Welcome to another edition of From My Collection. Today, we revisit the magnum opus of a band who straddled the line between hard rock and metal better than just about anyone else. I’m talking about Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog. After several years and albums as the underdogs of the underground rock n’ roll circuit, Hair of the Dog was the album that put Nazareth over the top. This essay will explain why.
The year is 1975 and hard rock is cleaning up its act. Bands like Aerosmith, Foghat, and Lynyrd Skynyrd are blowing up the charts with guitar driven crunchers. They’re ballsy enough for the denim clad rockers, but hooky enough to be played alongside The Carpenters and Elton John on AM radio. Scotland’s Nazareth saw this and wanted a piece of the pie. Taking with them the life lessons learned from the road, and production techniques learned from Roger Glover, Nazareth set out to break free from their album rock radio clutches.
I guess in layman’s terms, Hair of the Dog could be labelled a “sellout album”. Sure it’s far more polished and produced than its predecessors. But unlike the “sellout albums” of the 80s and 90s, the “sellout albums” of the 70s were held to a higher standard. If these guys were gonna go pop, it wasn’t going to be a fluffy affair. They had to make an album that was as well written as it was well rounded. We’d see this template demonstrated in later years by Blue Öyster Cult (Agents of Fortune), UFO (Lights Out), and Judas Priest (Point of Entry). As famed metal author and historian Ian Christe would call it, this was “metal for grownups”.
Despite their attempts at pop superstardom, Nazareth couldn’t help but open Hair of the Dog with what would become their biggest FM radio hit of all time. The infamous “Hair of the Dog” was originally entitled “Son of a Bitch”. The album was slated to be labelled such as well. When the puritan police at A&M put the kibosh on this, Nazareth had to think fast. “Son of a Bitch”…”Heir of the Dog”…”Hair of the Dog”. Brilliant. Absolutely positively bloody brilliant wordplay.
“Miss Misery” is one of the heaviest cuts in the Naz catalog. Cuts like this are why so many headbangers consider Nazareth to be a metal band. Despite all their brooding blues and boogie woogieing, they sure could unleash some pure audio hellfire. I don’t care what anyone says. This is sheer doom on par with Black Sabbath…which is why it’s ironic that following it up is the band’s biggest hit overall, “Love Hurts”. We’ve all heard their rendition of this Everly Brothers classic a zillion times over. It’s to the point where it seems classic schlock radio must be under the delusion that this and “Hair of the Dog” are the band’s only sense. Overplaying aside, “Love Hurts” features the vocal performance of a lifetime from Dan McCafferty. If I were to do a Top 10 Dan McCafferty Vocal Performances, it would most certainly make the cut.
Side A closes with another ultra metallic cut, “Changin’ Times”. The riffing on this sounds eerily similar to what we’d hear on Judas Priest’s Sad Wings of Destiny a year later. You know damn well Halford and company were listening attentively to this one. They’d even go on to have Roger Glover produce Sin After Sin, but more on that another day.
If Side A showcased the orthodox, hard rocking and hard working side of Nazareth, Side B showcased their eclectic, artistic, and dare I say “sensitive” side. The side opens with a scorching rendition of Crazy Horse’s “Beggars Day”. Naz adds their own heavy metal edge to the song, but while simultaneously respecting its Americana roots. They even add a lush, extended instrumental to the end of the song, entitled “Rose in the Heather”. This brief display of prog foreshadows what’s to come later in the album, but not before “Whiskey Drinkin’ Woman”. This quirky, almost novelty, southern twanged blues rocker is a throwback to the sound Nazareth explored on their debut album. With all due respect to these courageous Scots, ZZ Top did a much better job at it, but I digress.
Closing it all out is my favorite Nazareth song of all time, “Please Don’t Judas Me”. Songs like this are written once in a lifetime. For a band not known for prog rock suites, “Please Don’t Judas Me” would make you think Nazareth were lifelong maestros à la Yes or Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The way the song builds up is almost cinematic in approach. It begins gently; a tapestry of synthesizers, slide guitar, and peculiar percussion. Dan McCafferty sings with such honesty. You can hear the pain and desperation in his voice with each lyric. As the song continues, more guitars, synths, bass, and drums are added before the listener is immersed in a sea of soul swallowing sound. Forget “Stairway to Heaven” and “Bohemian Rhapsody”. “Please Don’t Judas Me” is the the real crowning achievement of 70s rock music.
I own most of Nazareth’s catalog, but there’s no question I put Hair of the Dog on more than any other release. Razamanaz comes close, but even that album, being a straight up hard rocker, lacks that creative dynamics of Hair. Having set the bar so high for themselves, Nazareth were never able to reach such peaks of creative or commercial greatness again. That’s not to underestimate the efforts made on their 1976 follow up, Close Enough for Rock ‘n’ Roll, which opens with the epic “Telegram”. It’s an enjoyable album for Nazareth diehards, but doesn’t have the same universal appeal as Hair. 46 years on, this album is still a “son of a bitch”…a loud and loveable son of a bitch.