#27: Nazareth - Hair of the Dog

Oh lord am I bummed that I didn't make it to the beer store in time before I put on this record, because along with Motorhead and ZZ Top and whatever hairy chest music I can think of at the time, this is a drinking record. So of course, it opens with the title track, a song about getting drunk to get rid of a hangover. They certainly knew the finer points of matching sound with content.

I picked this up because I'd been working on a piece about Appetite for Destruction, and the guys in GNR constantly mentioned Hair of the Dog as an influence both on the production and songwriting for Appetite. They even brought Nazareth guitarist Manny Charlton out to L.A. to potentially use him as their producer, but it didn't work out. All that remains is the stripped, live-sounding mix and Steven Adler's cowbell on "Nightrain." That, and a cover of the title track on the oh-so-glorious "The Spaghetti Incident?"

So before buying the record, I was pretty sure I didn't know any Nazareth songs, but of course, I definitely knew the title track (the "now you're messin' with a son of a bitch" refrain is a favorite bit of babble when watching rednecks from afar in a bar) and "Love Hurts," which might have been a cool song in 1975, but has now been used ironically in so many 'it all falls apart' scenes in shitty movies that, much like "Dust in the Wind," it can't be enjoyed at face value anymore. Alas.

It seemed like things were winding down by the end, but the real big bastard of them all is the near ten-minute closer, "Please Don't Judas Me." It's a borderline ballad that manages to be oddly chilling, obviously setting the stage for even more unnerving latter-day incarnations, such as Pantera's "Suicide Note, Pt. 1" and Slipknot's "Vermillion, Pt. 2." The influence is especially obvious in the former track, as Charlton's screeching guitar over the slow tempo would be basically mimicked by Dimebag to great effect twenty-one years later.

For as much as history scoffs at the Seventies as being lot of bloated Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes bullshit, there's some pretty damn solid straightforward rock from this era. I'm not sure what I was expecting with Hair of the Dog, but I dig it. Hell, if AC/DC - a band I've never fully come around on - used more of the loose, drunken swagger found on Nazareth's "Beggar's Day," I'd probably be more of an AC/DC fan. How early do the beer stores open again?

"Hair of the Dog" live in Houston. All the other videos I found were thirty years after the fact and were too depressing to post.