Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson’s Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is not generally the type of “important” documentary that wins awards, but it is a rare bird indeed: a film that lets its subject be its voice and aesthetic, resulting in a lean 97 minutes that feel natural and satisfying and, most importantly for this artist, delightfully weird.
With Swamp Dogg there seems to be no middle ground between “Who?!?” and “Swamp Dogg is the BEST!!!”, though perhaps Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted will warm some hearts in that space.
Swamp Dogg has become a musical cult icon solely by an amazing coincidence of proximity to fame dating back to his first recorded song in 1954. In the intervening 70 years he has been signed to, recorded for or held executive positions at maybe dozens of labels. He has written or performed in every genre imaginable and practiced his craft in every musical hotbed across the country. He’s an unheralded hip-hop pioneer as one of the founding members of World Class Wreckin’ CRU. He started his own label (and sold tens of thousands of copies of Beatles covers recorded by dogs). He was a featured performer on Jane Fonda’s anti-war Free the Army Tour. He is 81 years old and it was just announced this week that he has another new album on the way.
At some point Swamp Dogg was rich — he reflects on his fleet of unnecessary cars — but now lives in “Somewhere in The Valley” in what appears to be a comfortable if not exactly opulent ranch-style house. From garage to room after room, the house is filled with artifacts from adjacency-to-fame-outsideness: gold records; platinum records; boxes upon boxes of memorabilia; a vintage Wurlitzer.
The house is also filled with roommates who are lifelong musicians like Swamp Dogg, who have spent their careers in close proximity to celebrity one way or another. Guitar Shorty spent his own seven decades on the road gigging with some of the biggest names in rock and blues and R&B, influencing better-known legends along the way and even winning an episode of The Gong Show. Moogstar is even less of a household name than that, but he definitely got called up to the stage during the taping of Mark Curry’s comedy special The Other Side.
Swamp Dogg did not charge them rent. They were just three men who, when they were not on the road together or separately, would use the home’s various recording facilities or just hang out around the swimming pool shooting the shit.
The Bachelor Pad for Musicians. Aging Musicians, according to Jeri’s daughter (not “Dogg” as her last name is).
This is a variation of fame that only exists in the outer rings of Los Angeles, and it’s completely real — though as a Mark Twain quotation at the start of the documentary says, “The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.”
By the time Swamp Dogg himself compares an aging soul singer from Los Angeles to Twain in its closing moments, it has earned that comparison. A natural raconteur who can’t help but tell Gonzo-like tales about growing up in Virginia or falling under the tutelage of Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman, Swamp Dogg captures what Gale called a “weird corner of America” — and also a homespun philosophy: “Just be cool overall. You know? And it’s so much fun being yourself. That’s fun as hell. But you gotta find yourself.”
Swamp Dogg has a cluttered house and Gale and Olson had a cluttered life making this movie; they let clutter be their guiding principle throughout this thing. Sometimes Swamp Dogg’s memories are conveyed through slightly animated photos and television appearances — he seems like he was made for public access TV — but just as often, the doc veers into parodied infomercials or, in one case an elaborate Moogstar tall tale, makes use of a vintage Scooby-Doo cartoon.
In lieu of regular talking-head sections with subject matter experts or music critics pontificating about Jerry Williams Jr.’s catalog, we mostly just get Swamp Dogg sitting by his pool chattering with Moogstar and Guitar Shorty. And when they sense that we need different energy out them, Gale and Olson bring in recognizable admirers like Spongebob Squarepants voice actor Tom Kenny or Johnny Knoxville or…are Kenny and Knoxville actually Swamp Dogg’s friends or neighbors? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. But the idea that Spongebob and the guy from Jackass would have been orbiting him is, yes, credible.
It’s all held together with psychedelic “character” introductions and titles, font choices that will offend design purists and feel true to what this thing is.
Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted — the painting of which is one of several milestones, happy and sad, in this film — is good for a couple laughs, maybe some tears and at least proximity-to-profundity reflection.
Whether you know Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams when it starts or not, it seems like pretty much exactly the spotlight he deserves.
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