Latest news with #MuscleShoals
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Swamp Dogg, outsider artist who found his sound in Alabama, at center of new documentary playing in Birmingham
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) — In 1969, Jerry Williams Jr. was working with a group called C & The Shells, writing a song for them called 'You are the Circus.' Williams, who had been singing and writing music professionally since he was 12 years old, had been a producer at Atlantic Records for several years at that point and had gone back and forth through Muscle Shoals to work with different artists, from Doris Duke to Duane Allman and many others. With C & The Shells, 'You are the Circus' became a hit pretty quickly, selling 30,000 copies in Chicago in its first week. That's when a local DJ called the record label about an issue with one of the original lyrics: 'You don't seem to give a damn about me at all.' 'Somebody in Chicago started complaining, saying they didn't like that word,' Williams said from his home in Los Angeles. 'They didn't like damn. Atlantic called me back.' Williams said the disc jockey, whom he didn't name but said pulled a lot of weight in the music business, got his way, with Atlantic telling Williams to take 'damn' out of the lyrics. Williams then tweaked it to 'You don't seem to care about me at all.' 'We didn't sell 30,000 more,' he said. For Williams, that moment was one of several where he felt burnt out by the music business, constantly trying to compromise himself. The way he describes it, he had had enough. Before long, Williams decided he needed a change. Taking what he learned from Muscle Shoals, he took on a new name, Swamp Dogg, and set out to make the music he wanted, no matter how raunchy or noncommercial it seemed. Williams is the focus of a new documentary, 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,' which will premiere at the Sidewalk Film Center this Friday and play through the weekend. The documentary tells the story of Williams, his career, and how he found an audience through his uncompromising music. For Williams, his time in Muscle Shoals informed his sense of self to the point that many critics would later describe his sound, as heard on his debut album 'Total Destruction of Your Mind,' as a 'post-apocalyptic take on the Muscle Shoals' sound.' 'That's where I got my Phd for soul and country music,' he said. 'I learned more about what I was doing and started understanding where I was going and had visions of how I would get there.' As Swamp Dogg, Williams' muse often orbits around the subjects of sex and scatological humor, with a litany of racial epithets and swear words peppered through. At 82, Williams said there were times in his career where he questioned whether or not he was doing the right thing, whether he was putting himself out of work by not doing what others were. So far, it seems to be paying off. 'I'm not going to let anybody dictate what I have to say in my songs because that's what they are: my songs,' he said. With the gamble, Williams' work has received critical praise over the years, receiving glowing reviews in Rolling Stone and NPR. Many of his songs have been covered by mainstream artists, such as the Grateful Dead, Kid Rock, the Isley Brothers and Santana. Contemporary entertainers such as Johnny Knoxville of 'Jackass,' who is seen in the documentary, credit Williams as an influence as well. Williams' last album, 'Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th St.,' is more of a country album, but has been received well in that community, too. 'As music changed, I changed with it, but on my own terms,' he said. 'I don't copy people.' So what keeps Williams going all these years later? 'My mortgage,' Williams jokes. All these damn bills.' Click here for showtimes 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' will be playing at Sidewalk. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' Review: A Free-Spirited Music Doc as Delightfully Weird as Its Subject
At one point in the free-wheeling music documentary 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted,' the eccentric 82-year-old musician is asked to describe his philosophy on life. 'Just be cool, you know?,' Swamp Dogg says. 'And it's fun being yourself. That's fun like a motherfucker. But you gotta find yourself.' It's a fitting summary of a creative life lived exactly on his own terms. A cult figure in certain music circles, Jerry Williams Jr. rose to prominence in the '70s for his satirical Southern soul records that were equally likely to feature radical political messages or cover art of Williams inside a hot dog bun covered in ketchup and mustard. He adopted the Swamp Dogg moniker to separate his public persona from his previous career as a Muscle Shoals producer who churned out gold records for other artists, though he continued to be a force in the music industry as a record label founder and producer who backed Dr. Dre's first records. And he continues to innovate into his eighties, experimenting with autotune banjo music from his home studio and touring regularly. More from IndieWire Acting Is More Than Performance: The Stars of 'Sinners,' 'Nickel Boys,' and More Offer Guidance How Chilling Sound Design, POV Shots, and an Uncanny Creature Create a Cinema of Perception in 'April' But in Isaac Gale and Ryan Olson's new documentary, Swamp Dogg's life of achievements takes a backseat to a more pressing matter: getting his pool painted. In an unspecified location in the San Fernando Valley, Swamp Dogg lives in a suburban enclave of creativity. His house is filled with loving freeloaders, primarily musician friends like Guitar Shorty, who asked to crash with him at one point or another and ended up staying for decades. The house is a hotbed for jam sessions and barbecues, but Swamp Dogg thinks it's missing one thing. He wants a picture of himself riding a rodent painted on the bottom of his pool so that it can be seen from the sky. 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' begins with Swamp Dogg letting the pool painter into his backyard, but it quickly turns into a sprawling hang session featuring his housemates, neighbors like voice actor Tom Kenny, and his daughter. Swamp Dogg reminisces about his singular career, which eventually gives way to some obligatory archival footage, but the film is just as interested in celebrating the zest for life that the octogenarian currently enjoys. The result is a documentary that's as charmingly offbeat as its subject, whose greatest work of art might be the ridiculously fun existence he appears to be living out on a daily basis. Music documentaries have been almost irritatingly omnipresent in recent years, but 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' is a refreshing change of pace that should delight even the most genre-fatigued viewer. The film never takes itself too seriously, gleefully pausing mid-interview to show Swamp Dogg answering his phone and politely telling someone that he'll have to call them back because he's in the middle of shooting a documentary. It certainly benefits from the fact that its subject will be unknown to many viewers, which frees the filmmakers from the expectation of a hagiographic trip down memory lane and permits them to focus on whatever interests their subject at a given moment. Of course, the approach is only possible because the man getting his pool painted is so damn charismatic. At 82-years-old, Swamp Dogg doesn't look a day over 60, and he boasts a razor-sharp mind and an infectious appetite for all of life's weird pleasures. Watching him meander through his backyard, talking shit with his buddies, exploring new sounds, and dryly calling every inconvenience a 'motherfucker' is the kind of offbeat delight that I would have gladly watched for three more hours. Seeing his excitement that a manufacturer has revived the lost art of writing profane messages on socks or proudly show his daughter his sparkly new shoes is more interesting than anything in his recording career, and Gale and Olson wisely sit back and let the current Swamp Dogg absorb the spotlight. More than any individual song or album, the film seeks to encapsulate the Swamp Dogg vibe. Effortlessly cool, thrilled to be alive, and mildly entertained by just about everything, the man offers what appears to be the perfect blueprint to stay in 2025. We can't all be Swamp Dogg, but it's nice to know the world still contains heroes worth looking up to. I sure hope he enjoys his new pool. A Magnolia Pictures release, 'Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted' opens in select theaters on Friday, May 2. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
New York Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
What the Cult Singer Daniel Johnston Left Behind
Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village, is a working music museum. The Fender Twin amplifier that the studio's onetime owner Jimi Hendrix brought to work before his 1970 death remains, as does an electric piano Stevie Wonder used on an astounding run of records. There's a keyboard Bob Dylan played in Muscle Shoals and several lurid murals by the painter Lance Jost, originals depicting interstellar travel and Aquarian-age sexual exploration. But Lee Foster — the former intern who became the space's co-owner in 2010, after helping rescue it from financial ruin — keeps his drawings by the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston in a small safe in the corner of his office, each page bound in plastic in a lime-green three-ring binder. 'It has nothing to do with financial value,' Foster said in his art-lined room last month, as afternoon slipped into evening. 'It is so meaningful that, even if it was for that hour or three when he was sitting down to draw, it was all he was thinking about. There's a little bit of his soul in there.' Soon after Johnston's death in 2019, at 58, Foster became the unexpected custodian of Johnston's unexpectedly enormous art archive. His career hamstrung by bipolar disorder and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Johnston first found acclaim as an unguarded and guileless songwriter in the late '80s with tunes that cut instantly to the emotional quick. But he drew obsessively for more than half a century, too, creating a cosmos of characters — affable ghosts, flying eyeballs, his famously friendly frog, Jeremiah — that revealed his insecurities and hopes, sexual frustrations and religious aspirations. Foster estimates there may be 15,000 such pieces, many never seen beyond Johnston's family. 'I'm Afraid of What I Might Draw,' a book released in late April, is the first authoritative collection of Johnston's art and a revelation about how he experienced the world. 'He was not drawing these things to entertain us. He was drawing to entertain himself,' Dick Johnston, his older brother, said in a video interview from his home in Katy, Texas, frames and figurines of Daniel's art lining his bookshelves. 'He was real and earnest, and these are his moments in time. You get what an experience was for him.' Foster, 47, first learned of Johnston when Kurt Cobain began sporting a white T-shirt printed with the cover of his 1983 tape 'Hi, How Are You: The Unfinished Album.' He read about him in music magazines, too. Raised in rural Tennessee, however, Foster didn't have easy access to Johnston's records. The 2005 documentary 'The Devil and Daniel Johnston' — so candid about Johnston's struggles with mental illness and medication, plus assorted escapades with the circus and Sonic Youth — rekindled his interest. 'As a kid, one of my favorite things was 'Pee-Wee's Big Adventure,' and I always made that comparison,' Foster said. 'His life was stranger than fiction.' In the summer of 2019, Foster saw a Johnston drawing framed on a singer-songwriter's studio wall. He wondered how he might get one himself. (The reply — 'I send his family money all the time' — wasn't particularly helpful.) He found an illustration of a Kung Fu-trained Captain America on eBay for $900, then asked Johnston's family if he could visit and browse Johnston's other work. He arrived in November, two months after Johnston died and just after the family sold $500,000 of merch in mere weeks. Dick revealed box after box of drawings, and they waded through them together late into the night. 'After a while, you handle these pages, and they're just pages,' said Dick, 71. He began helping to manage his brother's career full-time in 2001 and became his guardian in 2012. 'But Lee was someone who could say, 'No, no, look at this one.' It had been a while since I had done that. It was a giddy sharing.' Foster recognized that, grief notwithstanding, Dick was now responsible for an overwhelming amount of material — 150 journals, thousands of hours of recorded songs and conversations, all those drawings. Dick has now digitized two-thirds of those tapes and is adding appropriate excerpts from them to reissues of his brother's albums. ('If we write a script for a movie,' he said, 'it's like he's already written it for us.') The rest reminded Foster of when he was faced with saving Electric Lady, with preserving an overwhelming legacy. He offered to help, first by delivering drawings Johnston had done of musicians like Cat Power and Elvis Costello to their subjects. He steadily became so obsessed with seeing and understanding all the work that, days before his 2024 wedding, he surrounded himself in Electric Lady's Studio A with Johnston's drawings, trying to tease out a page order for 'I'm Afraid of What I Might Draw.' He sent Dick a video. 'I said, 'Don't you have something else you need to be doing, son?'' Dick said, laughing. 'Man, he was committed.' In song, Johnston had an uncanny ability to capture complicated feelings with a few incisive lines, bleated sweetly over chords pounded or strummed. If 'Mind Movies' captures being forever uneasy with your own thoughts, 'True Love Will Find You in the End' is a bittersweet hymn about the pain of perseverance. He did the same with pen and paper. Surrounded by jeering demons, he appears catatonic in the sketch 'Alone Again Naturely.' Elsewhere, Satan looks up from a busty doodle, a Johnston favorite, to declare 'I Think I Draw I Am,' a wry moment of self-censure. In conversation, both Foster and Dick eventually discuss the same drawing, which now lives inside the safe at Electric Lady. Standing in a field of stumps as a half-dozen bats swoop in overhead, Johnston points toward a single sprout and grins. 'There is still hope!' he says. 'Isn't life a disaster and a train wreck? And here I am, and I climb out of it,' Dick said. 'You don't always know what your inner self is, but it reveals itself in your choices. Dan would hang onto that hope.'
Boston Globe
28-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
David Briggs, a music force in Alabama and Nashville, dies at 82
Advertisement The rhythm section at Fame, whose members also included Norbert Putnam on bass and Jerry Carrigan on drums, honed a down-home sound that, with its languid blend of country and soul, stood apart from the R&B coming out of Motown or Stax at the time. 'You Better Move On' attracted the attention of the Rolling Stones, who released their version of the song in 1964. (The Beatles had previously performed Alexander's 'Soldier of Love' on the BBC.) Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Briggs's other defining moment came when he, Putnam, and Carrigan moved to Nashville in late 1964 and began infusing country recordings with the understated, groove-rich variant of the Nashville Sound that became known as 'countrypolitan.' 'We brought along a more blues and pop-rock thing than what Nashville was doing at the time,' Putnam said in an interview. Advertisement He recalled that singer Ray Stevens, then a top arranger who worked in Muscle Shoals and Nashville, once said, 'You guys play the modern music better than the A-Team we have in Nashville.' Mr. Briggs would go on to play everything from the funky organ on Tony Joe White's 'Polk Salad Annie' to the pealing barroom piano on Conway Twitty's honky-tonk weeper 'The Image of Me.' He provided empathetic accompaniment on Sammi Smith's 'Help Me Make It Through the Night,' a No. 1 country and Top 10 pop hit in 1971, and Dolly Parton's 'Coat of Many Colors,' which was also a Top 10 country single that year. After just a few months in Nashville, Mr. Briggs had distinguished himself as one of the city's first-call studio keyboard players. He would go on to take part in hundreds of sessions a year into the 1980s. (An entirely different rhythm section, known as the Swampers, would take up the slack in Muscle Shoals, working with luminaries including Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, and Wilson Pickett.) David Paul Briggs was born March 16, 1943, in Killen, Ala., northeast of Muscle Shoals. He was the elder of two sons of James and Myrtle (Myrick) Briggs. His father was a letter carrier. Classically trained, Mr. Briggs began playing professionally as an adolescent. He worked in a local band called the Crunk Brothers and, through them, met Putnam and ultimately gained entree to session work at Fame. Mr. Briggs and Putnam played on Tommy Roe's chart-topping 1962 hit, 'Sheila,' and were members of his backing band when Roe was an opening act for the Beatles in their first US concert, in 1964. Advertisement Mr. Briggs, meanwhile, had begun writing songs and releasing the occasional record of his own as both a singer and keyboardist. One was a single produced by Owen Bradley, who urged him to move to Nashville in 1964 to do studio work. In 1966, Mr. Briggs joined Elvis Presley's TCB Band, a job he would keep, along with his session work, until Presley's death in 1977. In 1969, Mr. Briggs and Putnam opened Quadraphonic Sound, a much-in-demand studio that hosted projects by Neil Young, Dan Fogelberg, Jimmy Buffett, and the Jacksons. That year, Mr. Briggs joined Area Code 615, a supergroup of session musicians, including Putnam and guitarist Mac Gayden, who died this month. The band released a pair of albums of freewheeling country rock on Polydor Records. Mr. Briggs and Putnam also founded their own publishing company, Danor Music, which had success with No. 1 pop hits including Steve Winwood's 'Higher Love' and Whitney Houston's 'Didn't We Almost Have It All.' The two men sold Quadraphonic Sound in 1979, and Mr. Briggs opened another studio, House of David, three years later. The Blasters, Norah Jones, Bootsy Collins, and indie-rock band Yo La Tengo were among House of David's numerous clients, along with B.B. King, for whom Mr. Briggs wrote arrangements. In the 1970s and '80s, Mr. Briggs began writing and arranging (and sometimes singing) jingles for Coca-Cola, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and other products. In 1988, he became music director for the Country Music Association's annual television awards show, a position he held until 2001. Along with Putnam, Carrigan, and guitarist Terry Thompson, Mr. Briggs was inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in Nashville in 2019. He remained active as a musician and studio owner well into his 70s. Advertisement In addition to his brother, he leaves two sons, Darren and Gabriel, and a grandson. His marriage to Judy McLemore ended in divorce. Recalling the opening of Quadraphonic Sound in an interview for the National Association of Music Merchants' Oral History Program, Mr. Briggs said of his partnership with Putnam, 'We wanted a studio that was a little better than everywhere else we'd recorded.' He added: 'When we started, it was going to be a little demo studio, but then we started buying more expensive stuff. It just slowly, slowly grew and became this hot place.' This article originally appeared in
