04.29.11

How many chainsaw massacres per year?

Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 12:12 pm by George Smith

Getting Ted Nugent to do an e-mail interview is an invitation to merriment of the unintentional kind.

Once Nugent gets the word processor going he always hits send before giving it the once over. Much to our continuing joy and delight.

Take this interview, at Fox News on-line today:

It has always been the brain-dead elitist element to disarm others, while they are armed and protected by the other’s tax dollars. The misconception is misrepresentation in the media, and people who look at a gun and immediately look at the tragic use of a gun.

They don’t look at a chainsaw and think of dismembered people, they don’t look at automobiles as the tool of the drunk driver, and it is this bizarre mysticism of some shallow minds that the gun has a personality. Guns save lives.

In the last ten years I can’t think of any gun control legislation in this country. However, let’s let that one slide.

When was the last time you saw something about a chainsaw massacre — other than a movie ad — in the daily newspaper?

Chainsaw massacres, they just happen all the time. Almost as much as shootings.

Nugent is also virulently teetotal. And, he explains, this is why he hates Hollywood and Hollywood hates him:

Here is a man that has been attacked for my militant hatred for drinking and driving, and drunk idiots ruining lives because in Hollywood, if you aren’t drooling, puking and dying it is not a party. If you want to see a party watch Uncle Ted – I have been clean and sober for 63 years and this is a f**king party! Write that down!

Hah-hah. A good portion of ol’ Ted’s current audience is very physically active power drinkers. And it is not unknown for them to get behind the wheel after having been over-served. There is, after all, a reason Ted tours bars and casinos. It’s where the money is for him.

For example, this summer Ted will visit Jim Thorpe, PA, to play a show at Penn’s Peak in mid-August. DD played this venue many years ago when it was known as (and still is) the Flagstaff Ballroom.

Of Flagstaff, I wrote on the DD bio page:

When not playing the 4G’s, a typical gig would have us opening for Pat Travers or Robin Trower, semi-major guitar stars from the Seventies fallen on hard time in the haunch of the Eighties and reduced to performing in the coal town of Jim Thorpe. The venue, called Flagstaff, was an old resort from when Jim Thorpe, originally called Mauch Chunk, had an actual upper class of coal barons in residence around the turn of the century.

Like the south side of Bethlehem, Jim Thorpe was quite depressed. But since Flagstaff furnished very cheaply-priced big-league guitar rock in destitute Carbon County, fans turned out regularly.

Flagstaff was split into two sections, a main floor with an outside balcony that wrapped around the building — and a restaurant. During the shows, the lines to the conveniences would become overlong and the local custom was for the male patrons to march to the outdoor balcony and . . . well, you can connect the dots. En masse, it was quite an astonishing site and, I am told, fabulously irritating to the residents of Mauch Chunk who lived further down the hill from Flagstaff.

Good times, good times.

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