Latest news with #SwampDogg
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Homewood Public Library hosting ‘Book-A-Que' event to kick off summer reading
HOMEWOOD, Ala. (WIAT) — The Homewood Public Library is hosting an event next week to kick off their teen and adult Summer Reading programs. On Friday, May 30, the library will 'Chalk the Block' and 'Book-a-Que.' This combined event includes food trucks and a chalk art contest that teens and adults can sign up for. The event will last from 5-8 p.m. Swamp Dogg, outsider artist who found his sound in Alabama, at center of new documentary playing in Birmingham Summer Reading lasts until August 3. You can register for the program at the event or on the Homewood Public Library's website. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Axios
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Your D.C. Weekend: Bourbon & Bluegrass, Greek festival
Get ready for a banjo-pickin', tumbler-swillin' good time: It's the annual Bourbon & Bluegrass festival this weekend. Why it matters: It's the 10th anniversary of what Washington City Paper's called "The Best Music Festival in D.C." Plus: Now that the Kingman Island Bluegrass & Folk Festival is no more, it's a good chance to get your bluegrass fix without leaving the city. State of play: The festival will take place Saturday and Sunday at President Lincoln's Cottage near Petworth. The artist Swamp Dogg will headline the event and play both days. The seminal R&B, funk and soul singer and musician's latest album was named one of the best country albums last year by NPR. The festival coincides with the D.C. showings of " Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted," a documentary about — yep — Swamp Dogg awaiting a custom paint job on his L.A. pool while hanging with celeb pals like Johnny Knoxville. Catch the flick Saturday at Capitol Hill's Miracle Theatre, followed by a Q&A with Mr. Dogg himself, or Sunday at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center in Silver Spring. Throughout the weekend, you can also check out performances by acts like Goldbug Revival (a D.C.-based indie folk group that works at the NIH by day) and Hubby Jenkins, formerly of the Rhiannon Giddens band and the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Plus: Join in on a jam session, check out food trucks, play lawn games, take historic tours of the property and sip bourbon (obvi). Know before you go: A one-day adult ticket is $55 ($77 with drinks), and it's $82 for both days ($124 with drinks). Those between ages 7-20 are $39 a ticket ($55 for the weekend), and littles under 6 are free. President Lincoln's Cottage is located at 140 Rock Creek Church Rd. NW. More fun weekend events: 🇬🇷 The annual Saint Sophia Greek Festival runs Friday-Sunday near the Observatory Circle, with live Greek music and folk dancing, a marketplace, kids' games, a taverna with Greek beer and wine, and, of course, all the baklava, spanakopita and gyros your heart desires. (Free admission) 🪞 Head to Berryville, Virginia, for the Luckett's Spring Market Friday through Sunday, with hundreds of vintage vendors selling furniture and garden goods — plus a beer garden, food trucks and live tunes. (Tickets are $23 for general admission, $55 for the early-buyer weekend pass.) 🍜 Fiesta Asia will host its street fair-meets-homage to Asian culture on Saturday in downtown D.C. Come by for a karaoke contest, performances by dancers and martial artists, shopping, a parade, and ramen and sushi cookoff battles. (Free admission)
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
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Eccentric musician Swamp Dogg at 82: ‘There's no sympathy for octogenarians'
Swamp Dogg has only just stopped seeing monsters. Since being spiked with LSD back in the 1960s, which also influenced his distinct take on left-field soul music, the 82-year-old says he could still feel the impacts of it up until just a few years ago. 'I was paranoid of crowds and paranoid of being alone,' he says. 'I had high anxiety and could be sitting in a room with you and if I looked at you long enough, you'd start looking like some kind of monster.' For a long period of time it was only through the help and support of his late wife that he was able to hold it together. 'I didn't trust but one person in life, and that was Yvonne,' he says. 'I wouldn't do anything without her. She's why I'm still alive. Yvonne was my god.' There are similarly touching sentiments expressed about her in the offbeat, funny and strangely poignant new documentary about the cult artist and his curious world: Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted. Swamp Dogg is a musician like few others. Part golden-voiced crooner, part experimental satirist, part flat-out oddball, he has made music that spans soul, rock, country, disco, R&B and Auto-Tune boogie. Growing up in Virginia, he cut his first record when he was just 12 as Little Jerry Williams. He did A&R and production work for major labels and went on to write songs for Gene Pitney, Doris Duke and Johnny Paycheck. Feeling burned out, unfairly treated and frustrated by the industry, as well as chemically altered from his LSD experiences, he rebranded as Swamp Dogg in 1970. From then on he embarked on a much more singular musical trajectory that fused the madcap peculiarities of Frank Zappa with a deep love of old school soul and country. Since then he has worked with Bon Iver, been a manager and mentor to the World Class Wreckin' Cru, which featured a young Dr Dre, and he's sold novelty records of dogs singing – well, barking – Beatles songs to pet shops in Spain. His record covers – such as him stuffing himself naked inside a giant hot dog – regularly feature on lists of worst ever album sleeves. The album cover to 1971's Rat On!, of him riding a giant white rat, is also painted on the bottom of his swimming pool (hence the name of the film). And there is also a recent cookbook he's written that he describes as 'an idea 50 years in the making'. If You Can Kill It I Can Cook It features soul food recipes such as Baked Beans Bo Diddley. 'I guess I do feel like I am eccentric,' he says with a chuckle when asked if he agrees with the description that often follows him around. 'Although I pull back on a lot of things that I know are crazier than a motherfucker.' Pulling back is something that doesn't always come easily to Swamp Dogg. Back in the 1970s he joined Jane Fonda's anti-Vietnam Free the Army tour and he feels it set him back years in the industry. 'I'm trying not to be as political,' he says. 'I'm still a little political but not as much because it backfired. It got me thrown off of Elektra records and that's what stopped people from wanting to do live interviews with me on radio and television.' Does he have any regrets about how he approached that? 'I would do it the same again but I would do it harder,' he says. 'But with more backup this time. Because before it was like I called a meeting and nobody showed up for it.' Despite a turbulent career that, for the most part, has seen him confined to the fringes, he feels like he's landed in a sweet spot when it comes to carving out a space from autonomy and idiosyncrasy. He remains prolific too, having released three albums in the last five years. 'More people seem to know me now than ever before and I still feel like I'm cooking,' he says. 'Some concerts I play and I see all these people coming in and [there's that many] it's like they must be thinking Snoop Dogg is going to be here. I love the audience so much. I'm so happy to play for them. It makes me want to work like a motherfucker.' So what keeps him so motivated and hard-working at an age when many, after 70 years in the industry, would gladly be thinking about retirement? 'Poverty,' he says, bluntly. 'I think about poverty and I get dizzy. Laying in bed watching television, and all of a sudden, you realise I ain't had no money coming in for a couple of months. That drives me. The thought of being poor makes me want to work because being poor will get your ass no matter what age you are. There's no sympathy for octogenarians.' One of the really moving elements about the documentary is the domestic situation that he has at home. In a neighbourhood in Los Angeles where they joke that all the porn films are shot, he has neighbours such as Johnny Knoxville and Mike Judge who swing by, and he lives with his friends and musical collaborators Guitar Shorty and MoogStar. 'Guitar Shorty came here for a couple of months and it turned into 18 years,' he says. Swamp Dogg never charged him a penny in rent. 'Because I've been there,' he says. 'I've slept on people's couches and on their front porch and all that kind of shit. I've been all the way down to the bottom. But I would always find a way out because I don't like not having nice things, even when you can't afford them.' One such example of this tendency is illustrated in the film when he was at the peak of success and owned nine cars. 'I thought the world would become mine,' he reflects of that period. You get a sense that the company and camaraderie of his pals, bandmates and housemates have replaced the deep loss felt over his wife. He concurs with this, before joking: 'and they also never looked like monsters to me'. Sadly, Guitar Shorty has since died, along with another friend and collaborator, John Prine, who also appears in the film. 'I guess I'm next,' he says. 'But I'm trying to walk a straight line and do the things that keep me healthy and my mind, and my whole being, happy. I try to eat right, don't drink, don't do drugs …' he stops himself. 'Damn, you might say I'm boring as a motherfucker.' In reality, Swamp Dogg is anything but. And you get the sense that he is starting to realise that embracing eccentricity, and making music purely on his own terms, while forging a truly unique career path, has perhaps paid dividends. 'I'm happy that I've stayed true to myself,' he says. 'And I've got a lot of faith in what I do and I want to leave a hell of a legacy. That's why I cut so many albums. I'll take a shot and hope it works out. It seems to be working.' Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is out in Los Angeles cinemas on 2 May and in New York City on 9 May with a UK date to be announced
