Image via MSP Film
Staley Sharples’ Letterboxd page will receive its own documentary one day.
Swamp Dogg is one of the last true 20th Century American originals still standing, an eccentric and eclectic soulman long overlooked for his major contributions to R&B, folk, and country. But with the documentary, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, the strange 60-year journey and complex genius of Jerry Williams Jr., has finally been captured in the right light.
Filmed over the course of seven years, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is framed within the playful absurdity that defines the musician, writer, producer, record label owner, music manager, father, and now, documentary star. Directors Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale are intimately familiar with their subject, having connected during the making of Swamp’s acclaimed 2018 album Love, Loss, and Autotune. Olsen provided additional production on the project, and brought Gale in to shoot a music video for Swamp.
Upon discovering the interdimensional portal that is Swamp Dogg’s house, the decision to document Dogg, along with his live-in found family Moogstar and the late Guitar Shorty, was an instinctive decision for the filmmakers and their Marijuana Deathsquads bandmates. Gale puts it simply: “once you go to the house, you never want to leave.” Immersed in an alternate reality powered by brightly-lit TVs (Swamp Dogg loves television sets) and “a fleet of unnecessary automobiles” (which reached a total of nine at the collection’s peak), Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is a portrait of Swamp Dogg at his most unexpected and unfiltered.
Claiming himself to be the original “dogg” of the music industry, Jerry Williams Jr. reasoned that a dog can “get away with stuff,” which reflects the security that the Swamp Dogg persona has brought to his wild, uncharted path to self-discovery. Swamp Dogg was born only after years of writing and performing music during the 1950s and 1960s. Originally known to the world as Little Jerry Williams – a name that the musician would later label “too soft”— he first found success with hits like “I’m The Lover Man”, which he originally penned for Frankie Valli.
At the height of the song’s popularity in 1964, a Vermont nightclub promoter booked Williams to perform before an audience of screaming fans. Following the set, the promoter pulled him aside to tell him that he hadn’t realized Williams was Black before inviting him. Experiences like this birthed Swamp Dogg, Williams’s “ass kicker” who could protect his deep sensitivity and curiosity while boosting his bravado and magnetic weirdness. With a cup of coffee in hand by his “dry, dilapidated pool,” Williams peers deep into the heart of this alter ego. A pivotal scene in the documentary finds him wryly musing, “what Swamp Dogg truly was about was being somebody else while I looked for Jerry Williams, cause I had lost him somewhere along the line.”
Williams’s self-doubt and anxiety is part of what makes his work so relatable. Despite the tough-guy, swaggering exterior, the Virginia native has struggled with debilitating panic attacks throughout his life, stemming from the personal pressure to ensure that those around him were taken care of. Suffering from what felt like “five heart attacks a day,” Swamp Dogg was once “taking Zoloft like you eat M&Ms.” Although in the documentary, he claims that a small amount of acid was able to do wonders for his mental health.
It was the 1970s when Swamp Dogg “did all [his] crazy shit.” Prior to his 1972 reception in the country music mecca of Nashville in 1972, Swamp Dogg landed himself on the FBI’s watchlist for his involvement in Vietnam war protest group FTA (popularized by Jane Fonda.) He toured military bases and played controversial songs like “God Bless America For What.” According to Swamp, the United States Government viewed his “acts of resilience” as “acts of defiance” and targeted him. The conflict caused him to be dropped from Elektra Records for defying the conventional expectations of recording artists at the time. In translation, he did whatever the hell he wanted.
Despite the challenges, Williams never backed down in the face of adversity or absurdity. With the birth of the Swamp Dogg moniker came a torrent of too-crazy-to-be-true occurrences and business ventures. Aided by his beloved late wife Yvonne, the pair launched the SDEG (Swamp Dogg Entertainment Group), which nurtured the careers of the World Class Wrecking Crew and its members Dr Dre, Yella, and Alonzo Williams. The label’s most profitable release was Beatle Barkers, which featured covers of Beatles songs as performed by dogs, sheep, and other animals. Their most loyal buyer was a pet supply store in Spain, which purchased 30,000 cassette tape copies.
Swamp Dogg wrote hits for Gene Pitney, Tanya Tucker, and Conway Twitty, He racked up gold and platinum records, and a country crossover with the smash hit “Don’t Take Her, She’s All I Got.” He’s been sampled by Kid Rock and collaborated with Bon Iver and John Prine. Throughout it all, he’s never stopped making music.
In Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted, directors Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale capture the give-no-fucks essence of one of the great cult figures of American music. In these later decades of his life Swamp Dogg still finds himself looking for Jerry Williams, Jr.. He connects the most with bluegrass because to him, it encapsulates the human experience.
With the passing of his wife and his close friend Guitar Shorty, the next chapter is on Swamp Dogg’s mind. “If I’m lucky I got 20 more years here, but who gets lucky, you know?” he says in the film. “I got some stuff I want to leave for people to hear and know what I was about.”
His latest album, Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street, is a poignant encapsulation of the artist’s current mindset. In the search for himself, Swamp Dogg has released 26 full-length albums, produced and written countless hit singles, and changed the course of music history with his gonzo-style tongue-in-cheek approach to the classic Southern soul. Swamp Dogg’s philosophy is short and sweet: ”It’s fun being yourself, but you gotta find yourself.”
As it continues to screen at film festivals across America, I spoke with Ryan Olsen and Isaac Gale about the making of Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted.
How did you two start working together and how did that coalesce into this project with Swamp Dogg?
Isaac Gale: We’ve been working together for around 20-plus years on music. We had a hardcore band in Minneapolis together, and then that morphed into a project that we still do called Marijuana Deathsquads. It’s kind of an experimental music thing that sometimes looks like a band. Ryan produces a lot of music.
Ryan Olsen: I ended up producing an album for Swamp, and then had Isaac come out to shoot a music video at [Swamp Dogg’s] house. That’s when we discovered the house, and the roommates, and the whole thing. Isaac was like, we should document these guys and hang out here as much as possible, and that’s what we did for the past seven years, basically.
Isaac Gale: Once you go to the house, you never want to leave.
I can imagine. Swamp Dogg just has so many stories, and they’re really quirky, fun stories. With all the amazing things that he’s done in his life, how did you make the editing decisions to create that narrative? Is there anything that got cut that you wish that you could have included?
Isaac Gale: There’s a lot on the cutting room floor because like you said, he’s got infinite amounts of entertaining and amusing and hilarious stories.
We were editing over the course of two years and working on the project for seven. The main anchor points of the story we had an idea of early on. It was really modular. Everything [he shared] is a good story.
Ryan Olsen: There seemed to always be a call and response to everything we tried to put in there. Usually it’s [a moment] connected to something else. All of this found its own balance. There are tons of different stories and tons of different types of stories to tell with it, but this seemed to be the one that made the most amount of poetic sense.
Isaac Gale: Thinking of it, everything kind of loops in the movie so that it could be hopefully rewatchable, and still fun, and funny. That’s what happened to us watching a movie come together for seven years straight. The stuff that’s in there is the stuff that, after seven years of watching this thing over and over and over every day, is here because it’s still funny to us, or dramatic, or poignant.
You’re both musicians, but this is also your first full-length documentary feature. Where do you feel like the creative process as a musician overlaps with the creative process of being a filmmaker? I’m also curious as to what drew you to profiling another musician, beyond the obvious of Swamp Dogg being crazy and amazing?
Isaac Gale: I’ve done a ton of music videos, short docs, and experimental things—I’ve always felt like an artist who uses music and film as a medium. I don’t have ideas that are like, classic Hollywood films or whatever. That’s me specifically.
Sound and music are so incredibly important to any movie. We couldn’t wait to get into the sound design and the sound mixing and the music. Nothing feels better when you find a really good needle drop at a point in the movie.
Ryan Olsen: I do lots and lots of music all the time, so it was really nice to flex a different part of my brain. They’re very similar, for sure. It’s just nice to use a different piece of software.
Isaac Gale: Yeah, totally. You have this fully separate component that’s combining with the sound to lead to some other direction.
Eric Friend, who we mixed with in Texas, does a lot of Mike Judge’s cartoons. He had a sound effects library that was so fun for us to dip into. It’s just something you don’t get to do every day when you work in music.
What are the wackiest sound effects you used in the movie?
Isaac Gale: We added little baby steps at the pool when Jesse the pool painter runs to dive in. That was pretty fun.
I’ve already watched the movie twice, but like you said, there’s so much detail hidden within it. The jokes get funnier every time I watch it. It hits even deeper, because you feel like you’re just hanging out with these guys.
Isaac Gale: That’s what we were trying to do, is just make a thing that would be fun to hang out with these dudes over and over. Swamp himself, when you talk to him, you might not realize it, but he’s always leading you into some kind of setup for an amazing punchline. And he drops it when you don’t expect it. You realize that he’s been thinking about it for a minute, from the beginning of the conversation. Hopefully some of that happens in the movie.
Ryan Olsen: Unless he completely forgets his train of thought.
Isaac Gale: Or he completely forgets what he’s talking about, and the movie leans into that too.
Even when he does forget, he’s still just so cool about it. Nothing can phase him.
Isaac Gale: He’s a master of that. He’s also a master of pretending, or maybe not knowing your name, where you can’t tell if he can’t remember your name or if that’s him setting you up.
Ryan Olsen: Yeah, he called us Randy and Edgar.
Isaac Gale: Yeah, for the first couple years we were Randy and Edgar.
Do you think you would collaborate with Swamp Dogg on any future projects? Are you working on any music together, or is the Swamp Dogg chapter closed for now?
Isaac Gale: I think we’re now tied to these guys for life. There’s a new album that Ryan produced, it’s called Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street. That’s like Swamp’s bluegrass album. It’s amazing. Some of the footage [of the making of the album] is in the movie. We’re family with these guys.
Ryan Olsen: We’re pretty tied. He’s always talking about working on something. Right now, he’s working on a funk album. We’re definitely not done with Swamp Dogg
Isaac Gale: We’d love to figure out how to help get his music out there further. Hopefully this movie does that.
I already ordered Rat On vinyl.
Isaac Gale: That’s a good one. Total Destruction’s a great album.
Ryan Olsen: Gag A Maggott’s amazing.
I need all of them. All the music you featured in the film is so good. The segment on his writing credits highlighted how influential he is to popular music across all genres. What was that process like for you, digging into Swamp’s history and accolades as an artist?
Ryan Olsen: We learned it on camera, really.
Isaac Gale: Yeah, we went in to shoot a music video. Ryan had produced his new album, Love, Loss, and Autotune, back in 2017. That was where the genesis of the whole movie happened, but also where we really met those guys and experienced them, and [we] never wanted to stop hanging out. So we went into it not knowing very much about Swamp, and knowing nothing about Moogstar and Guitar Shorty. The experience and the process of figuring all that out is what really kept it super interesting and kept us wanting to keep going, cause you just keep discovering more and more. Years into it, Swamp reached under his bed and pulled out all this archival stuff that we’d never seen, and suddenly we had a whole new angle for the movie. We had all these photos that we had never seen before.
Ryan Olsen: It really tied a lot of the stories [together]. If anyone is a Guitar Shorty fan, they probably know the lore of how he gave Jimi Hendrix his first wah pedal, but we don’t even touch that in the movie. There’s a lot of facts about these guys—that wasn’t really what we were trying to focus on.
Isaac Gale: There’s a lot of music nerd stuff about that. They’re so deeply tied into the world. If you’re not into that scene, you might not hear about them, but hopefully there’s enough clues in this movie that if people are interested in digging more into the music, they’ll definitely find out some super wild facts.
I really love the fact that this is like a hangout movie in some ways, but with so much detail around these really incredible moments. For all the highs there are very emotional moments as well. The film is a great jumping off point for someone like me who wants to know more about these artists.
We were editing over the course of two years and working on the project for seven. The main anchor points of the story we had an idea of early on. It was really modular. Everything [he shared] is a good story.
Sound and music are so incredibly important to any movie. We couldn’t wait to get into the sound design and the sound mixing and the music. Nothing feels better when you find a really good needle drop at a point in the movie.
Eric Friend, who we mixed with in Texas, does a lot of Mike Judge’s cartoons. He had a sound effects library that was so fun for us to dip into. It’s just something you don’t get to do every day when you work in music.
Isaac Gale: They’re genius. They’re clearly stars in front of the camera. I’m glad that it works on people who are coming in without knowing anything about them, and hopefully it also works on people that aren’t huge music fans in general, but love watching cool people do cool stuff.
