08.22.11
Howard in the Heartland
On Ted Nugent’s summer tour of 2011, the cream puff features reporters and free-lancers of the small newspapers of the nation have found it a lot harder to ignore the truth of him than last year.
It’s because things are very noticeably worse now.
Polarization and raging bigots have made the US government paralytic. So an asshole screaming profanity about destroying said government, all his enemies and the President through megawatt amplification onstage isn’t so damn funny or as delightfully idiosyncratic an exercise in free speech as it was in 2010.
From the Peoria newspaper, Ted’s weekend gig excerpted:
When he shares his political views? That’s entertaining, too, in a borderline frightening way.
He railed on government in general and the president in particular. He invited his audience to storm down to Springfield and take it over. Right after an f-bomb-laced barrage, he remarked that it was nice to see children in the audience …
Next, his bandmates – all in helmets now – recreated the famous photo of troops raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima. It was a strange thing to tag on at the end of a concert. But in true Nugent fashion, they triumphantly waved their machine guns …
Nugent is ranting at a furious pace, cramming in more obscenities in three minutes than a roomful of cursing sailors, and undoubtedly saying something shockingly funny, or just shocking.
On Tuesday, many of Nugent’s rants were directed at Canadian visitors. Standing in front of a huge backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, Nugent invited Canadian visitors to “taste freedom.” Nugent later quipped, “I love you Canadians, it’s your government that is (fucked) up.” I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the picture.
There was also a massive one-finger salute to President Barack Obama, for which Ted pulled both hands away from his guitar and thrust two of his middle fingers in the air …
For the grand finale, the band donned military helmets and recreated the famous flag-raising scene at Iwo Jima …
All the reviews have one thing in common. The reporters rate as good only Ted’s old music and shtick, the last part meaning him shooting a flaming arrow into a target during “The Great White Buffalo,” a song which was in his set when he still called the band the Amboy Dukes.
The new stuff is not commented upon. And there’s no getting around the barrage of cursing and damnation leveled at over half the country, foreigners and the government.
The headlines are sometimes polite code for “questionable show” in newspaper rooms.
See, you just can’t get away with printing “Ted’s Nugent’s Tea Party hard rock hate show begs for burial and so, as a public service, we’re furnishing one” in hard delivery copy, although I was able to do that at the Morning Call newspaper many years ago. (It was a fluke, never repeated.)
Nugent is also traveling to Madison, Wisconsin, where it’s now become impossible to ignore his animosity toward unions, teachers and those who mounted the recall against the state’s Republican legislators.
National musicians from Tom Morello to Arlo Guthrie to Ted Leo supported Wisconsin’s union protest movement earlier this year.
Now a musician is coming to town to declare that “government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce.”
Unions? [Ted Nugent] says they’ve brought America to its knees …
Q: On the topic of politics, this year Wisconsin substantially limited the collective bargaining rights of public employees. There were intense protests against this at the state Capitol in February and March. Do you think public employees should have the right to collectively bargain, or do you see unions as too powerful a force in the public sector?
Nugent: “Overall, unions in America have brought this great country to its knees. The NEA has seen to it that American kids are the dumbest kids ever, the auto industry was raped, and government employees are rip-off artists that demand more than they produce. What’s not to despise?”
“The guitar rocker strikes harsh political notes,” reads the subhed.
Believe, at a newspaper the size of this one, it’s as close as a features editor can come to saying, “Jesus H. Christ, what’s with this guy!?”
Here’s Ted Nugent, performing “I Still Believe,” the title song for this tour, in some dive.
While not horrid, you wouldn’t go out of your way to see it. It’s teetotal Ted playing for an audience of white guy drunks with a band a bit better, but not a lot better, than the hard rockers who aren’t famous on off nights in the same place.
And this instrumental version of “oh say can you see” in an outdoor venue is just embarrassing. It’s not Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, it’s Ted Nugent screaming “Celebrate!” and “Freeeee-dommmm!” and it’s bad enough to make your neck sweat.
This, on the other hand, is not spitefully vindictive, old or embarrassing.
And in it’s snappy drumming take down it destroys stuff like phonus-balonus “I Still Believe” songs and an ass’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Laughter is a far better as remedy and entertainment than mechanized spite.
In Friday’s database crash, emergency backup eliminated the post: “The Party of Howard.”
But it didn’t kill it from my records, so republished, here it is.
UPDATED
[If] you’ve read the Ted Nugent tab for the last two years, [the next bit from the wires is no surprise.]
From Crooks and Liars, on the new GOP:
This is what President Obama seems constitutionally unable to grasp. That even if they are a sometimes useful foil, and (sadly) sometimes equally useful in getting him the policy results he wishes, by definition the Tea Party brigade sees any compromise as evil, because everyone to the left of Pat Buchanan is viewed as a mortal threat to their imagined perfect society, which looks a lot like Utah.
With fewer minorities. And a lot more Jesus …
[Any] compromise, no matter how small, is seen as an act tantamount to treason, which is precisely why we need to stop engaging these tottering tea lovers, because they simply do not believe in the workings of democracy.
The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, or even Reagan – the GOP in its current form is nothing more than the party of Ted Nugent – hopefully with somewhat better hair.
It’s true.
Barack Obama doesn’t understand the level of hatred aimed at him every night from the stages of Nugent’s summer rattletrap tour through the heartland. And, by disposition and mental bent, this is the personality he is up against in the GOP House.
I’ve taken two years to follow Nugent on DD blog.
He’s unrelenting and the substantial public record shows him seemingly without a single shred of simple human decency. There’s no bargaining with such a mind, only complete surrender. Like the Tea Party, it’s all Nugent’s way. Everyone else, anyone with differing beliefs, needs to to be run off, destroyed, hit with a crowbar, beaten, hunted down, imprisoned or put to death for the sake of the country.
Last year I proffered a book idea for a modern biography of Ted Nugent as a parallel parable for our times, when lunatic unpalatable extremism, that which was totally unacceptable a decade or so ago, became tolerated and embraced in the mainstream. No one was interested.
Many people, including those in the mainstream media, have no idea how radical and offensive Ted Nugent is because they’ve never bothered to read his columns and track down everything the man’s said when he thinks people not in his core audience aren’t paying attention.
Nugent has paraded around on his summer tours of our dives (and I know the territory firsthand) for the last two years.
The jaunts take him to all the one and two-horse town fairgrounds in the heartland, where he curses out the president, foreigners, minorities, Muslims, everyone not like him and everything a modern society would consider decent and good, from the stages.
Mostly, the locals never complain because Nugent’s audience, those who come for the riffs, are uniformly lower middle and lower class white trash assholes who get in free on county fair omnibus tickets. It’s a demographic that never buys the new records he makes.
However, Nugent also takes the time to peddle his views in the capitol’s Tea Party paper, the Washington Times, and to parlay himself onto regular appearances on Fox and even CNN.
Add to this the people who put Nugent in in the small newspapers of the heartland every week — music journalists/stringers who have generally called the man some manner of quaint, one who is “opinonated??? and “conservative,??? a polite and intelligent person.
Invariably these tyros always ask Nugent if he’s going to run for office. And he always begs off on answering. In any case, Nugent doesn’t have to run for office in 2012. Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann, or some other odious GOP reptile, will do the job.
Most of what I have written has shown how Nugent’s most bankable commodity is his role as an outdoorsman’s Glenn Beck. It has nothing to do with his music and everything to do with his reactionary views.
The views are totally unacceptable in a reasonable or thinking human being with a heart.
However, Nugent’s been mainstreamed in the last couple years. You can find him semi-regularly on CNN, where they bring him in for being a colorful character, and regularly on Fox.
Ironically, or stupidly, he’s often on Huckabee because saintly Mike likes to play a pantywaist’s version of old classic rock tunes with long-in-the-tooth rockstars.
The last time Nugent was on Huckabee it was before an old white audience, people who would have never gone to see him, as I and other reprobates did regularly, in the Seventies and Eighties.
When Nugent’s in front of such audiences, an older Tea Party demographic that loves to hear his views on stamping out the parasites and bloodsuckers (words he loves) bringing down America, he stifles the four-letter words for fifteen minutes.