FORGOTTEN CLASSICS / SWAMP DOGG

FORGOTTEN CLASSICS Swamp Dogg Total Destruction To Your Mind The Swamp Dogg Enigma In each issue, American Trail´s vinyl editor Donivan Berube tells the story of classic, but forgotten, American album. This time, Donivan talks to soul legend Swamp Dogg about one of his Total Destruction To Your Mind.

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY DONIVAN BERUBE

That little voice still comes up in my head sometimes and says, ‘You’re gonna die.’ So I say: ‘Yes I am, goddamnit, just not right this second.’” The cult phenom of soul known by most as Swamp Dogg has survived a half-century of exploratory destruction by stirring his own pot and pushing back against any boundary that comes within reach. One review of 1972’s Cuffed, Collared & Tagged read: “This album is by far the greatest piece of writing, arranging, producing, and sequencing genius that I’ve ever encountered. Anyone who has heard the first two Swamp Dogg albums will possibly say, ‘Impossible!’ But after listening to this, one will make the crossover to, ‘Incredible!’” Such raving praise was written by none other than Swamp Dogg himself, known officially as Jerry Williams Jr., and printed on the back cover of his own record. “The only album that may possibly compare with this one is the one I’m contemplating doing in the late future,” he continued. “What you’ve just read is my trip, and if you can’t tolerate it, that’s your trip!”

As an only child born to musical parents, his mother and stepfather were constantly hosting African American performers touring through Virginia on the southern Chitlin’ Circuit, offering up their house as a veritable home base. Williams set the scene in an exclusive interview from his home in Southern California: – Black artists didn’t have anywhere to stay since they weren’t allowed in hotels back then. The music was always playing at our house, either on records or the radio. It was like a party every weekend.

His entire childhood became something like a backstage tour of the music industry, cutting singles as “Little

Jerry” by the age of 12 and steadily carving out his larger-than-life musical persona. He was opening for Sam Cooke within two years.

ATLANTIC AND THE EARLY YEARS After starting out his recording career in Macon, Georgia and Muscle Shoals, Alabama, Williams was eventually hired on to the production team at Atlantic Records, working with his labelmate Doris Duke on her classic 1970 debut I’m A Loser and later writing songs for other stars. – I wrote ‘Please Let Me Go Around Again’ in 1977 and played it for everyone, he remembers. – I even got on Willie Nelson’s tour bus and played it for him, but nobody wanted it.”

Too bad for Nelson & company, as the 1971 hit song that Williams wrote with Gary U.S. Bonds, “She’s All I Got,” would go on to be nominated at the Grammys and Country Music Awards. He described an impromptu “songwriting master class” that he withstood in the offices of Ember Records: – I was in there for hours playing all my songs on a piano. They told me they didn’t like them, but they also told me why they didn’t like them. So I went straight home and started writing some decent songs.”

THE ANTIHERO OF HIS OWN SPECTACLE In time Williams realized that he didn’t want to be just another R&B sideshow singing popular hits, but the antihero of his very own spectacle instead. He described that period of his life as an entrapment of agoraphobia and claustraphobia at the very same time. – It felt like I was afraid to get in the elevator, and then afraid to leave the elevator, he says. I stayed in my house for almost a full year. Whenever I got the nerve to leave, I’d drive halfway up the block at most before turning around and running back home.

The anxiety left him hospitalized, where he was misdiagnosed for having suffered a heart attack. A psychiatrist’s valium prescription induced the development of Swamp Dogg thereafter. – My life was driven by ‘what if?’ but Swamp Dogg changed that to ‘I am.’ Jerry would never say ‘kiss my ass,’ but Swamp Dogg would.

It’s as if his idea of “Jerry” was too weak to suppress the fearlessness of his own alter-ego. The id of Swamp Dogg allowed Williams to cut loose from the imprisonment of his own mind.

There’s no exact corner in which to pin the Swamp Dogg sound, though. His records are something like a sad

There’s no exact corner in which to pin the Swamp Dogg sound, though. His records are something like a sad Funkadelic, a Stevie Wonder on the street corner, a Sly Stone in the darkness. Picture Van Morrison kicking in the doors of Muscle Shoals at 2:00 a.m. and turning all the amps up to 11. Swamp Dogg records are funkified obscurities shot out of a soul cannon, backed by hard-grooving rhythm sections and head-turning lyrics. Pitchfork named him “R&B’s weirdest and most radical weirdo.” Music journalist Robert Christgau called him an “Afro-American air raid siren.” He’s been likened by others as a “black Frank Zappa” in that most of his albums were conceptualized in part as comedy.

WITHOUT A DOUBT, WILLIAMS MADE THE MOST OF EVERY DECADE, UTILIZING SWAMPY HORN SECTIONS, DISCO DRUM MACHINES, ELECTRONIC AUTOTUNE, COUNTRY WESTERN ACOUSTICS, OR WHATEVER NEW FORMS OF MUSIC-MAKING CAME ALONG WITH THE TIMES. SOMEHOW, HE FOUND A WAY TO MAKE THEM SOUND IDENTIFIABLY “SWAMP DOGG” ALL THE WHILE.

Funkadelic, a Stevie Wonder on the street corner, a Sly Stone in the darkness. Picture Van Morrison kicking in the doors of Muscle Shoals at 2:00 a.m. and turning all the amps up to 11. Swamp Dogg records are funkified obscurities shot out of a soul cannon, backed by hard-grooving rhythm sections and head-turning lyrics.

Pitchfork named him “R&B’s weirdest and most radical weirdo.” Music journalist Robert Christgau called him an “Afro-American air raid siren.” He’s been likened by others as a “black Frank Zappa” in that most of his albums were conceptualized in part as comedy. The song titles are every bit as good as the music itself, like the celebratory “If I Die Tomorrow (I’ve Lived Tonight),” “If You Gotta Do Wrong, Do It Right,” “The Love We Got Ain’t Worth Two Dead Flies,” “The White Man Made Me Do It,” “I Called for A Rope and They Threw Me A Rock,” a pseudo-patriotic anti-inequality ballad ”God Bless America (for What?)” and “Give Em As Little As You Can As Often As You Have To.”

An outlaw rhapsody with an inexhaustable flair for storytelling, it’s easy to see how an audience could entirely lose sight of whether or not it’s all a joke. Another one of Williams’ self-penned liner notes read: “Without any formal training, I woke up one morning to discover that I was a genius. I owe all of my present success to a very dear person, someone who stuck by me when things were really bad and has never made a motion to harm me or my talents in any way, a person I love, worship, and admire without any shadow of a doubt...me!” He reviewed his 1973 follow-up as “funky enough to gag a maggot and drown a drop. No telling what it’ll do to your funky ass.” Williams simply thought that there was no one better for the job than himself. “Publicists don’t know shit about you,” he reasoned. “Records aren’t long enough to say all the things I want to say and give you enough Swamp Dogg wallowing in the music.”

This isn’t to say that all his tounge-in-cheek songwriting comes at the expense of more serious undertakings. Some songs are drowning in the kind of heartbreak that you’d expect from his more traditional contemporaries, with lines like: “There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all his money goes / Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.” On 2019’s Love, Loss, & Autotune (featuring Justin Vernon of Bon Iver) he hums: “I’ll pretend when I visit our old friends that you’re sitting down by my side / And when our old friends ask how am I doing? I’ll pretend I’m not losing my mind.” Williams’ innate ability to walk the line between laughter and tears has resulted in an enthralling and unpredictable curve throughout his 50-years-long discography.

TOTAL DESTRUCTION TO YOUR MIND That said, his seminal masterpiece remains the 1970 debut Total Destruction To Your Mind, a unanimous jumping-off point for psychedelic soul enthusiasts. On its cover, he’s sitting on the back of some kind of garbage truck while reading a book in a tin foil hat. The title track opens with an ambush of wah-wah guitars and organs backed by high-energy drums and roaring horns. In “Synthetic World” he sings: “Hey you, I’m up from the bayou / You could say that I’m country / What’s real has become a freak...” Such lonerism permeates the record in that perspective of an outsider looking in on a world to which he’s become misfit. “Another day has come and gone in a world where I don’t belong,” he wails on “I Was Born Blue.” “Why wasn’t I born with orange skin and green hair

like the rest of the people in the world?” Fleshed out with a cover of Bobby Goldsboro’s “The World Beyond” and more songs cowritten with Gary U.S. Bonds, the album’s 12 tracks combined play out like some kind of underground What’s Going On, a self-produced counterpoint to what popular soul music could tolerate. While it’s been reissued in several countries and on several formats over the years, playable copies of the original pressing average between $50-$100 when available.

Without a doubt, Williams made the most of every decade, utilizing swampy horn sections, disco drum machines, electronic autotune, country western acoustics, or whatever new forms of music-making came along with the times. Somehow, he found a way to make them sound identifiably “Swamp Dogg” all the while. – I never felt like I had to keep up with the times,” he reflects. “I’ve gone into record stores and seen my albums in the comedy section. People come up to me after shows to tell me that I should be a stand up comedian, and I think, ‘What, didn’t you like my set?’ I’m not trying to be funny, it just turns out that way.” 2020’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It capped his journey thus far with a slight return to the country soul and blues roots where it all began. This was the first time he let someone else produce the record. – I’m just cooporating my ass off here,” he laughs.

In a funereal duet with longtime friend and collaborator John Prine released just before his death this year, they croon in turns: “Memories don’t leave like people do / And that’s why anytime, anywhere, I can still be with you…” Call him whoever you want to, Little Jerry, Mr. Williams, or simply the Swamp Dogg, he remains uncuffed, untagged, uncollared, and dedicated as ever to destroying your mind. – If I could go back, I’d tell Little Jerry to try and understand the song he’s singing, Williams admonished. – Sing each line as if it’s real. And the ones that are real, be sure to keep them that way.