The debut Swamp Dogg record, Total Destruction To Your Mind, has also been reissued. 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. 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. 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. OFF THE RACK (online music site) – Positive album mention with cover artįor 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 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. 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. Part of what has made Williams an underground legend is his capacity for explosively soulful unpredictability. 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. WORLD MAGAZINE (Christian bi-weekly news magazine) – Positive CD review in Notable CDsīecause 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.
I mean, check it out: He’s snarling, shouting and smirking over a hot, hard-driving boogie. 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 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). NASHVILLE SCENE (Nashville weekly) – Best Local Rock Songs Ever, Part 17 “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. (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. 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.
Later in 1995 on Tha Dogg Pound’s multi-platinum debut album, Dogg Food, Kurupt replies on “Dogg Pound Gangstaz” with “Ain’t no harming me / Ain’t got no love for no Hoes-N-Harmony.”īut Kurupt says that it's all in the past and that he's become best friends with Layzie Bone.SPIN MAGAZINE – Bigger Than Jesus: 25 Rock Deities, Rap Messiahs, and Would-Be Golden Gods #22 Swamp Dogg 1999 Eternal, targeting the Death Row-artists with “Follow me / Roll, stroll down East '99 / Gotta find these Row hoes.” Layzie Bone followed one song later on “Shotz To The Double Glock” with “Niggas don’t take a wrong turn or you’ll enter the hood / Wig splitters will cover your dome / In a cut where the thugs and hustlas roam / Cleveland Browns / Dogg Pound hoes it’s on.”
Krayzie Bone took aim on “Mo Murda” off of Bone’s 1995 Grammy-winning album, E. We guess collaborative albums are just the thing to do now for acts who are legends in their own right but haven't dropped a hit in years, which would explain last year's Wu-Block album which matched Ghostface Killah and Sheek Louch.ĭuring the interview, Kurupt also spoke on the long forgotten beef between Bone and Tha Dogg Pound. "Snoop, Daz, myself, Soopafly, Krayzie, Wish, Bizzy, , Layzie, the whole ball of wax. “Right now we’re fixing to be working on a Thug Pound album with all of Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and all of Dogg Pound,” said Kurupt. In an interview with HHDX, Kurupt claimed that Tha Dogg Pound are actually working on an album with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.