Swamp Dogg is a workhorse. The mercurial musician and producer, born Jerry Williams Jr., began his all-but-auspicious career at age 12 under the moniker Little Jerry Williams. He found modest success singing formidable but over-the-plate R&B tunes up and down the East Coast, eventually shaking enough hands to write and produce songs for acts like Patti LaBelle, Doris Duke, and The Commodores. That CV is nothing to sneeze at, but Little Jerry’s solo act was growing stagnant. Then, something clicked. After an LSD trip that would at times threaten to unravel him, Williams realized he needed an alter ego to house his mischievous, cosmic ambitions: Swamp Dogg was born. “A Dogg can get away with anything,” Swamp tells Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson, directors of Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted. He may be right.
Swamp Dogg’s reinvention unleashed him to pursue whatever genre, gag, or whim caught his eye, so it’s only fitting that a film that found him as its subject would eschew traditional rock-doc scaffolding. Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is as breezy and cockeyed as its title suggests: it follows Swamp and his bandmates around his shady ranch home in Northridge, Los Angeles, as he oversees the renovation of his pool ahead of his 80th birthday party. The documentary switches gears as playfully as Swamp changes genres. It opens with and is punctuated by spoken-word renditions of Swamp Dogg songs; stripped from Swamp’s buoyant musicianship, they function more as Talmudic, THC-laden proverbs. Standard biopic table-setting loses its ground to punchlines and phone calls as quickly as it gets going. MoogStar (born Larry Clemons), Swamp’s funkadelic savant pinch hitter, receives a story arc by way of Scooby Doo cutaway. If Tom Kenny or Johnny Knoxville stop by the pool to shoot the shit, all the better for it.
Between the gags and head trips, Gale and Olson work stealthily to weave in enough biography to provide a decent, if not comprehensive, idea of Swamp Dogg’s life and career. After his third-eye rebirth, Swamp’s canvas unfurled beyond the horizons, and he used that newfound sense of freedom to expand his palate to include everything from rock to funk to psychedelia to bluegrass. Country music, an early fascination from his childhood, proved to be especially fertile ground, and Swamp scored a #2 hit on the country charts when Johnny Paycheck recorded “She’s All I Got,” a song Swamp had written for Freddie North. Swamp Dogg made regular appearances on TV, from local access to Politically Incorrect to People’s Court. He helped launch the career of Alonzo Williams, and, by proxy, Dr. Dre. He cut tracks with John Prine, was name-checked by Snoop Dogg, and made a shocking profit by producing a Beatles cover album composed exclusively of dog barks. It amounts to a once-an-eternity, unbelievable career, and Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted seems less hung up on whether you buy it or not than if you can catch the vibe.
Gale and Olson are perhaps better known as members of the Minneapolis avant-garde percussion collective Marijuana Deathsquads, a group whose polygenic dogma and back-of-the-classroom impishness provide easy shorthand for an oeuvre as giddy and sprawling as Swamp Dogg’s. Pool Painted marks their first foray into film, but the jump in medium isn’t especially surprising. Gale, who holds a film degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, shoots and cuts Deathsquads’ videos with the same caffeinated whiplash that characterizes his feature debut, and Olson worked with Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon to produce Swamp Dogg’s 2018 renaissance album, Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune. Swamp Dogg is a musician’s musician, the kind of act you learn about when your favorite artist names Rat On! as their favorite album. It stands to reason that his fellow working musicians, prolific in everything but notoriety, should tell his story.
Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is accordingly a work of admiration. The doc isn’t quite hagiographic, but it’s hard to walk away with any sense of Swamp Dogg that decries his character. Swamp had opened his home to house his bandmates, the psilocybic MoogStar and Guitar Shorty (born David Kearny), an affable and aging blues veteran, free of rent. Swamp’s daughter, Jeri, now an accomplished neurologist, gushes over her father in talking-head interviews and wonders whether his career might have seen more traction had he not put family first, trading national tours for backyard cookouts and middle school graduation ceremonies. The documentary is a glimpse of a man quick to cut you down with a dirty joke but quicker to cook you up a meal while you dangle your feet in his pool, someone who keeps the curiosity of adolescence burning across a 70-year career that never quite saw a hit.
Even the most far-out rock doc is unimmune to tragedy, and for all its levity, Pool Painted doesn’t shy away from the darkness. MoogStar all but drops the act when Guitar Shorty passes away in the middle of production (on 4/20, no less), and Swamp Dogg is brutally candid about the fallout that LSD took against his mental health and the pain he still harbors over the death of his wife and manager, Yvonne Williams. But the documentary and musician alike recognize death and suffering as just another chord in the cosmos, and neither are content to narrow their output to the blues. Through it all, Swamp Dogg always manages to circle back to a mantra that has kept his career singular across centuries: “Overall, just be cool. And… it’s all so fun being yourself. That’s fun like a motherfucker. But you gotta find yourself.”
DIRECTOR: Ryan Olson & Isaac Gale; CAST: Swamp Dogg; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: May 2; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
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