Hair of the Dog was the 1975 album that put the Scottish rock band Nazareth into the big league, and it was their first to be produced by the band’s guitarist and arranger Manny Charlton, who has died aged 80. It gave them a Top 20 hit on the US album charts and a Top 10 US single with their version of the Everly Brothers’ Love Hurts.
But Hair of the Dog also proved to be a different kind of landmark for Charlton. When, in the late 1980s, the then little-known band Guns N’ Roses were working on material for what would become their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, their vocalist, Axl Rose, instructed their record label, Geffen, to “get me the guy who produced Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog”. The title song, with its fat, swaggering beat and raucous chorus of “now you’re messin’ with a son of a bitch”, was one of Axl’s all-time favourites.
