SXSW Film Review: Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted

There are very few artists quite like Swamp Dogg, and Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted is here for it.

Born Jerry Williams Jr. in the Portsmouth, VA of 1942, our hero made good-not-great R&B records for about 15 years before adopting his nickname and cutting the 1970 album Total Destruction to Your Mind, as trippy a soul album as has existed outside the Funkadelic empire.

Over the next 50-odd (and I do mean odd) years, Swamp cut dozens of albums of his own psychedelic admixture of R&B, funk, country, and disco, doing time in scenes everywhere from New York to Muscle Shoals and Macon to Nashville before settling in Los Angeles. His business affairs were conducted by his adored wife Vivian and he seemed to do alright, a legend to some and unknown to most.

By the time ...Pool Painted directors Isaac Gale (a filmmaker) and Ryan Olson (a musician and producer who had helmed the most recent Swamp albums) caught up with Swamp in the mid 2010s, he was living in a small house in suburban Los Angeles with two roommates: the Texas/Florida bluesman Guitar Shorty (who died during production) and former Cameo/Zapp keyboard player Larry “MoogStar” Clemons (a brilliant musician and a man strange enough to make Swamp look downright square).

His neurologist daughter comes around to check on her dad (a scan of Swamp’s brain she shows the camera should be a T-shirt). His wife Vivian had died some time earlier and, well, he wanted his pool painted.

Gale and Olson bring a stoner energy to the proceedings, funny and a little hyper, amplifying Swamp’s stories with titles dropped into the footage and animated bits à la Mike Judge’s totally excellent series Tales From the Tour Bus. Judge pops in, in fact, as do Johnny Knoxville and voice actor Tom Kenny, mostly just to shoot the breeze with Swamp, poolside.

Swamp reveals himself to be a genuinely sweet, gentle man, a quiet citizen of the San Fernando Valley who happens to make music and film now and then (MoogStar has a green screen in the living room) with his roommates – he just happens to be doing it in his late 70s rather than his late 20s. If anything, ...Pool Painted will make any music nerd with a pulse snap up everything these three guys put their hand to. Long may Swamp vibe. (The pool looks pretty good, too.)

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Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted

Documentary Feature Competition, World Premiere

Sunday, March 10, 12:15pm, Alamo Lamar
Wednesday, March 13, 9pm & 9:30pm, Violet Crown Cinema

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