Everything You’ll Ever Need

by

A.J. Daulerio

illustration by Edith Zimmerman

In 2014 I raised a buttload of money for a media company I founded called Ratter, which was set to launch localized tabloids based in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. “It’s Patch meets Gawker…” was the gist of my elevator pitch to some luminously wealthy investors. Amazingly, some of them wanted in. Their money was banked. Momentum was built. And then I went to the west coast to do my first round of hires.

Now, around this time, on a day when I was fantasizing about building The Next Great Media Empire, I heard a song on a soul radio station that I immediately fell in love with. Although it was strung through a strange, alien song structure, it had a vaguely familiar melody. But…what era? 60’s soul, maybe? 70’s acid funk? Both? It was weird.

I didn’t catch the name of the song or the artist, but I remembered enough of the lyrics to Google and discovered the name of the song was “Synthetic World,” written and performed by a man named Jerry Williams, Jr., AKA “Swamp Dogg.”

I went down a pretty deep rabbit hole, trying to figure out if he was alive or not, and I finally stumbled upon an article called “The Real Motherfucking Doggfather,” written by a journalist named David Marchese.

David and I briefly overlapped as co-workers at Spin magazine in 2013. (He now works at the New York Times and is, honestly, the best interviewer in the history of everything. Dude just smokes everybody.) I begged him to connect me to Swamp’s email (it was AOL, of course), and he happily CC’d us both. Swamp was excited by my interest in him–he hadn’t had a hit record in 40 years, after all–and we set up a meeting to “talk business,” but I wasn’t sure exactly what kind of business either one of us had to offer each other. We met at Cheesecake Factory near his home in the San Fernando Valley and forged a relationship quickly. After that, I asked him to join Ratter. He was one of my first hires. I offered him a paid position as either House Band or Musical Director, and he took both. All systems motherfucking go.

In the fall of 2014 I spent a good portion of my time in Los Angeles, conceptualizing my soon-to-be-launched tabloid media site with my newly appointed Musical Director. This confused most of the other editors I’d hired, but once they met him, well, I think they got it? It made sense to me at the time.

Swamp contributed weekly songs for the site. And at the end of each week, he’d call me up and ask me, “Now, again…what are WE doing?” I didn’t know, and I think he knew that, but he stuck around anyway. He eventually played our launch party (six months after we launched, but who’s counting?) at the Dardy Bar in Williamsburg. There were 300 people packed into a bar with a capacity of 150. Lots of my friends came. The cops showed up and tried to clear it out. My father even came. And I did so much blow my throat closed up and had to go outside and gag myself. It was an incredible night.

A few weeks later, the site was running out of money, so I decided to lay off the whole editorial staff. Ratter shut down about six months after that. It wasn’t even that fun a ride. It’s one of my biggest regrets. I had this amazing opportunity and I just blew it.

*****

When I started The Small Bow, I had some outsized aspirations, thinking maybe I could make up for the stink of the Gawker trial or the dissolution of Ratter through TSB. I wanted to redeem myself if that was possible. Maybe I could get it all back–that lost opportunity, the lost dignity. Sobriety would help that. Why else would I do this again anyway?

A funny thing happened on the road to redemption, though–I started to enjoy my work. The newsletter became just a joyful thing I do once or twice per week. My subscription numbers aren’t very high, yet I consider it a huge success. I’ve told people the number, and they’ll be like, “That’s it?” which doesn’t feel great, but then they’ll follow it up with “You should have more than that,” which stings a little less. The podcast? Same thing. The downloads are “not where they need to be,” according to anyone trying to sell Better Health or boner ads on it.

How bad could they be, you ask? Put it this way if you drove into a town, and that town had a happy welcome sign with the population listed at the bottom, and that population number was based on TSB newsletter subscriptions and RGS downloads, you’d probably describe that imaginary town as “quaint.” You would also assume this town has no WiFi. It probably has a 12-hour diner where the sheriff sits on a stool drinking coffee with powdered cream, reading about tractor auctions. There was a big ribbon-cutting ceremony when a Fuddruckers opened. The mayor stands inside a gazebo to announce the Biggest Potato winner every year. It has one zip code with four numbers. Quaint. 

Should I strive for a larger audience and become a more attentive self-promoter to amplify things more or whatever else I need to do to build a readership equal to the size of Tokyo? I don’t think so. Not right now, at least. I’ve toyed with the idea and made huge, ambitious proclamations about TSB several times–to get it to a place where it can be less of a passion and more of a full-time job, but I’ve always caught myself.

Patience. I’ll have patience. Maybe something good will happen one day. 

But I also no longer think that everything pre-sobriety was tainted. This year–year 6 of sobriety–is when I removed the asterisk. There are some diamonds amidst the wreckage. Because if I wasn’t pulsating with outsized ambition and several different types of amphetamines, I would have never had the balls to go track down Swamp Dogg.

But then again, maybe I would have. I’ve always been drawn to the unlucky and the unlovable. The ugly and the lost. There’s a vibrant connection there.

If you’ve listened to the Really Good Shares podcast at all this year, well, you know that Swamp Dogg is part of every episode. He makes all the music for it, including some incredible covers I’d commissioned from him, several of which were positively absurd, but he did them anyway. (Swamp doesn’t get asked to cover The Buzzcocks that often. He tried, though.)

We’ve worked together for more than seven years now, and he’s very loyal. In fact, when I was getting harassed for millions of dollars by the courts after the Gawker trial Swamp offered to put on a charity concert on my behalf to raise some money. But once I told him how much money the court was asking for, he was stunned. “You need fucking Bruce Springsteen. But I’ll do what I can.” He’s a good dude. He’s a sucker for the unlucky, too.

Swamp Dogg, by the way, is actually having as close to a real moment. in his career as he’s ever had. His last two albums got some heat around them–especially the wonderful country one, “Sorry You Couldn’t Make It”–and he just released another one–“I Need a Job…So I Can Buy More Auto-Tune”–just last week. He will be 80 in July. Patience!

Still, he stays open to fans and opportunities because, as he told me during our RGS interview, he’s “thankful to anyone who gives a shit.” About him. His music. Whatever.

Sounds like the only healthy measure of success.