Swamp Dogg - Cuffed, Collared & Tagged

I have a few Swamp Dogg records. I reckon I got into him in the late eighties by picking up the Total Destruction To Your Mind LP secondhand because I liked the bonkers sleeve and I was hooked from there.

There’s a lot to like about Swamp Dogg: his barely-contained anger at politics, racism, the music business, and anyone else whom he believes has wronged him; he wears his heart on his sleeve; he is an unbridled eccentric, with total faith in his own genius.

To be fair, he is a prolific songwriter of some aplomb. When you hear one of his songs sung by someone else, you know it. On balance, he’s also made some shite.

This was his third album, released in 1972. It contains covers of John Prine’s Vietnam War veteran’s lament, Sam Stone,The Beatles’ Lady Madonna and Joe South’s Don’t It Make You Wanta Go Home. Musically, it falls in between the southern soul and country rock stools. It has a cast of thousands playing on this album (including the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, for Christ’s sake), showing that someone (still) saw some commercial value in all this and was willing to chuck dollars at him.

This is a US promo, which – according the the price written in marker pen on the front, had found itself in a 50c bin. I must’ve bought this off Discogs.

In an interesting indication of how times have changed since 1972, the ‘suggested cuts for air play’ sticker on the front lists Your Last Dirty Trick, a song where the protagonist commits intimate partner murder, going into more detail than is probably necessary, and doesn’t feel at all bad about it because, even though he’s now doing porridge, at least he’s no longer concerned whether the victim will late home. Interesting that you can go from railing against violence committed against soldiers of an invading army (albeit one disproportionately made up of black and working class men) and reveling in the violence committed against women in six short songs. It was a different age.

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