The story of how a struggling, industry-screwed singer named Jerry Williams became the cult-beloved Swamp Dogg is too elaborate to recount here; suffice it to say it ran through a lot of unpaid royalties, some stressful experiences working at late ’60s Atlantic Records, and an LSD trip that didn’t so much result in ego death as a new alter ego’s birth. But above all that, Swamp Dogg’s debut LP Total Destruction to Your Mind shows off a singer who had a burning desire to express the radical, often contentious subjects that nearly no other R&B star short of Sly Stone would touch. It’s by no means a psychedelic-sounding record; true to his alias and his experience working in Muscle Shoals, the sound is pure Southern soul, halfway between the church and the juke joint with all the chiming guitar twang and ray-of-sunlight horn charts that come with it. But the revelations come from his voice: as a songwriter, he stands apart by combining a sly sense of humor (“Sal-A-Faster” and its sales pitch for a suspiciously lysergic-sounding medicine-show elixir), an audacious directness (the opening title cut’s defiant show-and-prove statement), and a furious sense of demand for a better existence than the phony one we’ve got (the self-explanatory “Synthetic World”). And since his plaintive holler of a voice can shift from acidic condemnations to heartbroken alienation to pure romance without losing an ounce of character or urgency, the songs he didn’t write — especially two Joe South numbers, the fame-damning “These Are Not My People” and the knife-twist character study-slash-taunt of “Redneck” — wind up becoming his anyways, too.