SWAMP DOGG GETS HIS POOL PAINTED (A-minus) - Documentaries don't get much more giddy than this romp through the life and career of "Little" Jerry Williams, an R&B singer from the 1960s who retooled his persona in 1970 as Swamp Dogg, an underground legend in outsider music since. He and his band of eccentrics are a hoot to hang out with for an hour and a half.
Three directors and two writers collaborate on a pedal-to-the-metal visual and musical bouillabaisse, which nonetheless pauses enough times to deepen the development of the characters on display here. Williams wrote and sang R&B songs and "country soul" in the '60s, but at age 28, at the dawn of the '70s, he embraced the counter-culture (a little LSD apparently helped) and went deeper into Stax-style southern soul. (He called it swamp music.) He eventually launched his own studio and label to record others, while mining obscure archives for K-Tel-type compilations. He even distributed the infamous "Beatle Barkers" album of dogs and other animals bleating out Beatles songs in 1983, hawking it with a 1-800 number at the time.*
While his biography is impressive, much of it goes by in a blur, the kind of frenetic flashing of images that filmmakers are fond of these days. If you don't suffer an epileptic seizure early on, settle in for the entertaining interviews of Swamp Dogg and his entourage. During the film, he lives in Southern California with gunslinger Guitar Shorty and a crazy cat named Moogstar (aka Larry Clemons), a flashy multi-instrumentalist who still plays with stuffed animals. Their personal dynamics -- bullshitting and philosophizing much of the time -- are endlessly charming and often hilarious. The rag-tag crew is joined by neighbors and admirers like Tom Kenny, Johnny Knoxville and Mike Judge. Much footage is mined from a local cable talk show that Swamp Dogg made dozens of appearances on, hosted by Art Fein.
It is to the filmmakers' credit that they matched their video and audio style to the sparkling personality at the center of the documentary. The spirit of Swamp Dogg is always front and center, and there is fun to be had whether you are watching old music clips, the banter among housemates, or just Swamp Dogg sitting peacefully in his yard watching an artist re-paint the concrete swimming pool. He is an artist and a hustler and a pretty deep thinker when all is said and done -- and the filmmakers are perfectly in tune with all of that. This feels like the homage the man has earned.
SECRET MALL APARTMENT (B+) - This is a delectable story -- 20 years ago a bunch of young artists created a secret apartment in the hidden walls of a mall in Providence, R.I. -- but the execution here gets sloppy in the second half and loses its momentum.
Director Jeremy Workman struggled similarly in "The World Before Your Feet," a problem of narrative focus. Here he zeroes in on Michael Townsend, a teacher who recruited his students in 2003 to infiltrate the gleaming Providence Place mall that had opened 4 years earlier as an anchor for revitalization of the city's decrepit downtown. At times the project comes off as an artistic statement about capitalism and urban gentrification; at other times it seems like just a fun lark that took a few years to get found out.
Workman is blessed with tons of archival footage -- the crew apparently filmed themselves nonstop as they slowly converted the 750 square feet into a surprisingly livable space. Most impressive was the hauling up a steep ladder of not only furniture but later dozens of concrete blocks used to build a privacy wall (and to frame a door with a lock). Townsend is an appealing character. Other co-conspirators spin stories 20 years later, all but Townsend finally going public for the first time since he was caught red-handed in 2007.
Townsend is a natural leading character, and Workman explores his history of guerrilla art projects, most notably his pioneering of masking-tape art on the walls of a children's hospital. But deep dives into his responses to the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 feel dragged out and diversionary, as if needed to pad this out to feature length (91 minutes). We spend the second half of the film just waiting for the reveal of how Townsend got caught by mall security and what the consequences were.
But the setup can be a delight at times, delving into Providence's urban decay of the 1990s and the community created by artists and musicians at the time, with links to Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. The ingenuity of the mall crew -- a thoughtful and talented bunch -- is inspiring, and their camaraderie charming. Sometimes it's as simple as realizing that the security guards will ignore an alarm every time it goes off, and you can get away with a lot more than you think.
BONUS TRACKS
* - True story: I was in Rolling Stones record store in Norridge, Ill., sometime in the '80s when the man ahead of me was demanding a refund -- he thought he had bought an actual Beatles cassette "but it's a bunch of dogs barking." He then imitated the barking dogs. He was furious and completely oblivious to his own culpability in the original transaction.
Dozens of songs zip by in "Swamp Dogg," and here are just a few samples. First, his early hit, as Jerry Williams Jr., "I'm the Lover Man":
He wrote "She's a Heartbreaker" for Gene Pitney in the late '60s:
With Gary U.S. Bonds, Williams wrote the country standard "She's All I got," a No. 2 hit for Johnny Paycheck in 1971:
Here's a snippet of an interview with Swamp Dogg and the recording of a bluegrass-style song he wrote for Jenny Lewis to sing, "Count the Days":
And here he is from his heyday, the album "Rat On!":
No comments:
Post a Comment