Showing posts with label Jerry Williams. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jerry Williams. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction To Your Mind

Jerry Williams, Jr. (born 12 July 1942) is an American soul music artist who is better known by his pseudonym Swamp Dogg.

Okay, that is the short info line....now...how do we even begin to discuss the Swamp Dogg?? A genuine southern funk/soul genius? Yeah, I'll buy that --- crazed, angry, funny, sweet, and funky as a mutha...--- Yeah, all that too --- a bizarre-ass blend of Zappa, Clarence Clemmons and Sly? --- that works as far as it goes --- a political poet ala Gil Scott-Heron? -- sometimes THAT too, Starting to get curious? -- a nearly unknown soul artist who nonetheless found his way onto the Nixon enemies list and somehow lives in a mansion with his own limo? Oh Hell Yes! All of this and much more is waiting for you when you board the Swamp Dogg mystery tour! 

The AMG bio for this guy is good, but too long so I'm just using the first half for now...

"Raunchy, satirical, political, and profane, Swamp Dogg is one of the great cult figures of 20th century American music. The creation of Jerry Williams, Jr., an R&B producer and songwriter of the '60s, Swamp Dogg fit no tidy category. In sheer musical terms, Swamp Dogg is pure Southern soul, anchored on tight grooves and accentuated by horns, but the Dogg is as much about message as music. Williams incorporated all the mind-bending psychedelic ideas of '60s counterculture -- drugs, sex, radical politics, social politics -- into the framework of deep soul, establishing his blueprint on 1970's Total Destruction to Your Mind, then spinning out variations over the next several decades, never having hits (although Total Destruction to Your Mind apparently went gold at some point), but earning a rabid cult following while raking in royalties through his behind-the-scenes work, which included penning the country standard "She's All I Got," popularized by Johnny Paycheck.A native of Virginia, Williams began his career recording under the name Little Jerry, releasing a jump blues single called "HTD Blues" in 1954 when he was just 12 years old. For the next decade-and-a-half, he was an R&B journeyman working under the name Little Jerry Williams in the early '60s, then leaving the "little" behind in the mid-'60s, having a minor hit in 1966 with "Baby, You're My Everything." By that point, Williams had made serious inroads into the industry. He was working A&R and he was writing and producing singles, usually for unknown artists but occasionally for big names like Gene Pitney. Eventually, he earned the attention of Jerry Wexler and Phil Walden and began working behind the scenes at Atlantic Records in 1968, engineering and producing singles for the label. He also worked as a writer, and as the decade came to a close, he had written "She's All I Got" with Gary "U.S." Bonds, a song that wound up bringing him royalties for decades.Also at the end of the '60s came Williams' first LSD trip and, with it, a properly blown mind that led him to create Swamp Dogg. Inspired by Frank Zappa's satire and politics but determined to still sing soul, Williams' Swamp Dogg was filthy and political, wrapped up in a cheerfully vulgar package...quite literally so, as he's seen sitting in his underwear on a pile of garbage on his 1970 debut, Total Destruction to Your Mind. All of Williams' studio skills are on display on Total Destruction -- the grooves are tight, not sloppy, the songs precisely written -- and although what he was singing about was firmly outside the mainstream, his deep southern soul sounded commercial, so it became an underground hit...." AMG, Stephen Thoms Erlewine