06.25.10
Take advice from the ninny Nugent
The WaTimes continues to furnish Ted Nugent with real estate for self-promotion.
Again this week, Nugent pumps his “Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead” tour to places like a rib shack in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the Donna Corn Maze, or a “surf” ballroom in Iowa. Practically speaking, it’s harmless enough. No one who reads the WaTimes buys Nugent CDs.
His musical career is dead in the water. It has been for decades. But more on this after a couple of the usual Ted-isms, like his repeated working of the word “bloodsucker” into every column.
In the world of Ted, “bloodsuckers” are those who don’t share his politics, anyone he doesn’t like:
Only bloodsuckers, dopers and socialist stooges believe higher taxes are good.
They are nothing but economic parasites who live off the sweat and hard work of the producers. Mao Zedong would be proud.
If you believe we are in rough, choppy economic seas now, just wait a few more months. Things are going to get worse, possibly much worse under this rookie regime in the coming months.
The world is in the process of learning a painful economic lesson. That lesson is that liberals and their thirst for more government spending and control ultimately lead to economic collapse and despair. If the world – America included – does not make a very hard turn to fiscal responsibility and sanity, America will face the same fate as Greece in the not-too-distant future.
Next week, for example, “bloodsuckers” may be used to describe illegal immigrants, Democrats specifically, minorities on welfare, fat people, the census, the Social Security Administration, or those who approve of the BP escrow fund.
It’s the standard far right GOP scripting. Unlike in rock guitar, Nugent’s not original when it comes to politics. He’s embraced the Tea Party, just like any standard old school GOP pol hoping to vacuum up votes and head off challenge by someone further to the right.
Since his books now sell more than his albums, Nugent has to suck up to any potential audience on a growth curve. And that means the Tea Party. If you follow his name in the Google news tab, you’ll notice Uncle Ted trying to build a business in speaking at their events. Ted, when you get right down to it, can only aspire to being a poor man’s Glenn Beck. He has no venue in which to field a chalkboard and cite the books of Ayn Rand.
Nugent is and was a great rock guitarist. It must certainly sting to know idiots pay more for his words — idiots who would have never liked him in his heyday — than they’d ever pay for his records. That he has to be a toady to the likes of Sean Hannity for scraps from the table.
Which is to say he’s crummy with words. Any examination of the writings of Nugent show his fondness (or an assistant’s) for cut-and-paste and a love of a few odd but always mean slogans of his own invention. Copy editors prop him up big time but can’t massage the artifice out of the work.
What works in ferocious rock and roll — the repetition of angry money shot licks of your invention in subsequent recordings — doesn’t work for print.
However, this hasn’t stopped Nugent from trying to work various Ted-or-isms, like “Fedzilla” and “Trample the weak, hurdle the dead” into the vernacular, as if they’re the riffs from “Cat Scratch Fever.” The only place one sees Ted coinages are on his own borrowed land.
One of Nugent’s regular political riffs is how the US government can’t run an economy. And Ted knows this because he’s always been captain of his own business. Sort of.
The Ted line of thinking goes like this:
[It] does not appear to me that anyone in the Obama administration understands this most basic economic reality. That’s scary, though predictable for central planning liberals like President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Having zero experience at operating a business of any kind, this is all too predictable.
What Nugent doesn’t tell readers is that he captained his business into the ground in the early Eighties.
Nugent went from the being the biggest arena draw in the US to a laughable anachronistic nobody in a loin cloth in a couple years as tastes changed and he didn’t. Even famously over-the-top friends like Sammy Hagar flinch over the memory.
Ponder the guy who regularly rags on overweight “gluttonous” Americans, a man who now conspicuously wears a shirt — thank God — at all his gigs. This same guy who used to shave himself smooth and be in little but a hide g-string and boots for arena gigs. Despite his assertions, Father Time and gravity have worn on Ted as much as they have on everyone else.
During the height of his power, Nugent’s career was handled by one of the biggest management teams in rock — Leber-Krebs, the agency also reponsible for Aerosmith, Mahogany Rush, Parliament/Funkadelic and others.
But about a decade ago Nugent was part of one of VH1’s “Behind the Music” specials, documentaries on stars who’d gone from major success to epic failure, usually with piddling uplifting bits tacked on the end about how said wash-ups were revitalizing their lives, learning to cope with diminished expectations, battling free from substance addictions, or launching minor alternative careers in reality TV — which would inevitably result in nothing.
And Nugent hadn’t yet been discovered by Regnery Press, the publishing company which would make him a professional windbag from the extreme right.
So it must have seemed like something of a Hail Mary pass to cooperate with “Behind the Music” for the story of the collapse of the Nugent empire.
Nugent’s present manager explained the rocker was 30-60 days away from losing “everything” around 1982.
Risky investments had been made in mink farms and the raising of Clydesdale horses.
And, apparently, they went south, taking Nugent’s fortune from arena stardom with them.
“Wiped me out … wiped me out,” he says for the TV, adding he was “flat broke.”
In the doc, Nugent — as usual — puts all the blame for failure on others.
“We had a bunch of inefficient power-addicted, stardom addicted business associates that could give a rat’s ass about the source of the income — [me],” he says.
“I don’t know who gets the gomer award, me being stupid enough to believe them…,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. It’s uncharacteristic self-examination.
Nugent fired his management and financial adviser. These steps did not resurrect his solo career — which has remained stubbornly dead as a door nail. His fortune returned briefly with Damn Yankees, an act assembled from pieces of Night Ranger and Styx.
But back to the WaTimes:
My band is the best in the world. The weak got trampled, the dead hurdled. It’s how we got to yet another amazing rocking tour in 2010.
Keep telling yourself that Ted while you’re onstage at the rib joint in Fort Smith.
In terms of business acumen, another of Ted’s minor failures was his marketing of Gonzo Meat Biltong.
Consider the case of the man always extolling his talent for shooting game and preparing sumptuous feasts off the results of his hunting skills, completely ineffective at selling packs of beef jerky to his core audience of self-sufficient he-man survivalism freaks.