Swamp Dogg - Swamp Dogg

I’ve had this album filed under ‘shite’ in my mind for years – my memory of it is that it was full of terrible disco. (Now, I love a bit of disco as much as the next man - more probably – but terrible disco is indeed terrible), so it probably hasn’t been put on a turntable for twenty years. Until today, when I thought I’d give it another whirl.

This came out in 1982, by which time Black American dance music had moved on from the classic disco sound towards what would become known as post-disco or boogie. Not for Swamp Dogg though. Oh no. This album is largely made up of attempts at the classic disco sound, none of which really hit the mark, despite employing every disco cliché in the big glittery book. Here’s the kicker, though – even listening to it with retro ears, it sounds sub-par, both from a disco perspective and from a Swamp Dogg one.

The exception is the first track, the only one which follows more usual Swamp Dogg country-soul lines.

It's back on to the shelf for this one.

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Swamp Dogg - Rat On!

I like a record that seethes with anger. Swamp Dogg is an artist who, despite his often clownish persona, has a foundation of rage, and – when that breaks through – he seethes so well.

This album, for example, is more famous for it’s sleeve, which always features in those worst record sleeve lists. However, it contains God Bless America For What – a song so simmering with rage, it's breathtaking. There’s no ambiguity about this one – no-one’s mistakenly singing along with this one at MAGA rallies. It’s a lyric that got him (what we would now call) shadow-banned by his record label and sued by the Irving Berlin Foundation – all grist to the Swamp Dogg anger mill.

Rat On! is probably the quintessential Swamp Dogg album: it sits right at the intersection of soul, blues, rock and country, has songs about complicated personal entanglements, race, politics, a perfect cover version (The Bee-Gees’ Got To Get A Message To You), some kind of self-aggrandising statement in the sleeve notes, and an eccentric cover.

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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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