Hair of the Dog

The Zoo Crew just dropped the needle on Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog," off the 1975 album of the same name, and if you are a Zoo Freak who has ever ridden a two-lane blacktop with the windows down, you already know the chorus by heart. Dan McCafferty does not ease into it. He leans on that talk-box growl and tells somebody they have finally picked the wrong fight. The title never shows up in the lyric. That was the joke, and it was a pretty good one.

Pete Agnew, the bassist who has been with this outfit since the Dunfermline days, has told the story more than once. The band wanted to call the song and the album Son of a Bitch. The label flipped. Agnew remembers arguing that John Wayne said the same phrase all the time in the movies, and the suits still would not buy it. Being Scots, the line did not even feel that heavy to them. It was an Americanism they had picked up off the screen. So they poked around for something that meant the same thing without printing it on the sleeve. Son of a bitch became heir of the dog, and heir of the dog became Hair of the Dog, borrowed from that old hangover cure about the hair of the dog that bit you. Agnew has laughed about it since. The title, he said, had absolutely no meaning at all, and nothing to do with what the song was actually about.

What the song was about was a charmer who had been running the table. Heartbreaker, soul shaker, red hot mama, velvet charmer. McCafferty is not singing as the wounded party. He is the warning. Now you are messing with a son of a bitch. A lot of radio people spent the next fifty years calling the record by the chorus instead of the title, which is exactly what the label had been afraid of, and exactly why it caught fire in the States. Agnew has said the swear word is a big part of why America grabbed it, while Germany and Britain barely blinked.

The track started in a rehearsal on a riff Manny Charlton had been messing with. Everybody else piled on, adding the stops and the starts until it had that stomping, don't-come-closer feel. Drummer Darrell Sweet hung a cowbell on it. Charlton ran a talk box through the middle. They cut the basic tracks at Escape Studios, a cheap converted oast house out in Kent, in about nine days, for a few thousand pounds. Agnew figured they probably got charged more for the food. McCafferty kept his cards close the whole time, just grinning that he had something up his sleeve. The vocal went down later at AIR Studios in London. When the rest of the band heard that chorus, they knew they had a problem the good kind of way. In 1975 that language was still considered outrageously risqué. These days it would barely raise an eyebrow at a truck stop.

Charlton produced the album himself after three records with Deep Purple's Roger Glover. It came out in April 1975 and went on to sell more than two million copies in the United States. A&M boss Jerry Moss did them a favor they did not ask for. On the American pressing he swapped out their cover of Randy Newman's "Guilty" and stuck on the band's take of the Everly Brothers' "Love Hurts," which had been sitting around as a B-side. Agnew has said thank God for Jerry Moss. The ballad is what made the album take off after it had sat quiet for months at home and in the States. He has also pointed out the little domestic surprise that followed. Folks who bought the record for the wife, on the strength of that pretty romantic song, got a shock when the title track came snarling out of the speakers.

The song has followed them ever since, sometimes into rooms where somebody official did not want it. Down in Chile, back when General Pinochet was still in power, they played a televised show that went out to a huge audience. They closed with "Hair of the Dog," McCafferty got the crowd singing the chorus back at him, and the next day's papers lit up. Before the second night the lady mayoress came backstage with an entourage and, through a translator, told them they would not finish with that song. McCafferty nodded and said aye, no problem. When she left, Agnew asked what in the world he was doing. Dan's answer was pure. They were not going to close with it. They were going to open with it.

Younger bands kept finding it. Guns N' Roses cut it for The Spaghetti Incident?, and Agnew has been plain about that version. He called it a bit of a copycat thing. They were not trying to make it their own. Axl Rose wanted to sound like Dan. That affection went back a ways. Before Guns N' Roses were a recording band, Nazareth did six California shows and the kids came to every one. Years later, already huge, they turned up in the front row in Winnipeg, headbanging. Charlton even worked on early versions of songs that ended up on Appetite for Destruction, reportedly because Axl wanted the guy who produced Hair of the Dog. Girls Aloud later sampled the riff for a British hit, and Agnew has admitted he had no idea who they were when the clearance call came in. His son, he said, kept asking if he could get any phone numbers. Charlton himself once called the album a big, fat, greasy kahuna burger, and the only gold-selling eight-track in history. In a 2001 interview McCafferty said the band had to play "Razamanaz" and "Hair of the Dog" or the room would just go boo. He was not wrong.

None of that growl happens without the long road out of Dunfermline. Pete Agnew put together a local group called the Shadettes in 1961, singing and playing rhythm guitar. Darrell Sweet came in on drums in 1963. Dan McCafferty, Pete's friend since primary school, joined in 1965 after another singer left. Manny Charlton, who had been around bands like the Mark V and the Red Hawks, eventually locked in on guitar. For years they were the resident band at the Belleville Hotel on Pilmuir Street, learning three new covers every Sunday afternoon so they would have them ready that night. Ballroom bookers still wanted lightweight pop. Agnew has talked about having to play tongue-in-cheek versions of things like "Simple Simon Says" if they wanted to get paid. It was enough to make a pack of angry young players from a town well off the London map tell the Brylcreem crowd to stuff it.

By the start of 1970 the lineup had settled into the four-piece that would matter: McCafferty, Agnew, Charlton, and Sweet. The name Shadettes felt dated and light for the times. They were sitting in the bar of a local hotel, arguing about a new one, when The Band's "The Weight" came on the sound system. The first line is the one everybody knows. I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead. Agnew said, how about Nazareth? Nobody disagreed. They were already married and settled when they quit decent day jobs in the summer of 1971 and moved into a grotty communal flat in London. The debut album arrived that year. Exercises followed in 1972. A support slot with Deep Purple led to Glover producing Razamanaz, which gave them British hits in "Broken Down Angel" and "Bad Bad Boy," and then Loud 'n' Proud, with that heavy reading of Joni Mitchell's "This Flight Tonight." Rampant came in 1974. Hair of the Dog was the one that broke them wide open on this side of the Atlantic.

Sweet died in 1999. McCafferty and Charlton both passed in 2022. Agnew is the last of the original four still carrying the name, and he has said Dan's voice was what separated Nazareth from every other hard rock band on the block. The song stayed in the set anyway, because the rooms still want it. The Zoo Crew is spinning it for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, commercial-free, the way a record like this was meant to be heard.

If you want the band in their own words and on their own clock, the official site is Nazareth. They keep the road news and the later records up there, right alongside the history that still runs back through Hair of the Dog. The verified Facebook page is Nazareth on Facebook, where fans still post that they are spinning the old album. Instagram is @nazarethband. The band's X account is @NazarethBand. For the longtime faithful comparing set lists and old interviews, the Facebook group Nazareth The legendary rock family is where folks trade stories about the nights Dan had to play this one or the room would let him know. Turn it up. The cowbell is not a suggestion.