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Just like Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog is a type of uncommon rock songs that discovered huge worldwide success however didn’t have its title talked about within the lyrics. The motive for this was easy: Son Of A Bitch, which is what Nazareth needed to name it, was deemed too vulgar for public style again in 1975.
“The record company flipped when we told them our intended title,” Pete Agnew, longtime bassist with the Scottish veterans, remembers. “We argued that it was okay because John Wayne used the same phrase all the time, but they wouldnae buy it.”
So they regarded for the same various, and Son Of A Bitch advanced into Heir Of The Dog, then Hair Of The Dog – after the well-known alleged hangover treatment.
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“It had absolutely no meaning at all!” laughs Agnew, 34 years later. “And nothing to do with the content of the song!”
With its strident, aggressive refrain of ‘Now you’re messing with a sonofabitch,’ Hair Of The Dog is a music the Scots band got here up with throughout a rehearsal. “It was based on a riff that Manny [Charlton, guitarist] had been messing around with,” the bassist recollects. “Everyone else joined in and mucked around with it, adding the stops and starts.”
Closeted away at Escape Studios, a cheap-as-chips transformed former oast-house within the depths of Kent, Nazareth ultimately labored up an instrumental model of the music as a backing monitor. Drummer Darrell Sweet bolted on its signature cowbell half, whereas Charlton spiced up the mid-section additional nonetheless with a talk-box guitar phase.
Charlton took over the manufacturing reins from Deep Purple’s Roger Glover, who had overseen the group’s previous three albums. Incredibly, all the basic tracks for the Hair Of The Dog album were recorded in just nine days, at a cost of only a few a few thousand pounds. “They probably charged us more for the food we ate down there,” Agnew quips.
While at Escape Studios, when it came to the song’s lyrics vocalist Dan McCafferty had merely grinned and informed his bandmates he had something up his sleeve.
“The vocals were done afterwards at Air Studios,” explains Agnew. “When we heard Dan singing the chorus we all thought: ‘This should do well.’ Such language is nothing to the stuff you hear on records these days, but back then it was considered outrageously risqué.”
In fact the album went on to sell more than two million copies in the US, where label boss Jerry Moss decided to replace Nazareth’s cover of Randy Newman’s Guilty with the band’s reworking of the Everly Brothers-popularised Love Hurts. “Thank God for Jerry Moss,” enthuses Agnew. “But people that bought the album for their wife, having heard this lovely romantic song [Love Hurts], were in for a bit of a shock.”
The record company flipped when we told them our intended title. We argued John Wayne used it all the time.
Pete Agnew
Nazareth are known for their willingness to record other people’s material, having notched another worldwide hit with the reworking of Joni Mitchell’s This Flight Tonight on the previous year’s Loud ’N’ Proud album. In turn, Hair Of The Dog has been covered by Britny Fox, Warrant and recently by young US band Stonerider among many others, the most high-profile example being by Guns N’ Roses on The Spaghetti Incident? album.
Nazareth already knew of Axl Rose’s affection for their band, through personal experience. Manny Charlton even worked with the pre-fame GN’R on early versions of the songs that would eventually end up on their debut album Appetite For Destruction, reportedly at the insistence of Axl Rose, who wanted “the guy who produced Nazareth’s Hair Of The Dog”.
“Even before they became a recording band, we did six shows in California and they came to each one,” Agnew recollects fondly. “Years later, when they were huge stars, they also showed up in the front row at one of our gigs in Winnipeg – headbanging and jumping up and down.
“Their [GN’R’s] version was a bit of a copycat thing; they didn’t try to make it their own,” Agnew affords. “We always try to add our own personality to our covers, but that was never the point with them – Axl had always wanted to sing Son Of A Bitch. He wanted to sound like Dan.”
Perhaps extra surreal nonetheless, two years in the past Nazareth obtained a writing credit score when the riff from Hair Of The Dog was sampled by Girls Aloud for Sexy! No No No… which turned a UK Top Five hit single.
“I though they did something really interesting with our song, though I had no idea who Girls Aloud were when they got in touch to obtain legal clearance,” Agnew admits. “By golly I know who they are now. My son kept asking whether I could get hold of any of their phone numbers.”
I had no thought who Girls Aloud had been. My son saved asking whether or not I might pay money for any of their cellphone numbers.
Pete Agnew
Understandably, Hair Of The Dog has been a must-play staple of each Nazareth present since 1975. However, not less than one bureaucratic try was made – and failed – to get the music nixed from the set.
“We were playing two nights in Chile back when [military dictator] General Pinochet was still in power. It was a televised thing that went out to about 100 million people,” Agnew remembers. “On the primary night time, we completed as regular to Hair Of The Dog and Dan obtained the viewers to sing the refrain again at him. It created such a furore that it made the following day’s newspapers.
“Before the second present the Lady Mayoress got here backstage with an entourage and gave us an perspective. Somebody translated what she had stated and it was: ‘Tonight you will not finish with that song. Do you understand?’
“Dan kept nodding away and told her: ‘Aye, no problem.’ When she left the room I asked him: ‘What the hell are you talking about? That bitch is telling us what to play.’ And he replied: ‘We’re not gonna close the show with that song. We’re gonna open with it.’”
Today, Agnew is the one member of the unique Nazareth line-up nonetheless round – Darrell Sweet died in 1999, whereas Dan McCafferty and Manny Charlton each handed away in 2022.
But Hair Of The Dog stays one in all Nazareth’s most well-known songs. As Manny Charlton, who left the band in 1990 and handed away in 2022, put it: “Hair Of The Dog was a big, fat, greasy kahuna burger of an album that went on to become the only gold-selling eight-track in history.”
Originally revealed in Classic Rock subject 136 (July 2009). Updated April 2026
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