"Sittin' on a cornflake
Ridin' on a roller skate
Too late to hesitate
Or even meditate
Always looking up what's down
They've come to get me from the lost and found
But believe me, I'm feeling fine
To the world I'll throw some wine"- Swamp Dogg, "Total Destruction to Your Mind"
Goofy and entertaining new documentary about the legendary R&B artist and songwriter who began his lengthy career as "Little Jerry Williams" and morphed into psychedelic trickster/funkmeister Swamp Dogg in 1970. After years on the fringes of the more trad R&B scene and watching Black music world go all patchouli oil-scented paisley-colored (witness the emergence of The Temptations's Psychedelic Shack, Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, Muddy Waters's Electric Mud, most anything by Sly and the Family Stone, and of course the baddest and boldest of them all, Jimi Hendrix) Williams defiantly changed his image and his sound with his landmark 1970 album Total Destruction to Your Mind. Released nearly simultaneously with George Clinton's 1970 cutting-edge outing Funkadelic (you have to wonder who was zooming who here), Swamp is depicted sitting on a garbage bin in an alley, which started the ball rolling for his prodigious and unclassifiable subsequent album forays into the wacky.

This doc captures Williams in all his imperious glory (he had hits in Nashville writing cross-over country classics!)—and his ragtag coterie (esp. Guitar Shorty and MoogStar) are nearly as colorful and larger than life as the guy himself in this kitchen-sink melange of vintage clips, outtakes, animation, bloopers and studio sweepings. Suppose Ryan Coogler's Sinners posits a Fear of White Musical Appropriation of a Black-created idiom (da Blooze) by the stage-Irish vampiric folk troupe who wander into frame out of nowhere (for me, the weakest part of an otherwise powerful film). In that case, Swamp Dogg Gets His Pool Painted celebrates Williams' musical miscegenation in Nashville with the likes of John Prine. Highly recommended (although sad to say, I was the ONLY attendee at the 2:30 PM show two days after it opened in the big theatre at the IFC, WTF).
Best sequence: Swamp Dogg releases an album of various dogs barking, The Beatles' Greatest Hits, under the name The Barkers.