site) – Second positive post with album art and video.
Return of the Dogg
It’s official – 60’s and 70’s outsider soul icon Swamp Dogg is back. Far more than a novelty act, his combination of soul, funk and rock wears very well over 40 years later His return was first reviewed here: Swamp Dogg is off the leash. This week Alive Natural Sound Records release Swamp Dogg’s first two recordings – “Total Destruction To Your Mind” (1970) and “Rat On” (1971.)
Both are available on vinyl or CD. Get your Dogg on and check it out. Find out what George Clinton meant when he said “Must be the Dogg in me.” Take him for a walk and find your inner Dogg.
http://whenyoumotoraway.blogspot.com/2013/03/return-of-dogg.html
THE DAILY PRESS / SOUND CHECK (Hampton Roads, VA daily) – Positive album review with cover art.
Early albums by Swamp Dogg, the Portsmouth-born soul cult hero, reissued on CD and vinyl
By Sam McDonald
Jerry Williams, better known to record collectors and soul obsessives as Swamp Dogg, remains a shadowy figure even to many in his hometown of Portsmouth.
A ray of light is being beamed at his legacy, though, courtesy of Alive Naturalsound Records. The label is releasing remastered versions of the first two Swamp Dogg albums, “Total Destruction To Your Mind,” from 1970 and “Rat On!” from 1971. Both are out this week.
The discs are highly sought after for both their funky grooves and eccentric moods.
“Easily on my Top Ten list of long-out-of-print records that deserve a CD reissue,” John Dougan wrote, describing “Total Destruction …” on Allmusic.com. “The title track is a slam-bangin’ chunk of rock and funk that’s pushed by a great session band including guitarist Jesse Carr and drummer Johnny Sandlin, and is easily Dogg’s finest moment on record. But the rest of this is great too …”
He concludes his review with, “Good luck finding a copy.”
In addition to CD and black vinyl versions, there will also be a limited number of colored vinyl discs available for both titles. Those are exclusive to mail orders through Bomp!
“Maverick soul artist Swamp Dogg has been described as the ‘soul genius that time forgot,’ and ‘a strange combination of Sly Stone’s progressive funk with Frank Zappa’s lyrical absurdism,'” a news release said. “In the ’70s he even made the famed Nixon’s Enemies List.”
http://www.dailypress.com/entertainment/music/mix-position-blog/dp-swamp-doggs-early-albums-back-in-print-20130307,0,7092776.story
PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER (Philly weekly) – Positive album review with cover art.
Disc-o-scope
What we’re listening to
soul/reissue
Hyped-up unearthings of vintage funk/soul “lost classics” are a dime a dozen nowadays, but it’s not often you encounter something as truly strange and striking as the first two LPs from Virginia eccentric Jerry Williams Jr., aka Swamp Dogg. Total Destruction to Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971) — remastered/reissued on Alive Naturalsound — make good on their gonzo titles with faintly absurd yet salient satire on war, consumerism and race politics all backed by roiling, Stax-style funk. —K. Ross Hoffman
http://www.citypaper.net/music/Discoscope_03_07_2013.html
WXDU RADIO (Durham, NC station) – New remastered version of “Synthetic World” aired March 6th & “TDTYM” on March 10th.
http://www.wxdu.org/
WNCU RADIO (Durham, NC Jazz station) – Interview with Swamp and Howard Burchette on The Funk Show.
LARGEHEARTED BOY (online music blog) – Brief news posting on Spin profile.
SPIN profiles soul legend Swamp Dogg and shares a collection of his craziest album covers.
http://www.largeheartedboy.com/blog/archive/2013/03/shorties_nprs_s.html
SOUL SAUCE (Soul/R&B music blog) – Brief news posting on Spin profile.
RAT ON!
Hi Folks… you’d never know it, but I’m a huge fan of Jerry ‘Swamp Dogg’ Williams. Although I’ve mentioned his work as a songwriter and producer any number of times, somehow I never got around to writing about him as the groundbreaking artist and all-around Great American that he is. Well, as it turns out, now I don’t have to.
David Marchese has put together a knockout interview and profile over on SPIN that covers all the bases (and then some!). From his early days hawking songs in the Brill Building, to becoming the first black producer at Atlantic (“Just draw your money and shut the fuck up”), to the great records he cut for Canyon and Mankind on folks like Freddie North and Irma Thomas, to his emergence as an acid-fueled R&B visionary, Marchese has captured the tone and spirit of this uncompromising self-made Legend intact. Check it out!
The Dogg’s first two albums, Total Destruction Of Your Mind and Rat On! were re-issued on high quality vinyl and CD just yesterday by Alive Naturalsound Records…
It’s great to see Williams finally getting some of the respect and name-recognition he deserves in the mainstream press… after all, he is Tha Real Mother****ing Doggfather!!
http://souldetective3.blogspot.com/2013/03/rat-on.html
THE FIRENOTE (online music site) – Positive album reviews.
Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction Of Your Mind / Rat On! [Album Review]
Fire Note Says: Swamp Dogg’s music finally gets the respect that it deserves.
Album Review: Back in the late 60’s/early 70’s there was quite the musical renaissance that was taking place. Miles Davis’ jazz freak opus Bitches Brew took shape, Sly & The Family Stone was killing it, Led Zeppelin was storming the scene, and Hendrix’s lingering guitar leads where influencing everything from funk to rock and R&B to jazz. So then, fast forward about 40 years later where many shapes, sizes, and sounds can fly. Jerry Williams Jr. aka Swamp Dogg then and now was and is the real deal and it is his time to shine. Born a music man from the beginning, cult hero Swamp Dogg’s 1970’s Total Destruction of Your Mind and 1971’s Rat On! (voted one of the worst album covers of all time, a fact Swamp is quite proud of) reissues show how soulful, beautiful, and advanced the lyrics, tones, and funk were at the time.
A Beefheart of R&B, The Fogerty of funk, and the sultan of Stax like psych Swamp Dogg takes a historic landscape of funk and R&B. All the while writing songs and penning lyrics in his own off kilter, witty style. Jabs at the U.S. Government, Anti-Vietnam protest songs, infidelity, illegitimate children, redneck rabble rousers, and snake oil like concoctions. It takes on a weird hodgepodge of taboo romantics, religion, responsibility, and respect. Total Destruction of Your Mind carries a bit more psychedelic themes and theories’ about its self. While, Rat On! is a bit more hard hitting and heavy handed with it themes as infidelity, war, and color seem to make more of an appearance.
It’s true that most essential tracks fall out of Total Destruction of Your Mind but Rat On! still has it merits. Title track “Total Destruction of Your Mind” starts right out the gate with a fun, fast funk and a Beatles reference to boot, “Sittin on a corn flake”. Also, Swamp’s scat like song endings are showcased here. It seems to be used often and some might find it lazy but I think it works just fine and only ramps up the fun. Soul stunner “Dust Your Head Color Red” impresses with vocal prowess, the right amount of brass blasts, and the fantastic ballad like interplay between keys and organ. Soul stomper “Sal-A-Faster” is a drunken affair over interstellar snake oil. Destruction’s final track “Mama’s Baby , Daddy’s Maybe” employs an electric Howlin’ Wolf lead that’s the perfect big blues finish.
As I said, Rat On!, while not as strong at Destruction, still has its fair share of impressive tracks. “Do You Believe” proves that the funk is still alive and well here. Also, that scat like vocals to the tune of “ding-dang” carry the song to an end. “Predicament #2” asks God why it’s so hard for him to create a sexual goddess and family-oriented housewife. Swamp just solves the problem with infidelity and has both. “Creeping Away” shines and strokes those funk chords to a fine perfection. A nice surprise is the Bee Gees cover “Got To Get A Message To You” sung as sweetly as ever.
Swamp Dogg had an interesting view of soul that needed to be heard. Alive did great work choosing to reissue these albums that fell out of print. Total Destruction of Your Mind had funk, soul, and innovation that’s fun with every spin. Rat On! while not as ear catching as Destruction still has its place as is noted by the albums strong combined score.
Key Tracks:
Total Destruction of Your Mind: “Dust Your Head Color Red”, “Sal-A-faster”, “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe”
Rat On!: “Predicament #2”, “Creeping Away”, “That Ain’t My Wife”
Artists With Similar Fire: Black Joe Lewis and The Honeybears / Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings / Doris Duke
http://thefirenote.com/2013/03/06/swamp-dogg-total-destruction-of-your-mind-rat-on-album-review/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=swamp-dogg-total-destruction-of-your-mind-rat-on-album-review
NO DEPRESSION / HYPERBOLIUM (Americana music site / online music site) – Positive album reviews.
CD Review: Swamp Dogg – Total Destruction to Your Mind / Rat On!
Lost soul classics lost no more
Industry veteran Jerry Williams, Jr. unleashed his alter ego on this 1970 masterpiece, spelling out his unconventional views in groove-heavy soul music. He makes good on the title’s brag with catchy, original songs that touch on environmental decay, social isolation, dystopian visions, racism and questions of paternity. Williams’ lyrics are often Zappa-like in their surface absurdity, but there’s a gripping observation or lament at each song’s heart. His voice has the pinched, keening sound of the Showmen’s General Norman Johnson, but with a rounded richness that suggests Jackie Wilson. Recorded at Capricorn Studios in Macon, GA, his band is soaked in the horns, low bass and guitar riffs of Southern soul, and touched by the propulsion of West Coast funk. It’s hard to imagine how this record (as well as the follow-up, Rat On!, an album better known for its cover than its content) has remained so obscure and hard to find. A two-fer on Swamp Dogg’s S.D.E.G label has been available off-and-on since 2000, but Alive’s digipack remaster should give this five-star gem the broader circulation it deserves. It’s a shame new liner notes weren’t included to provide the album’s history and context; the booklet does reproduce the song list, personnel credits, a few “relevant quotes,” and a short, typically absurd, autobiography. Analog fans will be happy to find both this and Rat On! are also being reissued on vinyl [1 2].
Swamp Dogg’s newly penned liner notes tell the story of his second album’s original sessions (under the title of “Right On”) at Florida’s TK Studios, with a backing band that included Betty Wright, Lonnie Mack, Al Kooper and a label worker (and future disco star) named Harry Wayne “KC” Casey. Apparently the results sounded awesome to the alcohol- and herb-fueled participants, but were not so easy on the ears of anyone else. The resulting tapes were shelved (though a single of the original “Straight From My Heart” was released with a B-side cover of Joe South’s “Don’t Throw Your Love to the Wind”), and a second run at the album was made at Quinvy Studios in Muscle Shoals. The latter sessions were released on Elektra in 1971 as Rat On! The Quinvy crew featured several legendary musicians, including bassist Robert Lee “Pops” Popwell and guitarist Jesse Willard “Pete” Carr, and Swamp Dogg’s soul sound, much like that on his debut, gave the players solid grooves to explore. His songs continued to mix outspoken views on race, sex, religion, war, relationships and social issues, couched in melodies whose sweetness sometimes obscures the deep twists and turns of his lyrics. Listened to in passing, Rat On! offers top-flight ‘70s southern soul, with deep bass and punchy horns. But listened to more carefully, the album reveals a daring songwriter who wasn’t afraid to tell it as he saw it, challenging society’s icons of freedom with “God Bless America For What?” and landing himself on Nixon’s enemies list. The album’s features soulful reworkings of the Bee Gees’ “Got to Get a Message to You” and Mickey Newbury’s “She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye,” and though the original tunes aren’t nearly as absurd those on Total Destruction to Your Mind, their messages are just as powerful, and their grooves are just as deep.
http://www.nodepression.com/profiles/blogs/cd-review-swamp-dogg-total-destruction-to-your-mind-rat-on?xg_source=activity
AND…
http://www.hyperbolium.com/2013/03/05/swamp-dogg-rat-on/
NASHVILLE SCENE (Nashville weekly) – Feature interview.
Swamp Dogg: The Cream Interview
by Edd Hurt on Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 5:00 PM
Swamp Dogg’s 1970 full-length, Total Destruction to Your Mind, updated soul music with post-psychedelic, Southern-fried guitar, and made its destructive point with acerbic lyrics about racism, rednecks, consumerism and the end of the world. Swamp Dogg is the pseudonym — the souldonym, really — of veteran producer, singer and songwriter Jerry Williams Jr., who had achieved a few successes of his own in the ’60s while producing hits for the likes of Gene Pitney and Charlie and Inez Foxx. Total Destruction to Your Mind was the work of a dissatisfied man, and a glimpse into one possible future for the soul music Williams had helped to create in the 1960s.
Along with 1971’s Rat On!, Swamp Dogg’s Total Destruction is getting a long-overdue reissue. Alive Naturalsound Records has released spiffy remastered versions of the two albums on CD and vinyl, and it could be that a new generation of music fans will come to appreciate the work of a brilliant, prolific soul auteur. Born in Virginia in 1942, Williams has also had a close connection with Nashville for decades — with co-writer Gary U.S. Bonds, Williams penned a classic country song, “She’s All I Got,” which went on to be a 1971 hit for Nashville soul singer Freddie North, as well as a smash for country vocalist Johnny Paycheck.
Produced by Williams for Mankind, a Nashville soul label, North’s version of “She’s All I Got” is true country-soul crossover. Cut in Music City with producer Billy Sherrill after the North version had made the charts, Paycheck’s version is stone country. The song has been recorded by around 90 artists, including Conway Twitty, Norma Jean and Floyd Cramer. A decade later, Williams came to Nashville and cut an idiosyncratic country album for Mercury. It didn’t see the light of day until Williams himself released it on CD some years later.
A songwriter whose trademark is a blithe aggression that reveals the aggrieved heart and soul of an incurable idealist and romantic, Williams has released a bewildering array of recordings in his nearly 60-year career. Before he adopted his Swamp Dogg moniker, Williams hit in 1966 with “Baby, You’re My Everything,” a mid-tempo tune that isn’t as sentimental as the title may suggest. As Swamp Dogg, Williams has recorded with such musicians as guitarist Jesse Carr and bassist Robert Popwell, along with Mississippi singer and drummer George Soulé, Miami guitar legend Willie “Little Beaver” Hale and legendary soul-funk-country-disco singer Esther Phillips.
Apart from Total Destruction and Rat On!, Swamp Dogg cut the hard-driving — and superb — 1973 full-length, Gag a Maggott [sic], which integrates sardonic horns into futuristic blues shuffles. On that record’s “Please Let Me Kiss You Goodbye,” Swamp Dogg sings about a woman who falls for a guy wearing “a little diamond ring and his bell-bottom suit.” Other Swamp Dogg songs address the many facets of the male-female dynamic: Cut by both Freddie North and Swamp Dogg himself, “Did I Come Back Too Soon (Or Stay Away Too Long)” is a soul tune that ends with its hapless narrator peeking around his bedroom door as his wife makes it with another woman.
His 1977 track, “Understanding California Women,” features a narrator who goes home with a Beverly Hills woman who wears “shorts so tight, they wouldn’t let her cheeks breathe,” and becomes a kept man. And perhaps most succinctly, his 1976 “Or Forever Hold Your Peace” is an ingenious country-pop song about a father who has known, quite well, the wife-to-be of his beloved son.
I’m a fan — I drove from Memphis to Nashville in September 1998 to see Swamp Dogg play a pickup-band show at Nashville’s now-defunct Sutler. His two sets that year appear to have been the only Nashville dates in his long career, although he’s done a lot of recording here. His great air-raid siren voice is intact, and he’s still recording: recent records include a Christmas collection and a set of rock ‘n’ roll oldies. If anyone working in popular music has enlarged soul music’s thematic and musical scope, it’s Williams. We caught up with the master musician at his California home.
Jerry, we understand you’re living in Southern California these days.
Yeah, I’ve been living out here for about 40 years. They can stick Northern California up their ass. That’s like being in New York.
You’ve also spent time in Nashville.
It’s cool, and it’s cold, in Nashville. But I was sayin’ it’s cold, ’cause I’ve been there in the winter, stayin’ with a couple of friends of mine down there, and boy, he got ready to take me to the airport one morning, and he had to get hot water and put it on the door handle so he could open the son-of-a-bitch.
Tell us about the new reissues of your first two Swamp Dogg records. They’re amazing, and sound fresh after 40 years.
Well, first of all, the first one [Total Destruction to Your Mind], I didn’t even have a clue. I wasn’t even Swamp Dogg. It was just Jerry Williams in the studio, with a bunch of songs he liked, and I had a good crew: I had [drummer] Johnny Sandlin, [pianist] Paul Hornsby, Pete Carr and Robert Popwell. We just had a bunch of great musicians, and all of ’em were exuding ideas. Sometimes, there comes a time when a producer wants to try his ideas first, before he listens to people. In that case, although I was the producer, I didn’t go in there as a producer. I went in there as a guy who wanted all the help he could get in making a hit record. I’m gonna give you an example: on “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” right at the end, Johnny Sandlin is rollin’ the drums — “shik-a-took-a, shik-a-took-a” — and I didn’t like it. But everybody in the studio liked it. So I said, “Well, then, let’s roll with it.” And that’s what we did. There are times when you’re just not ready to make a good decision.
As Swamp Dogg, you could write about forbidden, off-limits subjects? Was that the idea?
Yeah, yeah, right. It was, uh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say “forbidden.” I’ve got people who come up to me and say — especially black people — “That [Total Destruction track] ‘Redneck,’ man, did you think you’d get in trouble with that?” I said, “That was written by a white boy [Joe South]! I didn’t write it; he wrote it. So why should anybody be mad at me? I’m just repeatin’ what he said.”
So you were always looking for great songs back then.
Yeah. I’m still that way. I’ve got two songs recorded that I did Sunday. Only the rhythm section, and a pilot vocal, that I did for the new album that I’m coming out with. I might be finished with this new album in the next, I don’t know, two, three months. ‘Cause every piece of material in there has to mean something, and it’s got to be Swamp Dogg. I found I had not lost Swamp Dogg since the first three albums. But I had misplaced the shit out of him.
In what way?
In other words, I had put Swamp Dogg somewhere so far behind, even when I restarted, I couldn’t find him. And it took me different ways, musically. I’m speaking to resolve this in my mind, and find him and bring him back.
So you were committed to pushing boundaries with Swamp Dogg, and that wasn’t happening any more?
That’s the word: committed. Yeah. I had lost a lot of commitment. In one stage of my life, I thought I was greater than I was. In another stage of my life, I felt inferior to everybody. You know, that’s a see-saw kinda thing. But neither one of them has positive outcomes. So I had to work on myself, mentally. Not just my music, but my everyday life. I feel real good about where I am at this moment.
Did it have something to do with your definition of success?
That could be part of it. But I was also lookin’ for something even greater. It’s like high-definition television. I was expecting much, much more when these motherfuckers came to my house and put in all those boxes and shit, and I got this big, wide screen. And I turned it on and I said, “It’s the same shit. It’s just a little brighter.”
I saw you play in 1998 in Nashville — I believe you did two sets.
Were you at that one place I played? What was it called?
The Sutler.
So you were one of the six people, huh?
Yeah. Had you played Nashville before, Swamp?
Never. Never. I tell you what I used to do. Whenever I was in Nashville, at the time, the hotel to stay in was Shoney’s. It was nice and really clean, had everything — everybody was stayin’ there. I used to walk across the street, and there was a club over there. I forget the name of the club, but I used to go over to that club and go up and sing. I’d sing maybe one song, two songs. And I would get standing ovations. But I wasn’t tryin’ to sing country. I was just singin’ what I sing. But naturally, the music was country, because it was a country band. That was the only times I really did anything in Nashville. I recorded in Nashville.
I really like the work you did with Freddie North on the Mankind label.
He already had a soul album he had produced. But Mankind, that was my label, to put all my stuff on, anything I picked up that I liked.
Tell me about writing “She’s All I Got,” which is a country standard.
Well, we actually were just in my basement. At that time, I lived in Queens, and Gary had most of the words written out on a piece of paper he’d been carryin’ around in his pocket for God knows how long. We used to try to get together at least four times a week, and write. All we could do is write. We didn’t have anybody to write for. He brought that out, and when he read me the words, a melody came to mind immediately. The music came to mind immediately. We switched a couple of words, just a few, and that was the song.
Now, when I went to cut Freddie North, I pulled it out and played it. He liked it. Nobody was, like, knocked overboard by it, you know. It was like singin’ “Three Blind Mice” — in the arrangement, the song didn’t go anywhere. And that wasn’t because of Freddie. I felt like we hadn’t given him a vehicle that would go anywhere. He was going around and around the block. That’s when I decided to put that tail end on it, where you just slow down, and you’ve got nothing but that little groove, and then it goes, “Kiss the ground in the summertime, and make the flowers grow.” That was what sold that record. And then the girls come in like a gospel thing.
Tell me about meeting Freddie North.
When I started the label, they kinda left it up to Freddie as to what he thought of the idea of bringin’ me and my label aboard. [North, whose real name is Freddie Carpenter, was born in Nashville in 1939. He recorded throughout the ’60s, and was national promotions director for Nashboro Records when Williams started Mankind as a Nashboro subsidiary.] Freddie, who didn’t know me but had heard some of my production, had nothing but good things to say. That’s what got me in. He could’ve kept me out, easily. That runs rampant among lots of musicians and producers, of all colors. They know they’re good, but they’ll do what they can to keep you out, if they can. That was the first thing that gave me the utmost respect for him. And [Nashboro executive] Bud Howell said, “Now, here’s what I want you to do. Freddie here thinks he can sing. I want you to produce a record on him, if you come on board.” I said, “No problem.”
So we signed the papers and passed the money ’round and everything, and then Freddie came out to New York — by that time I’d moved to Long Island — and we worked on the material. [I interviewed North last year, and asked him about working with Williams on the Friend album. North said, “One day, he was gonna drive from over in Jersey to the city. I go outside and get in the car, in the back, and he and his wife were in the front. He starts the car up and he sits there for a minute — we got our seat belts on. All of a sudden, he slapped it into gear and floored that thing, and took off from a standstill. He was gone. And when we would go into the studio, that’s the exact procedure he would take, right there.”]
Were you surprised at the success of “She’s All I Got”?
Yeah, I really was, because first of all, I don’t even think I wanted to put that record out as the first single. But they did, and everybody heard it, except me.
Do you have a favorite version?
There’s about 90 covers. Johnny Paycheck for sure. Him and Freddie. I kinda like Floyd Cramer’s instrumental of it. Sheb Wooley, he did a version. He got in touch with us and said he was gonna do it, and he wanted half the publishing. So I told him to go suck out my ass. Like I’m gonna give him half on the publishing on a song that is nominated for a Grammy and shit, just for him to go in and community-ize it. There is no such word, but I think I like that — community-ize the fuckin’ song. But he did it anyway.
Freddie North told me his version of “She’s All I Got” sold 900,000 copies.
It sold a million-one. What happened, when it got up to 900,000, I made a deal with the Armed Forces for 100,000. And they took ’em. Because of the exposure that came from that, another hundred thousand was sold.
What do you think of the term, “country-soul”?
If you take away the horns from most of my recording, you’ve really got somewhat of a country version. Like Mickey Newbury’s “She Just Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye” and even “God Bless America for What,” they’re country. I am country. I was raised up on country music. The only black music I heard was on jukeboxes in service stations and places like that. The first talent show I ever appeared on, I came in second place. I sang “Peace in the Valley” by Red Foley. Everybody in the house was into country, but they were also into Louis Jordan and that kind of shit.
Your 1971 album with Z.Z. Hill, The Brand New Z.Z. Hill, was designed as a kind of blues opera. Tell me about working on that.
Yeah, that was the idea — a blues opera. I wrote the opera to be in three parts, and the other side was supposed to be designed for the fans that Z.Z. already had. I wasn’t crazy enough to jump out there — like, “Fats Domino at the Met,” I wasn’t gonna do no shit like that. The way we edited the opera, for singles, his audience went crazy. They loved it.
You’ve always been ahead of your time, and such an innovator, Jerry.
It embarrasses me when people say shit like that. Other people have said it like that, and there are so many other producers and writers I that I envy and admire, and who I feel are so much better than I am. I don’t take myself real seriously, although I’m very serious when I write and produce.
Tell us about your 1981 Nashville-recorded country album, which is legendary.
It’s on The Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 5. Steve Popovich was over at Mercury Nashville. He and I had been friends since the ’60s. I had this idea of an outrageous black country singer, with the cape and all of that shit. It was close to what maybe Little Richard would’ve done, or did. But mine was gonna be purely country. I got to Nashville, and cut it, because, at that time, if it wasn’t cut in Nashville, it wasn’t country. I went into the studio there and cut it. When I got back to Mercury with it, my man Steve was goin’ crazy. But then all of a sudden, it cooled. It was right around the time those old boys had “Elmira.” What was the name of the group?
You mean “Elvira”? The Oak Ridge Boys.
Yeah, “Elvira.” They were hotter than cayenne pepper. Whoever was at the top, over Steve, they were, like, afraid to fuck with it, although they had given the go-ahead at first. Like any of us, we say, “Yeah,” and on the way home, you start thinkin’ about that. You say, “Shit, I can’t do no shit like that.” So I understood it, you know.
I love your song, “Understanding California Women,” about a guy who takes up with a kind of new-age woman. How did you write that?
I looked at it as what I had seen happen out here in California. Guys would meet a woman, and she’s got the means and the money and everything, and they’d take him in. They’d carry the guy home — hey, he’s living good. But she wouldn’t give him no money, you know, and then, one day, it was over, and he didn’t have shit. I guess she let him take the clothes.
You also worked with Esther Phillips on a song titled “The Love We Got Ain’t Worth Two Dead Flies.” What was that like?
When I went with Takoma Records, I wanted to do a female thing with somebody, whoever was available, who had a name. So when she met me, she said, “I done heard about you, Swamp Dogg. I know you’re clean and you don’t do this, and you don’t do that. But I do, and you better go get me some.”
http://www.nashvillescene.com/nashvillecream/archives/2013/03/05/swamp-dogg-the-cream-interview
SPIN (national music magazine) – SPIN senior editor David Marchese’s fantastic artist profile on Swamp Dogg, including interviews, exclusive photos, video and accompanying gallery of Swamp Dogg’s best/craziest album covers.
Tha Real Mother****ing Doggfather
by David Marchese
Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams is a cult hero with a painful history who’s responsible for some of the most unique rock-influenced R&B (and weirdest album covers) ever made. And he also happens to be a pioneering indie mini-mogul. DAVID MARCHESE traveled to Southern California to get down to business with Swamp.
Jerry Williams, Jr. would rather be writing a song than wasting his time trying to wrangle a dumb-love mistake. “That’s the intention most motherfucking mornings,” he says in a reedy southern accent as he stands in the doorway of his six-bedroom San Fernando Valley bungalow. “Then some shit happens.” “Shit” is a car that he wants back. “Two-seater 370Z, I don’t know — said she’d have it for me this morning.” “She” is a mistake.
Williams, 70, is 5-foot-5-inches tall, with a round belly and trim mustache. On this cloudy California day in early February, he’s wearing a tan leather baseball cap, large eyeglasses, a gray button-down shirt, crisp cargo pants, and perfect white Nikes. “I don’t know how to go about getting that motherfucking car,” he says matter-of-factly, and then chuckles and strolls down the hall toward his office. Williams has a perpetually playful, expectant air about him, as if he’s told the world a joke and isn’t sure if anyone’s heard it. “You with the police?” he teases. “They the only ones ever looking for me.”
We pass a wall adorned with commemorative gold and platinum records: DMX’s Grand Champ, Kid Rock’s Devil Without a Cause, Swamp Dogg’s Total Destruction to Your Mind. I linger on the latter: Released 1970, the placard reads, certified gold 1992. “Took its sweet motherfucking time,” says Williams, whom everyone calls Swamp. The Los Angeles-based Alive Naturalsound label, which released the Black Keys’ debut, is reissuing Total Destruction to Your Mind on March 5. The album has a habit of falling out of print.
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
Swamp lives alone here in this big, dark, tidy house, though this weekend he’s taking care of his granddaughter’s yapping pooch. A vintage Wurlitzer jukebox sits in his living room, loaded solely with his own productions and compositions. I peek into his home studio and see framed Swamp Dogg album covers forming a funky bunting above the instruments and recording gear: There’s Swamp, riding a white rat (1971’s Rat On), looking out from a crumpled photo sitting on a heap of trash (1973’s Gag a Maggot), wearing a white top hat and tails and dancing on a boardroom table (1981’s I’m Not Selling Out / I’m Buying In!). A backyard pool is visible through his studio windows.
Swamp’s affluence is itself a creative project. His most recent, all-new effort, 2009’s An Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year, the cover of which shows the singer in shorts, as his covers often do, sold 100 copies according to Nielsen SoundScan. Careful with that number, though — the company doesn’t officially stand by sales totals that can’t be rounded up to 1,000. (Swamp’s biggest-selling album of the SoundScan era, which began in 1991, is a compilation called Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2. It sold 3,000 copies.)
See SPIN’s gallery of Swamp Dogg’s 11 wildest album covers.
Alternative revenue streams, self-financing, licensing strategies, distribution models. This is the jargon of the musical economy in the digital era, reflecting the harsh realities bemoaned by befuddled indie and major-label artistes alike. Or as the ever-entrepreneurial Swamp understands it, “A bunch of old shit with new names I been doing forever.”
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
Standing behind his office desk, he puts the phone on speaker and starts to dial. “I can’t even drive stick-shift,” he quips, thinking about the car. “But I still want the motherfucker back.” Based on frequency, “motherfucker” is Swamp’s favorite exclamation, and he pronounces it with impressive variety: MUTHAfucker, muhfuh, motherFUCKER, and myriad other ways impossible to do justice with italics and caps.
One wall of the bright, cluttered office is dominated by shelves holding an eclectic vinyl collection — Funkadelic, Emmylou Harris, The Elephant Man score, all the Swamp Dogg LPs. CD towers holding newer music — Tupac, Faith No More — stand on the floor. On the bookshelf opposite the vinyl are some tools: a rhyming dictionary, unabridged Webster’s dictionary, and a dictionary of synonyms and antonyms. (Swamp has written more than 2,000 songs, and owns the publishing to hundreds more.) A dry-erase board leans against the shelving unit; categories are written at the top of columns: Artist Roster, Friends, Need Songs, Distribution/Licenses, Projects. Each column is filled with names. With the possible exception of retro-soul spitfire Sharon Jones, none would be familiar to the casual music fan. A framed photo of Swamp’s first wife and former business manager, Yvonne, is by the chunky old computer monitor.
An automated voice answers the phone and requests information. Swamp punches in an ID number, then mutters to himself with the puzzling-out tone of someone verbally solving a math problem, “If I can get till Tuesday, then I can wait for…” He hits zero to speak with a loan agent. The phone rings again. “You wanted to observe me. This is what I do,” he says to me in mock apology, “You thought I was a musician or something?”
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
He is that, of course, and the Swamp Dogg catalog entails one of R&B’s most deliriously idiosyncratic and independent trips. But as a producer, publisher, manager, and impresario of the pop-music margins — with a cottage industry as a cult hero — he’s also a model for how to make a living in the music business in 2013. Well, he’s an idea for a model anyway.
A woman’s voice comes over the speaker: “How can we help you with your loan today?”
“Noooow,” Swamp says, stretching the syllable like taffy, “how do I go about getting an extension?”
Easily, it seems. Extension procured, he’s on to the next task, and dials another number.
“Hey Swamp,” I ask, “did you ever…”
“Twice,” he says, without looking up, “but I don’t fuck with those kind of girls no more.” The phone is ringing on the other end. “I get caught in shit that would make the average motherfucker jump out a window. But it works out. Example: I needed till Tuesday for that loan; they gave me two weeks.”
The phone stops ringing. Voicemail.
“I would really like to have my car back today,” says Swamp. “Now, you promised that I would have it. You texted me at three or four o’clock this morning. I can understand you being tired or something, but let’s just sever all this relationship, and please give me back my motherfucking car.”
He ends the call and sits in the roller chair behind his desk. “All right, you can ask whatever you want,” he says. “You do your job, and I’ll go about my business.”
Since he released his first record, “HTD Blues,” as a 12-year-old in 1954, Swamp Dogg’s business has been music. (“Got my union card at 10,” he says.) He sang in the clubs and cabarets of Portsmouth, Virginia, where his father was a chief petty officer for the Navy and his mom was a singer. She still performs, as Vera Lee — 93 and managed by Swamp, who left for New York in his early 20s and bopped between floors of the Brill Building, selling songs while still releasing self-deprecating ballads and Fats Domino-indebted boogie as Little Jerry Williams. He took on A&R gigs and wrote, arranged, and produced for familiar names (Patti Labelle, Gene Pitney) and phantoms (C & and the Shells, the Suburbans). “I can sing fine,” he says, underselling himself — he’s got a wry steam whistle shout — “and I can play keyboard good” (especially joyous piano triplets), “but I will put myself up against any motherfucker when it comes to writing songs.” His “baby” in that regard is “She’s All I Got,” a jaunty country weeper that Johnny Paycheck took to No. 2 on the country charts in 1971. The hit earned Swamp an invitation to the Grammy Awards. “Security made me go in the kitchen because they thought I was a waiter, all dressed up in a suit and shit,” he says. I learn quickly that his triumphs often have twists.
In 1968, Swamp was hired as the first black staff producer at Atlantic Records. The result, he says, of tokenism forced on the label by the NAACP. “[Atlantic] didn’t give me shit to do,” he offers without animosity. “And when I complained and told them I wanted to leave, they said, ‘Just draw your money and shut the fuck up.'” As Swamp sits at his desk and talks, he also checks e-mail and texts, receives faxes, and takes calls via Bluetooth earpiece.
“I wasn’t a corporate guy,” he continues. “Example: I never seen anybody get so excited about having a key to the executive restroom as those motherfuckers at Atlantic. You’d think some motherfucker got the crown jewels of England when he got his own restroom key. You could be cuttin’ Aretha Franklin and some motherfucker would come in and say, ‘Who got my restroom key?!'”
After getting fired from Atlantic in 1969 for, as he tells it, spending too much money on a Gary U.S. Bonds recording session, he returned to freelance production and songwriting. At a party around that time he drank punch laced with LSD. He willingly tried it again a few more times and “opened up a can of mental worms.” Suddenly, the Sly Stone and Frank Zappa records he loved were speaking a new language. The worms began to wriggle. “I realized Jerry Williams needed an alter ego,” says Swamp. “Jerry Williams the performer was not prepared to say and do the things that I wanted to do. I’d gone as far as I could go singing love songs. There were other artists that was better looking, taller, had more sex appeal than me. So what the fuck I’m gonna stay in the mix for? I had to try something else.”
He slid down to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to record with that town’s famous studio musicians, the Swampers, industry-famous for adding rhythmic grease and guitar grit to records by Wilson Pickett, Etta James, and others. Wally Roker of Canyon Records agreed to release the output and suggested the name Swamp Dog on account of the backing players. “I liked the ‘Dog’ part,” remembers Swamp. “A dog can shit on your rug, do anything, and you still like him. I just said, ‘put two g’s on that motherfucker.’ Now I had my own category. Now motherfuckers hadda compare themselves to me.”
Good luck. Total Destruction to Your Mind, the first Swamp Dogg album, begins with the title track, wherein Williams, winking at the Beatles, sings about sitting on a cornflake riding on a rollerskate as his voice is surrounded by curling guitars and blammo horns and the music keeps freaking out from there. He prophesizes a post-bomb wasteland where kids have never known rain or rock’n’roll. Psychedelic music blows his mind, so his patience grows thin with the synthetic world we’re living in. He laments being born blue instead of orange-skinned and green-haired like everyone else. He razzes rednecks. He pitches snake oil called “Sal-a-Faster.” He wonders about mama’s baby and daddy’s maybe. His voice is boisterous, jovial, quizzical; his melodies sly and punchy. The music — given perfect shape by its craftsman’s hand — suggests a quirky avenue that black music might’ve pursued if funk hadn’t fomented instead. And it came packaged with a cover that showed Swamp sitting in shorts on a garbage truck, wearing a graduation cap.
“It’s real gritty shit,” says Kid Rock, a Swamp fan and unintentional patron, “It has a wild attitude. A lot of old soul is straightforward — I love it, but funk is usually weirder. Swamp Dogg had the craziness you expect from funk, but put to soul and R&B.” Total Destruction to Your Mind created a musically and mentally uninhibited template for the more than 20 Swamp Dogg albums that would follow. It also set another precedent: It sunk.
But not without making some ripples over the years. “I heard ‘Total Destruction to Your Mind’ on underground rock radio and I thought, ‘This is really interesting,'” recalls Cliff Burnstein, longtime co-manager of Metallica and the Red Hot Chili Peppers and himself a legendary music-biz swami. “Swamp was an R&B guy with a great sense of humor even when he was doing complete diatribes. It was indelible.”
No other Swamp Dogg album has gone gold or platinum. His second LP, Rat On!, came out on the rock-centric Elektra label in 1971, the same year Swamp played a few shows with Jane Fonda’s Free the Army anti-Vietnam War tour, an activity he claims landed him on Richard Nixon’s enemies list. (Swamp’s politics are hard to parse; he’s credited Ronald Reagan for inspiring his creativity but wrote an anti-George W. Bush tract called “They Crowned an Idiot King.”) The aforementioned album’s songs are still winking and popping, with more explicit screeds — the oddly stirring “God Bless America, for What” — and conceptual coups (the Bee Gees’ “Got to Get a Message to You” as churchly epic).
Didn’t matter. Rat On! sold less than its predecessor, and by 1973, Swamp was singing about his “Buzzard Luck.” On that song’s B-side, “Ebony & Jet,” he argued that his career was nothing till he got on the cover of those magazines. The desired press was not forthcoming.
But rather than bemoan his failures — money was still rolling in from production and songwriting — he adopted an underdog shtick that he’s never abandoned. (1989’s I Asked for a Rope and They Threw Me a Rock is exemplary in that regard.)
“It didn’t surprise me that my albums didn’t sell nothing,” says Swamp of the old days, “because the motherfuckers told me they didn’t like ’em. No one ever lied to me. I’m singing songs called ‘Call Me Nigger’ that’s got banjo on it.” Swamp really likes the banjo. “I get why that’s confusing. I thought it was funny.”
Swamp Dogg in the studio, 1971 / Photo Courtesy of Alive NaturalsoundSwamp Dogg in the studio, 1971 / Photo Courtesy of Alive Naturalsound
Paradoxically, Swamp’s musical singularity means he hasn’t had much, if any, influence on contemporary R&B; but his determination not to dilute his personality could be seen as a precursor to the uncompromising individuality of Frank Ocean and the Weeknd, who are now free to serve up their unadulterated them-ness via albums, singles, videos, tweets, and Tumblr. By comparison, Swamp had unreceptive radio and album sleeves (he loaded them with in-jokes and avuncular invective).
“The system in those days was so haphazard,” explains Burnstein, who started out as a promo man. “A small label like Canyon had no one like me calling up the stations. Elektra and Island (the label for Swamp’s 1974 LP Have You Heard This Story??) were rock-oriented. If Swamp got played, it was probably due to luck. Rock was always so serious, and he had this predilection for album covers that showed him sitting on things wearing shorts with his legs splayed. The only world he could fit into was the one for him and the tiny handful of weirdos who liked him.”
His reluctance to tour was another problem, born of agoraphobia and studiophilia. “I didn’t get my name out there,” he says. “Not touring is the dumbest thing I ever did.” It didn’t seem so at the time. Even though his own albums couldn’t get much of a sniff, Swamp lucratively labored away writing and producing precisely arranged, emotionally raw sides for, among others, Irma Thomas, Ruth Brown, Z.Z. Hill, Freddie North, and Doris Duke (if you don’t hear her Swamp-helmed I’m a Loser, you are one). “I’d have a budget of $25,000,” he says, “and cut the records for five. I had all that songwriting money. I was a rich motherfucker.”
He bought a mansion in Hempstead, Long Island, and a Mercedes limo, Rolls Royce, Cadillac Eldorado, and two-seater plane to go with it. He frequented his favorite jewelers. “Germano and Gerardi in New York City,” he says, savoring the memory. “They made the most beautiful shit.”
To celebrate finishing a session Swamp sometimes hosted “smokers” — the kind of parties you either don’t remember or can’t forget. “We went down on Broadway and made deals with three hookers to come,” he recalls about a night that still lingers. “We said, ‘Don’t ask nobody for no money. At the end of the night, we’ll tally up. I want y’all with just little skimpy towels on and your breasts out so people know why you there.'” He gives a rueful grin. “They was fucking everybody — except me. My wife said I could have the party, ‘but you ain’t touchin’ those bitches.’ Motherfuckers were lined up. Don Covay, the singer, who had a 35-inch dick, he’s standing there with his pants down and this one hooker, she says, ‘Wait a minute, I can’t take all you people.’ Don took that as a racial remark and started screaming and shit. I had to give her extra money.”
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
Such extravagance, explains an unrepentant Swamp, is why he didn’t get to keep the mansion, cars, or aircraft. “My favorite food is hot dogs and all of a sudden I was convinced I only wanted filet mignon. Money is a motherfucker, and it goes a lot quicker than it comes.” He went broke for the first time in 1974. “Best day of my life,” he reckons. “No more obligations.”
Changing tastes were harder to surmount. 1980’s Doing a Party Tonite, released not long after he moved to California, found Swamp in an ill-suited disco setting. He also found himself aging out of a certain kind of relevance. “If you’re black,” he reasons, “when you hit middle-age, they call you a ‘blues man’ and that’s not what I was. I don’t care if you’re singing arias. If Pavarotti’d been black, he’d have to be called Blind Pavarotti and put out blues albums.” Eventually, his own label, SDEG (Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group), became the first priority — he’d evolved into a fully “indie” musician before that signaled anything other than a major-label red flag. His job expectations have adjusted accordingly. “I’m grateful to be as busy as I am,” he says, adding, “but I would like to do one more record — I don’t care if it’s a sample like DMX — that sells a million. Or all I need is one hit with one of them rock acts and the motherfucking floodgates will open.”
Outside a small circle of obsessives, Swamp exists, at best, as a fond recollection from an effervescent time. “I believe I do remember Swamp Dogg,” says William King, who at Swamp’s behest drove up to New York City from Tuskegee, Alabama, with Lionel Richie and the rest of the Commodores in 1969. “He invited us to record with him. He wore green shoes, green pants, green suit. He even had a green hat with a green feather. It was an exciting time, man.” They cut four songs, fast, and King never heard from Swamp again. “We heard he died in a boat somewhere; that he was fishing and he drowned. I kept thinking of that green suit falling off some dinky canoe and that green hat just floatin’ on down the way. I never did hear those songs till I bought a bootleg Commodores tape in Hong Kong years later.”
A legitimate collection of those recordings is easily available. It’s called Rise Up, and it’s on SDEG.
Swamp and I are riding in his silver Chrysler 300 on the day after our initial meeting. He needs to go to the bank so he can send a money transfer. We roll down wide boulevards, passing tall skinny pines and landscapers mowing lawns. Swamp presses play on an unreleased CD of buoyant blue-eyed soul by an English band called Little Big Man. “Worked with them in ’74,” he says. “I’m gonna put this out later this year: From Manchester to Muscle Shoals.”
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
Swamp had mentioned messing with a memoir, so I ask if he can share a story.
“What kind of story?”
“Just one you haven’t told anyone else.”
“Oh yeah, I got a few of those.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“When I was about 11,” he says amiably, “I was raped by a motherfucker.”
“Are you kidding me?!”
“Who kids about rape?”
Swamp turns the volume back up. I don’t know what to say. I see a CD case in the cupholder between our seats: Mama Don’t Take No S*** by Mikelle Morgan, released on SDEG last year. “How’s this?” I ask.
“It’s a motherfucker. Sold 33.”
“Did the thing you said before screw you up?”
“Maybe subconsciously. Guy’s name was Black Bobbie. He used to hang around the YMCA near where I lived in Portsmouth. He caught me leaving there one day and pulled me into the bushes. Put a little pocketknife to my throat. Told me he’d kill me if I said anything to anyone.
“Listen to this,” he says, raising the volume as Little Big Man’s guitarist plays a twisty solo. “They was some motherfuckers.”
He points out a boxy, meandering estate. “Dr. Dre used to live there.” Swamp briefly managed Dre in the early ’80s. “The only thing I understood about his music was that people wanted to hear it.”
“Do you think maybe your agoraphobia was related to that other thing we were talking about?”
“Could very well be,” he says, pulling into a strip-mall parking lot. I don’t walk around thinking about it.”
The bank is closed. “Ain’t that a bitch,” says Swamp nonchalantly. “You hungry? You wanna go to the Cheesecake Factory?”
Swamp is, and always has been, open to a good offer: On the wall of his guest bathroom is a gold record commemorating “Salty Dog,” a song he wrote for a Suntory whiskey campaign for Japanese TV. He made $5,000 when he was asked to do the music for 1991’s Ted & Venus, a little-known film written by and starring Harold & Maude’s Bud Cort. “We were looking at using a Marvin Gaye song,” says Cort. “It would have cost $50,000 — which was way more than our total music budget.” His co-producer had heard about Swamp Dogg, so they cut a deal. “He knocked it out of the park,” says Cort. Warlocks, a subsidiary of SDEG (yep, SDEG has subsidiaries) released the soundtrack. “They did?” says Cort. They did.
Swamp cuts licensing deals for his vast collection of copyrights, and the songs he owns have appeared in everything from Dog Whisperer With Cesar Millan to Pimp My Ride. Swamp Dogg albums are streaming on Spotify and available as downloads on iTunes and his official website, The Swamp Dogg Times.
He’s largely overcome his social anxiety and now plays live with some regularity. Swamp does well in Europe and is especially popular in Trinidad, where he claims he gets “Al Green money.” He manages acts, too. “I could go out right now and find you a rapper,” he boasts. In 1991, MC Breed had a minor hit with “Ain’t No Future In Yo’ Frontin'” for SDEG.
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
“I raised five daughters,” says Swamp, whose youngest girl is a neurologist. “I had to get busy. I wasn’t carrying on about success or no success. That’s why it’s better to be your own boss. I can have a plan and do it, and I know that if I fuck up, I’m the only one to blame. If I go along with your plan, and you fuck up, what did I learn?”
He’s assiduous about keeping on top of his samples, though he’s not as tenacious as Yvonne used to be. “I got a call crazy fast, like the week after the track came out, asking for a credit,” says DJ Hi-Tek, who used a snatch of Swamp on “Move Somethin’,” a 2000 single he produced for Talib Kweli. “His wife did the negotiating. I don’t know how they heard it that fast. She was tough — ended up with 50 percent of my publishing.”
“I remember catching wind that negotiations got nasty,” says Kid Rock about clearing his sample of Swamp’s stirring “Slow Slow Disco” on Devil Without a Cause’s “I Got One for Ya” (hence the platinum disc on Swamp’s wall). “His wife was being old-school gangster about the whole thing. But fuck it, I’m glad I could put some money in the guy’s pocket.”
Yvonne died in 2003. She and Swamp had met in Philadelphia in 1963 when she was a singer and he was doing occasional A&R for that city’s V-Tone records. For most of their time together, Yvonne was Swamp’s business manager. Ten years ago, shares Swamp cryptically, cancer compelled her “to take care of business someplace else.” He remarried in 2006, to a doctor who lives in San Jose, and they’re “working towards keeping the future bright.”
Even without Yvonne, Swamp is quick to seize an opportunity. In late 2012, Patrick Boissel, the laconic Frenchman who runs Alive Naturalsound, called Swamp Dogg to inquire about licensing the song “Total Destruction to Your Mind” for blues-rocker Lee Bains III. They hit it off and cut a deal to reissue — in addition to Total Destruction — Rat On! and Gag a Maggot, as well as albums that Swamp produced for singers Irma Thomas, Raw Spitt, Wolfmoon, and bluesman Lightnin’ Slim. “It’s really quite punk rock how he does his business,” says Boissel. “It’s, ‘This is what we can do, this is what it will cost to do it.’ No extra bullshit.” Boissel has set up Swamp to produce another of “them” rock bands, Philly’s John the Conqueror.
“[Swamp’s] got all these revenue sources,” says Burnstein, who knows a thing or three about developing musicians’ careers. “He also writes, records, produces, plays. If I had a talent, I’d do what he does. Put it all together and it adds up to a pretty decent life.”
Swamp sits behind the keys at his white baby-grand piano on a sunny Sunday morning, ready to do what he was put here to do. He and a bassist, drummer, guitarist, and keyboardist are in his studio, running through a new song intended for an upcoming album. He’s been thinking about titles: Either Leroy Kardashian: Formerly Known as Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams or Swamp Dogg the Beast.
“I wanna get lowdown on this motherfucker,” he tells the band. The song is called “If That Ain’t the Blues What Is?” Swamp pumps out a rich gospel chord progression on the piano and sings a strutting melody about the bullshitters in Congress. His voice is bright and strong. His shoulders shimmy and roll. He bounces on the piano bench.
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
The other musicians are confused. “Is there a grace note in there? What beat is the verse landing on?” asks the keyboardist, who resembles David Letterman and never removes his sunglasses. “Are we going ten bars or 12?” They try again, Swamp again belting beautifully, and again he loses his backers. The bassist, nose-tackle big and wearing a Cosby sweater, leans forward and says, “You gotta tell us what you’re gonna do.”
“You sayin’ that like I know!” cracks Swamp.
“Write this down,” says the bassist, smiling, “Swamp’s what you call an eccentric musician.”
They keep trying for another half hour, then take a break. The boss orders everyone chicken wings and pizza from Domino’s. The musicians retire to the kitchen and turn on the Lakers game.
Photo by Elizabeth WeinbergPhoto by Elizabeth Weinberg
Swamp ducks into his office to look for a fax that he’d misplaced — he’s being sued by a recurring pest who says he’s due a piece of Jackson 5 & Johnny: Beginning Years 1967-1968, a compilation of pre-fame recordings by Michael, Jermaine, Randy, Tito, Marlon, and a non-blood “cousin,” to which Swamp owns the rights. “This motherfucker sues me every time he thinks I’m making some money,” explains Swamp. “He’s in Indiana, man. They some backward-ass folks over there.” He finds the fax in a pile of papers and looks down his nose. “Oh, this ain’t nothing to worry about.'”
We can hear the musicians in the kitchen; they’re mercilessly heckling Dwight Howard. “I pride myself on paying my sidemen well,” declares Swamp, reading through text messages. He makes a lemon-sucking face. Shit. It’s the car. “The insurance hasn’t been paid, it don’t start, and the rear bumper fell off.” He gives a why me? shrug, then rises to rejoin the band. “Let’s go get to work,” he says gleefully. “Let’s go do the motherfucker.”
Giant Rats! Human Hot Dogs! Boxer Shorts! Swamp Dogg’s 11 Craziest Album Covers
The weirdest images from five decades of total destruction
by Colin Joyce
Since his 1970 debut, Total Destruction to Your Mind, R&B cult hero and SPIN profile subject Swamp Dogg has been responsible for some of music’s most outlandish and just plain weirdest album covers. These are the 11 you must see, with commentary from the man himself.
#1 ‘Total Destruction to Your Mind’ (1970)
“I lived like three blocks from LaGuardia airport at that time and [Willis Hogans Jr., the photographer, and I] went out and took some pictures. People talk about the washed out color, but that was because the guy that I was using for my album covers was, by profession, a police photographer. All [the photos] he shot were mug shots! I guess [the cover] looked great to him.”
#2 ‘Rat On!’ (1971)
“By the time I got to Rat On!, I figured out who Swamp Dogg was but I put [him] on a higher plane than he really deserved. I felt that the black man was arriving and was closer to being at his destination than he was. The black man finally is on top. The rat is smiling because in his mind he knows that the black man does not have enough savvy, education, and stick-togetherness to stay on top.”
#3 ‘Have You Heard This Story??’ (1974)
“Other than wanting to take a picture in my drawers and undershirt and a hat that I got from my father after he passed away, I don’t know if there was any big idea. I have a book called I’m OK, You’re OK sitting out there. That was like the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time. I’m speaking of popularity, not of content. It was all about what I was going through mentally. It’s about Swamp Dogg trying to get his mind back.”
#4’I’m Not Sellin’ Out / I’m Buyin’ In!’ (1981)
“That’s when I got tired of fighting the establishment and decided to become part of the establishment. In my songs I basically was fighting for the black man. I was trying to educate the black man. I was trying to make the black man rise up. I put myself on the table to show that I had picked up enough to join in with society as we know it. It’s time to make a living.”
#5’The Best of Swamp Dogg: 13 Prime Weiners, Everything on It!’ (1982)
‘[Photographer] Willis Hogans Jr. and I got together and did that. I just wanted to be inside a hotdog bun, and whatever my next album was going to be that’s what I was going to do. When the guys decided they were going to call it 13 Prime Weiners, that fit me just right. If you look closely you will see that we didn’t quite line up the legs as well as we could’ve lined them up.”
#6 ‘Swamp Dogg’ (1982)
“I let another company put that out, Ala Records. They did that cover and I hated it! I still do. I was going to sue ’em and my wife said, ‘You know, when they walk into court with all of your albums and show the judge what kind of shit you’ve been putting out, he may lock you up for wasting his time.'”
#7 ‘Surfin’ in Harlem’ (1991)
“The last place you can surf is in Harlem. Nevertheless when they open up all of those fire hydrants during the summer, that’s about as much surfing as you’re going to get. It was about how ridiculous life has become. It has become about as ridiculous as wanting to go surfing in Harlem.”
#8 ‘The Re-invention of Swamp Dogg’ (2001)
“I was trying to set up a thing that it would be Frankenstein being operated on. I couldn’t get ahold of an operating room or a doctor’s office where they’d let me do this. We put some shit together in my living room. I wanted my wife on the cover and so there are two girls on there. The prettier one is my wife!”
#9 ‘If I Ever Can Kiss It… Kiss It Goodbye’ (2002)
“That was my attempt to hit the Southern Soul market and to be very sexually dirty. That’s the type of songs on that record. It’s about being sexually edgy and having a lot of fun. All those lips and tongues and shit are mine. I came up with that idea from Mick Jagger. I can always see those big ol’ lips. So I had my lips and tongue all over the motherfucker.”
#10 ‘The Resurrection of Swamp Dogg’ (2007)
“Jesus Christ had all these people around him that supposedly had his back and one or two of them got together for a few pieces of silver and had his ass nailed to a cross. You can’t trust nobody. Well if you look at the cap it says ‘Witness Protection Program.’ The Witness Protection Program is supposed to be top notch, but of course we know better. You watch TV and you see what happens to witnesses under protection.”
#11 ‘An Awful Christmas and a Lousy New Year’ (2009)
“I had on my drawers and my wifebeater. I picked up my attaché case to bring it back to my office. My partner took four or five shots. My graphic people got rid of all of the equipment and chairs and put me in the middle of a burned down house. If you stand in the middle of your house and it’s a big ol’ cinder, that’s an awful Christmas. And there’s no way you’re going to have it back up by New Year’s. That’s an even lousier New Year’s.”
http://www.spin.com/articles/swamp-dogg-total-destruction-rat-on-the-real-doggfather
http://www.spin.com/articles/swamp-dogg-album-covers-total-destruction-rat-on
ROLLING STONE (national music magazine) – Positive 4 STAR REVIEW of Total Destruction To Your Mind! (PRINT ONLY)
SOUND + VISION MAGAZINE (online music site) – Positive review with album art.
Swamp Dogg: Total Destruction to Your Mind; Rat On!
Reissues (Alive Naturalsound)
Search the Web for words to describe this cult-legend soul man and you’ll find everything from simply “odd” and “eccentric” to blatantly “gonzo” and “mad.” Heard today, however, in the midst of the turgid technology that often tries to pass for R&B, these two albums sound completely normal — and positively thrilling, as if we’d just found a couple of prime unreleased Sly Stone albums hidden in a closet. Jerry Williams, Jr., began his career as Little Jerry in 1954. Total Destruction to Your Mind, his debut album as Swamp Dogg, was released in 1970, followed by Rat On! a year later. There are interesting covers (Bobby Goldsboro’s “The World Beyond,” the Bee Gees’ “I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You”), but the originals (some co-written with Gary “U.S.” Bonds) are the bee’s knees, delving into politics on every level: social, personal, sexual.
Total Destruction is the more energetic of the two; Rat On! is ballad-heavy but has more-developed songs. Both are a blast, charged by the Dogg’s zealous vocals. Freshly remastered, the albums are being issued on vinyl for the first time since their original release, and they’re also available on CD. Either way, it’s a kick to hear the era’s wide-separation stereo mixes. You think Swamp Dogg is Out There? I say he’s resolutely down-to-earth.
http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/blog/2013/03/05/week-music-march-5-2013-replacements-reunion-hendrix-exhumation?page=0,2
ROCK STAR JOURNALIST (online music site) – Postive review with album art.
Swamp Dogg reissues out today from Alive Naturalsound; download two free tracks
Legendary psychedelic soul bluesman Swamp Dogg‘s first two albums, Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On! see reissue today via Alive Naturalsound. I’ve had a chance to listen to both, and they sound amazing. They’ve still got that swamp funk to them, but the remastering job is just absolutely stellar. For those used to vinyl rips and bootleg CDs, these brand-new LP reissues (and first-time official CD releases) will blow your mind.
Hopefully, this will lead to a new generation of folks getting into this somewhat lost musician. While Swamp Dogg’s songs have been covered by the likes of Galactic, it don’t mean shit to be known if folks can’t get your music. Now that’s the case. Both LPs are available from the Bomp! store. Check out two tracks from the reissues below.http://www.nuthousepunks.com/blog/2013/03/05/swamp-dogg-reissues-out-today-from-alive-naturalsound-download-two-free-tracks/
TRI-STATE INDIE (Philly-based music site) – News post from press release with album art.
Swamp Dogg Remastered
Posted by Harrison Brink in Daily Fix
Maverick soul artist Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams) has been described as the “soul genius that time forgot,” and “a strange combination of Sly Stone’s progressive funk with Frank Zappa’s lyrical absurdism.” In the ’70s he even made the famed Nixon’s Enemies List.
Alive Naturalsound Records is proud to bring you Swamp Dogg’s first two albums, newly remastered and re-released for the very first time on vinyl since their original release in the early ’70s. Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970), has been called “one of the most gloriously gonzo soul recordings of all time,” while Rat On! (1971) was ranked as having one of the top ten worst album covers of all time, an achievement that Swamp Dogg is rightfully proud of to this day.
The two remastered reissues of Swamp Dogg’s early ’70s albums Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! are available now. In addition to CD and Black Vinyl, there will also be a very limited pressing of Colored Vinyl for both albums exclusive to mailorders through Bomp!
http://www.tristateindie.com/2013/swamp-dogg-remastered/
BLURT (national music magazine) – Positive 8/10 album reviews
SWAMP DOGG Rat On! + Total Destruction To Your Mind
(Alive Natural Sound)
www.aliveenergy.com
The world of soul, funk and R&B is heavily populated with major characters and outsize personalities, which is hardly surprising: they are entertainers, after all. Popular music is also one of the few realms where eccentric behavior can be celebrated as opposed to shunned. Yesterday’s high school outcast or town weirdo can be tomorrow’s chart topper or night club headliner, given the right set of circumstances.
R&B and funk seems to be particularly populated with willful eccentrics and those whose fires burn especially bright. Think Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Andre Williams, Blowfly, Sly Stone, George Clinton, Rufus Thomas and yea, you also better think Jerry Williams, Jr, aka Swamp Dogg. Alive Natural Sound is set to release Dogg’s first two full length classics, Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971); he previously recorded some sides under the name his parents called him growing up. Dogg is a first class character, from the whack cover art on his records, to his hilariously surreal and self congratulatory liner notes to his all-over-the-place lyrical musings. Fortunately the man has substance, not just personality, and both of these are red hot platters of burning Southern Soul.
Both discs were recorded at a high water mark for Southern Soul, Total Destruction…at Capricorn Studios in Macon, GA, and Rat On! at Quinvy Studio in Muscle Shoals, AL. And both use the world class musicians available in those studios, including drummers Johnny Sandlin and Jaspur Guarino, bass player Robert Popwell, guitarist Jesse Carr, keyboard player Paul Hornsby and various horn players and back up singers. These cats lay down a swampy soul groove to equal most anything at the time, all bathed in the wondrously warm analog sound of the era. Swamp Dogg wrote or co-wrote most of the material, produced and arranged everything, plays piano and “everything else of any importance” as he so modestly puts it. And of course he sings it all in his strong, Southern dipped voice, comfortable in the mid and especially higher registers.
Williams/Dogg’s outsized personality infuses most everything with a touch of the surreal, from the see-it-to-believe-it photo on the cover of Total Destruction… to the cheeky liner notes (he name checks Gene Autry, Moms Mabley, Phil Walden, Snow White, Jerry Wexler and Wally Roker in one sentence), and then on to the music, even the straight up soul numbers. How about we just lay a few song titles out there? We’ve got “Dust Your Head Color Red,” “Sal-A-Faster,” “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe,” “Redneck” (by Joe South), “Synthetic World,” “Total Destruction To Your Mind” and six others from the first record, and “Predicament #2,” “That Ain’t My Wife,” “God Bless America For What,” and seven more on the more straight-ahead second. It’s important to know that these aren’t novelty songs in any way at all, and Dogg’s isn’t a jokey performer, per se: sure, some of them are funny, others are topically pissed off, but most are straight up soul numbers that could have been on the radio at the time. He may be a bit off-the-wall, but there’s always an underlying sense of integrity to what he’s doing, at least as far as these two releases goes.
Most importantly, they really are great songs, from start to finish on both records. Check “Total Destruction…,” “Remember, I Said Tomorrow,” “Creeping Away,” “Mama’s Baby, “Daddy’s Maybe,” “Do You Believe,” “Do Our Thing Together,” and really just about anything here and you’ll find the vi/ntage goods, sounding as good today as they the day they were laid down.
DOWNLOAD: “Total Destruction To Your Mind,” “Synthetic World,” “Redneck,” “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe” from TDTYM; “Creeping Away,” “God Bless America For What,” “Remember, I Said Tomorrow” and “Do You Believe” from Rat On! –CARL HANNI
FYI, Dogg is still kicking it. There’s a nice NPR piece here: http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=16322903&m=16322952
http://blurt-online.com/reviews/view/4393
WRAT RADIO (NJ Rock station) – Interview with Swamp and Keith Roth for Keith’s Electric Ballroom show to air on Sun. March 3rd at 10pm EST. (After the airing Keith said, “great great response last night.”)
HYPERBOLIUM (online music blog) – In-store preview
Swamp Dogg in Person!
Those of you in the Los Angeles area have the opportunity to meet the infamous Swamp Dogg, promoting the upcoming reissue of his first two albums, Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On! He’ll be appearing at Freakbeat Records (13616 Ventura Boulevard in beautiful Sherman Oaks, California) on Sunday, March 3rd from 1-2:30pm.
http://www.hyperbolium.com/2013/02/25/swamp-dogg-in-person/
THE STASH DAUBER (online music blog) – Positive album review.
Swamp Dogg’s “Total Destruction To Your Mind” and “Rat On!”
The classic sound of ’60s and ’70s soul refuses to die. In recent years, the Brooklyn-based Daptone label has introduced monster talents like Sharon Jones, Lee Fields, and Charles Bradley to the public consciousness, while Patrick Boissel’s Alive Naturalsound, once known for its reissues of Detroit ramalama and the first couple of Black Keys sides, has brought us latter-day wonderment from obscuro ’60s soul men Andre Williams and Nathaniel Meyer.
Now, Alive’s reissued the first two albums by Swamp Dogg — surely the most eccentric and individuated of classic soul singers — on CD and sweet, sweet vinyl. Born Jerry Williams, Jr., in Virginia, 1942, he released records under his given name beginning in 1954, and did occasional songwriting and production for artists including Z.Z. Hill before unleashing his persona — a sly observer and social commentator, like Joe Tex gene-spliced with Frank Zappa — on the world. If you haven’t heard him, you owe it to yourself.
I remember seeing Swamp Dogg’s 1970 debut album, Total Destruction To Your Mind, with its cover depicting the artist in his underwear, when it was new and thinking, “Oh wow. A record by a crazy person” (and this was years before Wesley Willis ever contemplated a musical career). I was reminded of the title track — with its immortal opening line, “Sittin’ on a cornflake, ridin’ on a roller skate — a few years back when Eric Ambel, a fella that knows good songwriting, covered it on his Roscoe’s Gang album.
Swamp Dogg’s an impassioned shouter in the Otis Redding mold, and these two records have the extroverted energy and friendly blare of vintage Stax or Hi jams — until you listen to the lyrics. “Friendship’s like acid,” he sings over a “Like A Rolling Stone” organ in “Synthetic World”: “It burns as it slides away.” And has there ever been a paean to lust with a line as great as “If I die tomorrow, I’ve lived tonight” (from “If I Die Tomorrow”)? I think not.
Like Ray Charles, Swamp Dogg grew up listening to country music, and he likes to tell a story in song the way the best country songwriters do. (Indeed, he collaborated with Gary “U.S.” Bonds on Johnny Paycheck’s hit “She’s All I’ve Got.”) In “The Baby Is Mine,” written in an era before the phrase “baby daddy” had entered the vernacular, he sets an example of paternal responsibility that young men of today would do well to emulate: “I’m not just a father, I’m also a man / I’m going to see my child every chance that I can / And as for the woman, she’s his all alone / I’m not trying to break up that man’s home.” Then he turns around and puts the shoe on the other foot, with the bluesy cuckold’s lament “Mama’s Baby Daddy’s Maybe.”
The album’s most outrageous lyrics, however, come from the pen of Joe South, he of “Hush”/”Games People Play”/”I played with Dylan, too” fame. “Redneck” chugs along to a greasy groove, except it’s liable to break up the dance party with lines like, “But you never had much use / For all the niggers, dagos, and Jews.” As if to pour oil on the waters, Swamp Dogg also covers South’s cry for sanity “These Are Not My People.”
Rat On! was the followup, improbably released on Elektra in 1971, replete with cover art of our hero triumphantly astride a white rat. Sadly, the disgruntled social commentary of “Remember I Said Tomorrow” remains on point 40 years later: “Tomorrow we’re going to pass a law that will make everything alright…Tomorrow we’re going to bring the boys home / The end of the war is on its way…Tomorrow you’ll even have freedom of speech…” “God Bless America” takes an even more jaded view of the political scene, but ends with a heartfelt plea for coexistence.
When he’s not addressing serious topics with more humor than Curtis Mayfield, Sly Stone, or Norman Whitfield ever did, Swamp Dogg can even play it straight. “I Kiss Your Face” is a convincing ballad on its own terms, and Rat On’s version of “Got To Get A Message To You” is the best Bee Gees cover since Al Green took possession of “To Love Somebody.”
A decade ago, Swamp Dogg was reduced to reissuing his albums on shoddily-packaged twofer CDs, albeit on his own label. More recently, he was shilling them as Bandcamp downloads. Here’s hoping that Alive Naturalsound will go the distance and restore more of his catalog to vinyl availability. The world needs more Swamp Dogg now!
http://stashdauber.blogspot.com/2013/02/swamp-doggs-total-destruction-to-your.html
WFMU RADIO (NJ college station) – Do You Believe from the new reissue aired on Htch’s show on Feb. 24th.
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/49576
ECLECTIBLOGS (online music site) – News post from press release.
Maverick Soul Artist
Maverick soul artist Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams) has been described as the “soul genius that time forgot,” and “a strange combination of Sly Stone’s progressive funk with Frank Zappa’s lyrical absurdism.” In the ’70s he even made the famed Nixon’s Enemies List.
Alive Naturalsound Records is proud to bring you Swamp Dogg’s first two albums, newly remastered and re-released for the very first time on vinyl since their original release in the early ’70s. Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970), has been called “one of the most gloriously gonzo soul recordings of all time,” while Rat On! (1971) was ranked as having one of the top ten worst album covers of all time, an achievement that Swamp Dogg is rightfully proud of to this day.
The two remastered reissues of Swamp Dogg’s early ’70s albums Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! will be available on Black Vinyl and CD on March 5th. In addition, there will also be a very limited pressing of Colored Vinyl for both albums.
http://eclectiblogs.webs.com/apps/blog/show/24039542-maverick-soul-artist
BLOG CRITICS (online music site) – Positive album reviews with album art .
Swamp Dogg Rising: Classic Albums by the Funky Soul Maestro Re-Released
Before there was Snoop Dogg, there was Swamp Dogg. Jerry Williams, already an experienced recording artist in his late 20s, took that moniker and launched a venturesome if part-time career as a purveyor of funky soul music. Over the years since, Williams has worked as a producer and songwriter for other artists.
With Gary “U.S.” Bonds he wrote “She’s All I Got” for Johnny Paycheck, which in 1971 reached No. 2 on the U.S. country singles chart; with Charlie Foxx he wrote “Count the Days” for Inez and Charlie Foxx (of “Mockingbird” fame; more recently he wrote music for the writer Ben Greenman’s fictional “Rock Foxx” character. But his two earliest Swamp Dogg releases – Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970) and Rat On! (1971) – have long been overdue for a re-release. Now, crisply remastered and available March 5 on CD and vinyl, they’re ready to shine afresh and perhaps attract a new audience.
After all, Rodríguez – whose two albums came out in ’70 and ’71, and who is an exact contemporary of Williams – has made something of a comeback, and he didn’t even have a music career in the interim. And unlike Rodríguez, no one needs to go “searching for” Swamp Dogg; he’s right here, at his own actively maintained website.
The Unknown Legends of Rock ‘N Roll described Swamp Dogg’s songs as “Like a strange combination of Sly Stone’s progressive funk with Frank Zappa’s lyrical absurdism,” a description especially apt for the first album. The leadoff and title track of Total Destruction To Your Mind, a funk masterpiece, has been covered by Galactic and other groups in the years since, but they couldn’t possibly have surpassed the original. (You can hear a snatch of it in Swamp Dogg’s promotional “jingle”:
With a punchy, high tenor voice that sometimes sounds a bit less polished than those of more famous soul singers like Jackie Wilson or Sam and Dave, but is every bit as biting and with a freestyle quality all its own, Swamp Dogg was clearly the master of his own universe on these recordings. “His vocals have always been for me both very energetic and very sad,” says Greenman, a longtime fan. Lyrically, Swamp Dogg manifests three preoccupations (he wrote some of the songs by himself, others in collaboration with Troy Davis or Gary “U.S.” Bonds.) There are calls for equality and social justice, songs about love and jealousy, and a related concern with babies and children. But he tends to tinge all of them at times with a kind of psychedelic absurdity. “Total Destruction” expresses a non-specific sense of being downtrodden and a vow of revenge:
I stand here, watch you playing games
But now I’m learning do the same
And now I am on your case
Looking you square in the face
And as sure as the sun will shine shine shine shine shine
I’m gonna do
Total destruction to your mind.
He leaves to our imagination just how he’ll engineer such destruction, while letting his own imagination run wild in songs like “Dust Your Head Color Red” (“Spirit dust your head color red / Sparkle your insides pink with pleasure”) and “I Was Born Blue” (“Why wasn’t I born with orange skin and green hair like the rest of the people in the world?”).
There’s less surrealism, and there are more overt cries for social justice, on the second album, Rat On!, which Swamp Dogg proudly touts as having one of the top 10 “worst album covers” of all time. In “God Bless America for What” he cries, “Oh what a joke is the Statue of Liberty / When there are Indians on the reservation, and black folks still ain’t free.” “Remember, I Said Tomorrow” and “Do You Believe” are also songs about liberation, and in “Do Our Thing Together” he returns to New York Harbor with: “We got to walk tall / Hand in hand / We’re a proud new generation / We’ll make a new land…The Statue of Liberty can be real if we let her.”
Singing about the darker, wackier side of family relationships, Swamp Dogg anticipates the oeuvres of both Maury Povich and Michael Jackson in songs like “The Baby Is Mine” and “Mama’s Baby, Daddy’s Maybe”:
I got brown eyes
And so does she
But my baby’s got blue eyes
That’s a mystery to me…
Could it be Mama’s baby, Daddy’s maybe?
I guess I don’t really really want to know.
“Predicament #2” is about a man who has two women and is fine with keeping it that way “until I find a solution.” But the tables are turned and he goes into denial with “That Ain’t My Wife”: “That ain’t my wife that I see / I know that woman with that man don’t belong to me.”
There’s nothing unusual about any of these themes showing up in funk and soul music, but Swamp Dogg applied to them his own quasi-tongue-in-cheek patina, often enough to make him a true original, and an artist whose work of that period deserves to be better remembered than it is.
Humor and skewed points of view aside, all the best singers and songwriters know that a good song is a good song, and Swamp Dogg knows that very well, having crossed genres his whole life. In an interview on NPR’s Studio 360, he explained that he was raised on country music, growing up in Portsmouth, VA listening to DJ (and songwriter) Sheriff Tex Davis play country songs all day. On the other hand, “Black music we heard somewhere starting about 10 o’clock at night ’til about 4 in the morning, and I had to be in bed then…If you strip my tracks, and you take all the horns away and the funk guitar licks, what you have is a country song.” Ray Charles knew that too.
Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! will be available March 5. In addition to CD and black vinyl, there will be limited pressings on colored vinyl available at Bomp.
Listen to “If I Die Tomorrow” from Total Destruction To Your Mind.
Listen to “Creeping Away” from Rat On!
http://blogcritics.org/music/article/swamp-dogg-rising-classic-albums-by/page-3/
also got picked up by the Seattle daily newspaper, SEATTLE POST-INTELLEGENCER:
• http://blogcritics.org/music/article/swamp-dogg-rising-classic-albums-by/
• http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Swamp-Dogg-Rising-Classic-Albums-by-the-Funky-4298828.php
COLLECTING VINYL RECORDS (online music site) – News posting (from press announcement) with album art and related links.
http://collectingvinylrecords.blogspot.com/2013/02/vinyl-record-news-music-notes_21.html
MONKEY PICKS (online music site) – Positive album reviews with album art .
SWAMP DOGG – TOTAL DESTRUCTION TO YOUR MIND (1970) and RAT ON! (1971)
“Sitting on a cornflake, riding on a roller skate!” Those opening words to the thumping “Total Destruction To Your Mind” show Swamp Dogg’s worldview doesn’t necessarily come from the same place as us ordinary folk but he was writing and singing about the things relevant to most. As he explains, “Commencing in 1970, I sung about sex, niggers, love, rednecks, war, peace, dead flies, home wreckers, Sly Stone, my daughters, politics, revolution and blood transfusions (just to name a few), and never got out of character.”
And what a character it was. With the release of It’s All Good: The Singles Collection 1963-1989 I wrote how Jerry Williams created Swamp Dogg after years of relative obscurity, knocking out records and productions under a variety of guises. His first two albums recorded under his most enduring moniker have now been legitimately reissued for the first time on vinyl (plus CD and download etc) and they’re both excellent throughout.
In his brief liner notes Dogg suggests these albums sold millions due to bootleggers (“thieves”, he calls them). There’s no way of proving that but a couple of things strike me about them now. Firstly, they are as solid a pairing of soul albums as you’ll find from that period. They have moments of humour (Swamp possesses one of those voices which make things sound funny even when they aren’t) but they aren’t jokey or over the top, he plays it straight. Lyrically he addressed the same issues Marvin Gaye did on What’s Going On; this was Soul With A Conscience. Marvin’s album though was a no-expense spared affair with a lavish production and Gaye on the cover looking moody and serious standing in the rain with his expensive collar up; whilst Swamp recorded his with a tight funky band of Muscle Shoals soul men and was pictured sitting on a garbage truck in his shorts and cheering while straddling a giant white rat. Which brings me to my second point, those silliness sleeves don’t communicate how good the music is and how under appreciated these records are and Swamp/Williams is within the soul universe. When Rat On! has been mentioned in the intervening years it’s been in the Worst Album Sleeves of All Time lists, a fact Dogg acknowledges now. “This left-handed accolade has helped this masterpiece continue to sell and avoid obscurity”. That was him calling his own album a masterpiece. I wouldn’t go quite that far but Total Destruction To Your Mind is essential listening and Rat On! isn’t far behind.
Total Destruction To You Mind and Rat On! by Swamp Dogg are released by Alive Records on 5 March 2013.
http://monkey-picks.blogspot.com/2013/02/swamp-dogg-total-destruction-to-your.html
WMSE (Milwaukee college radio) “She Even Woke Me Up to Say GoodBye” 2/15 and“These Are Not My People” 2/8 on Zero Hour
http://zerohourradio.blogspot.com/
ROCTOBER (online music site) – Positive album reviews with album art .
Swamp Dogg “Total Destruction to Your Mind,” “Rat On!”[GUEST REVIEW BY JAMES PORTER] (Alive) Swamp Dogg has released over a dozen albums since the 1970 and 1971 LPs that Alive is reissuing this year, but as outrageous and bizarre as many of them have been, nothing matches the mind-blowing power of these R&B/rock/protest/progressive masterpieces that musically kept pretty loyal to Southern soul but conceptually were like nothing else on the market (which is probably why they were relegated to bargain bins instead of Casey Kasem countdowns). In 2000 Roctober published our Swamp Dogg listener guide, and the following excerpt holds true today:
After bursting on the scene as Little Jerry Williams in the 50s, the Virginia native continued in that vein for years, with minor success as a producer, songwriter and soul singer, until 1970 when he retired the sharkskin suit and the love songs and finally gave the world a piece of his mind with these two albums that started the show. Looking back, “Total Destruction” is like a a total reaction to the plastic soul sound of the period. While other producers would assemble a vocal group, string and horn sections, and a wah wah guitarist (to get the white kids!) in one studio and let them battle it out, nothing is wasted to excess on Swamp Dogg’s debut. Yes, there’s the guitar obbligatos of Pete Carr, Swamp’s own Gospel piano, and the usual horn section, but it’s Robert Popwell’s bass playing that defines the sound. You can hear his forbidding pulse to best effect on “The World Beyond,” holding down the bottom while Swamp recites a scarifying tale of life after wartime, one of the LP’s several powerful, unique, political statements. “The Baby is Mine,” a child custody song not to be confused with “Mama’s Baby…Daddy’s Maybe” (a minor hit from the same LP, Swamp’s only non-Jerry Williams chart appearance unless you count a Kid Rock SD sample) is almost too much for one sitting: “When I come by the house/I’m quiet as a mouse/but he always starts something every time…I got my rights/she might be his wife/but the baby is mine!” While this album isn’t as out there as similar soul experiments like Funkadelic or Gil Scott-Heron, songs like “Synthetic World,” “Redneck,” and the title track are more authentic than (admittedly great) Motown trifles like “Ball of Confusion” or “Friendship Train.” Swamp Dogg was speaking his mind while the Motown songs were written to cash in on fads. “Rat On!” is slightly more normal — the protest riffs, with the exception of “God Bless America,” are less bitter and more generalized, and there are a few more cheatin’ and infidelity songs (“Creepin’ Away,” “That Ain’t My Wife”) than previous, but the Dogg is still in top form.
For years both of this LPs have been available on one CD on domestic reissues (the SDEG label is Swamp Dogg’s own) and from Charly in the UK, but not enough can be said about the cover art that ALive reproduces in full 12″ glory on the new vinyl reissues. “Total Destruction” has an outrageous sleeve (an out of focus Polaroid of SD in shorts and a mortarboard sitting in the back of a garbage truck) so raw and funny and strange and amateurish that the devastating soul rock it sheathes is all the more powerful, and “Rat On!” (Ratso’s fave LP cover of all time) has him riding a giant rat. If only to get the cover art restored to full size (even on the CD resissues it’s a full five inches instead of two mini-covers on the prior CDs) these loving reissues would be worth the price, but they also sound great. Rat on, indeed!
http://roctoberreviews.blogspot.com/2013/02/guest-review-by-james-porter-alive.html
ABOUT.COM / BLUES (online blues music site) – Positive album review with album art .
Soul Legend Swamp Dogg Reissued
By Reverend Keith A. Gordon
Soul legend Swamp Dogg (a/k/a/ Jerry Williams) was a unique figure even by the standards of the day. A talented songwriter, studio engineer, and producer, Williams worked with Jerry Wexler and Atlantic Records through the 1960s. By the end of the decade, however, Williams had invented his “Swamp Dogg” alter-ego, releasing his debut album Total Destruction To Your Mind in 1970. Although it sold poorly at the time, the album’s mix of soul, funk, blues, and rock music would inspire a generation of artists to follow, Swamp Dogg a soul shouter in the style of Solomon Burke, a humorous and satirical (and frequently dirty-minded) songwriter in the vein of Frank Zappa.
Swamp Dogg followed up his eclectic debut with the musically similar Rat On! album the following year, the grotesque cover art (Dogg riding atop a large white rat) now considered one of the worst album covers of all time (a fact that Williams is oddly proud of). Both influential but out-of-print albums became coveted collector’s items long ago, but thanks to the good folks at Alive Naturalsound Records, both will be reissued on CD and vinyl LP on March 5, 2013. Newly re-mastered and appearing on vinyl for the first time since their original release, special limited-edition colored-vinyl versions of both albums will also be available by mail order only from the Bomp Records website. You can get a taste of both albums right now, however, courtesy of Swamp Dogg himself, by clicking through the links below.
“If I Die Tomorrow” (from Total Destruction To Your Mind)
”Creeping Away” (from Rat On!)
http://blues.about.com/b/2013/02/13/soul-legend-swamp-dogg-reissued.htm
WFMU RADIO (NJ college station) – Predicament #2 from the new reissue aired on Joe McGasko’s Surface Noise show on Feb. 10th.
http://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/49375
WCNI RADIO (Conecticut college station) – Both albums added to playlist rotation (per music directo Brian Turner)
WNCU RADIO / THE FUNK SHOW (Durham, NC Jazz station) – Positive CD OF THE MONTH reviews with album art posted on their website.
CD of the Month: Swamp Dogg! Total Destruction To Your Mind & Rat On!
Swamp Dogg is a very unique figure in Funk & Soul music. He is a musician, producer and a composer of more than 778 songs (listed on BMI). His name is Jerry Williams Jr. and he is from Portsmouth, Virginia. He produced other artists like Doris Duke, Z.Z. Hill, Irma Thomas and James Carr. Swamp Dogg is the author of about 12 albums and several singles. He recorded his first album in 1970 called Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! In1971. These two albums have recently been reissued by Alive Natural Sound on CD.
The CD Total Destruction To Your Mind opens with the title track which is totally funky. It features good vocals from Swamp Dogg, funky guitars, funky horns and a great band. The track Redneck is an upbeat tune and was written by Joe South. One of the singles from the album is Born Blue which is a southern Soul track that has a Muscle Shoals sound. The album was recorded at Capricorn Records in Macon Georgia. Another single was These Are Not My People which is a pop / soft rock single and contains a catchy melody. The Baby Is Mine is another catchy southern soul tune and was much like the songs from that period. The CD ends with a funky blues which was released as a single in 1970 called Mama’s Baby – Daddy’s Maybe, which is one of the best on the CD.
Next is the CD Rat On! which opens up with Do You Believe which is a marriage of full horns, a rhythm section, soulful female background vocals and the lead vocals of Swamp Dogg. The album was also recorded at Muscle Shoals Alabama with most of the musicians from his first LP. The songs Predicament #2 and Remember I Said Tomorrow are two more total Soul sides with the Muscle Shoals sound. More funky moments comes with the tracks Creeping Away and Got To Get A Message To You. I Kissed Your Face reminds you of the classic King Curtis arrangements. The CD ends with That Ain’t My Wife, She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye, and Do Our Thing Together. If I had to give my own label for these two CD’s I would call them FUNKY SOUL!
http://thefunkshow.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=132:cd-of-the-month-samp-dogg&catid=42:cd-of-the-month&Itemid=57
BLURT MAGAZINE (national music magazine) – Positive post with album album art and Swamp photo
Swamp Dogg STILL Ain’t Selling Out……. he’s buying in!
By Blurt Staff
Maverick soul artist Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams) has been described as the “soul genius that time forgot,” and “a strange combination of Sly Stone’s progressive funk with Frank Zappa’s lyrical absurdism.” In the ’70s he even made the famed Nixon’s Enemies List.
Alive Naturalsound Records is reissuing Swamp Dogg’s first two albums, newly remastered and re-released for the very first time on vinyl (and CD) since their original release in the early ’70s. Total Destruction To Your Mind (1970), has been called “one of the most gloriously gonzo soul recordings of all time,” while Rat On! (1971) was ranked as having one of the top ten worst album covers of all time (see above), an achievement that Swamp Dogg is rightfully proud of to this day. Here is a pair of “jingles” for each album title: http://www.alive-totalenergy.com/x/?page_id=3848
http://blurt-online.com/news/view/7118/
MADD CHICAGO (Chicago music blog) – Positive post with Swamp photo and album art and two mp3s.
Swamp Dogg to get re-issued
Maverick soul artist Swamp Dogg will have two of his seminal albums, Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On!, re-issued by Alive Records. Known for his progressive funk compositions combined with absurd lyrics (and album covers, see Rat On! below), Swamp Dogg is one of the forgotten classic soul singers of the 70′s. Dogg also made headlines in the during his career for his disapproval of President Richard Nixon and The United States innvolvement in the Vietnam War. A stand that apparenlty put the soul singer alongside John Lennon, Joe Namath, Bill Cosby, and Noam Chomsky among others on Nixon’s Enemies List.
Dogg has offered fans downloads of “If I Die Tomorrow” from Total Destruction and “Creeping Away” from Rat On! for their listening pleasure. Grab both track below. http://maddchicago.com/swamp-dogg-to-get-re-issued/
WHEN YOU MOTOR AWAY (online music site) – Positive post with album Creeping Away and If I Die Tomorrow mp3s
Swamp Dogg is off the Leash – Again.
Not all reissues suck. Some are great. Two reissues from soul iconoclast and Nixon enemies’ list member Swamp Dogg (aka Jerry Williams) will be released by Alive Natural Sound Records. They are reissuing Swamp Dogg’s newly remastered first two records from the early ’70s: Total Destruction To Your Mind and Rat On! on March 5th. This music will be available on black vinyl or CD. Swamp Dogg is offering fans free downloads of “If I DieTomorrow” (from Total Destruction To Your Mind) and “Creeping Away” (from Rat On!).
Swamp Dogg wears many hats – performer, songwriter, arranger, anti-war activist and producer. His own words help us understand why record companies had difficulty embracing the man: “Commencing in 1970, I sung about sex, n*ggers, love, rednecks, war, peace, dead flies, home wreckers, Sly Stone, my daughters, politics, revolution and blood transfusions (just to name a few), and never got out of character. He did not get put of character when he created what has been described as one of the 10 worst album covers of all time:
So as another original, Lord Buckley, so eloquently stated: “Hipsters, flipsters and finger-poppin’ daddies knock me your lobes.” The first taste is free. His music is rock, it’s country soul, it’s classic R&B and it’s funk. Take away the impeccable Stax horn arrangements and it’s stone cold classic country. Enjoy. Rat on brother, Rat on. – Frank Fahey
http://whenyoumotoraway.blogspot.com/2013/01/swamp-dogg-is-off-leash-again.html
NOW THIS SOUND IS BRAVE (online music site) – Positive post with artist photo and Creeping Away and If I Die Tomorrow mp3s
Swamp Dogg: Rat On!
When you look at the cover of Swamp Dogg’s album Rat On! now – on a black background, Swamp Dogg, in beret and fringed vest, sitting astride a white rat, Dogg’s arms held up in triumph – it just looks silly (and has indeed been called one of the worst album covers of all time). But at the time of its release in 1971, it managed to offend some people (evidence that people searching for things to be offended by is not a new development). While the photo was never intended as anything more than a visual component of the title’s play on words, Swamp Dogg hasn’t been one to back away from controversy, so he decided to stoke the fires of the offended by claiming the cover represented “the black man on top of the white man”1.
Clearly, what the cover does denote is an album from someone fond of clowning around. What you may miss from just looking at the cover, though, is that, beyond the silly cover and between some jokey songs are serious responses to race, war, sex, and more, backed by solid soul.
You see, Swamp Dogg is the alter ego of a man, Jerry Williams, Jr., with chops. Williams cut his first record when he was around 12 years old, when he was known as Little Jerry, and he’s been writing and producing music for himself and others since childhood. He’s worked with artists like Solomon Burke, Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, Gene Pitney, and, along with writing partner Gary U.S. Bonds, was nominated for a Grammy for the song “She’s All I Got”, recorded by Johnny Paycheck.
Williams has not stopped working, either on his own or for others, and his first two Swamp Dogg albums, 1970′s Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On!, are being remastered and reissued on vinyl and CD by Alive Records on March 5.
http://www.nowthissound.com/ntsib/2013/01/29/swamp-dogg-rat-on/
UR CHICAGO (Chicago weekly) – “If I Die Tomorrow” featured as an “MPFREE”
http://blog.urchicago.com/
TOP 40-CHARTS (online music site) – News posting (from press announcement) with album art and related links.
http://top40-charts.com/news/Pop-Rock/Alive-Naturalsound-Records-To-Reissue-Soul-Legend-Swamp-Doggs-Newly-Remastered-First-Two-Seminal-Albums-From-The-Early-70s-Total-Destruction-To-Your-Mind-Rat-On-3-5/86275.html
BROADWAY WORLD (online music site) – News posting (from press announcement) with album art and related links.
http://music.broadwayworld.com/article/Alive-Naturalsound-Records-to-Reissue-Swamp-Doggs-First-Two-Albums-35-20130123
FARONHEIT (online Chicago music blog) – “If I Die Tomorrow” mp3 added to their “1/24/13 Pick Your Poison” feature.
Pick Your Poison: Thursday 1-24-13
PLUG-IN MUSIC (onlinemusic site) – News feature (from press announcement) with album art and related links.
http://www.pluginmusic.com/news/article/alive-naturalsound-records-to-reissue-two-swamp-dogg-albums
MUSIC INDUSTRY NEWS NETWORKS (online music industry site) – News posting (from press announcement) with album art and related links.
http://mi2n.com/press.php3?press_nb=161129
