03.11.11
The ‘family man’
Ted Nugent tries to pass himself off as the wholesome American family man. Then when he comes to smalltown USA and swears the atmosphere into rancid cottage cheese at the county fair the locals who hired him act stunned.
And most of the adults you know have probably made it through life without having children given up.
So there’s this from today’s New York Daily News on Nugent’s long lost son:
A Brooklyn restaurateur, adopted as a baby, was shocked to learn his biological father is none other than “Motor City Madman” Ted Nugent.
Bay Ridge native Ted Mann, 42, got the news about “The Nuge” in an October phone call from a sister he never knew he had. She had reached out to the adoption agency that placed him.
“I’m like, ‘What!?'” laughed Mann, whose newest eatery is Cabana Social in Williamsburg …
Nugent, the “Cat Scratch Fever” rocker known for his pro-gun stance and a VH1 reality show where he made people build outhouses and skin a wild boar, [and had an accident with a chainsaw] immediately welcomed Mann into the family.
“His first words to me were ‘Hello, son,'” Mann said. “Within an hour of knowing him, he said, ‘Let’s go shoot some guns.'”
Nugent had always been open with his other seven children about the fact that he’d given two kids … Nugent has since told Mann a little bit about his biological mom, but Mann has yet to get in touch with her.
Nugent was not yet quite the wealthy rock star of the mid-Seventies when he gave the child up for adoption, an item the stories on this don’t really make clear.
If the reporting on Ted Mann’s age is correct, the adoption occurred in 1969. At the time Nugent was in Amboy Dukes.
The Amboy Dukes had a minor hit with “Journey to the Center of Your Mind” in the late Sixties. The band recorded three pyschedelic hard rock records of no great impression for Mainstream.
Two more Amboy Dukes records came out on Frank Zappa’s Discreet label in ’73 and ’74 — Call of the Wild and Tooth, Fang & Claw. Band-wise, they’re the same group — minus a singer — that would put out Ted Nugent in 1975, the record that issued him into the US arena circuit.