09.07.11
Pattycake with Ted
Howard is “volatile,” it is reported.
Today’s laugher re Howard is an interview conducted by Detroit music journalist Gary Graff for Billboard.
Almost all US music journalists are milchtoasts. They’re simply not capable of doing honest interviews with the likes of Ted Nugent.
Today’s piece in Billboard is no exception.
Entitled “Ted Nugent ‘Too Divisive’ to Get Role in Rick Perry Campaign,” the headline telegraphs what any reasonable person would find obvious.
However, most of the story is devoted to more puff hagiography for Ted Nugent.
It’s not the first time.
DD has mentioned Graff in the Ted Nugent tab before. Last year, right around the same time — Labor Day — when Ted had just finished his annual anti-union ritual.
I put it this way:
Nugent eventually left Michigan for Waco, Texas. And while assorted cream puff music journalists have asked Ted this summer whether he might run for political office, given his views, he’s unelectable wherever there is still an informed middle class. Even in this toxic climate. And that rules out almost his entire old home state. Ted knows it, too.
Ted Nugent, elected to represent places like Detroit, Flint, Kalamazoo, Ann Arbor or Lansing? Surely you must be joking.
Now, as for Waco or Crawford, Texas? Maybe.
Ted’s return to Michigan for a Labor Day gig has generated local advance press. Typically, no one brings up the very bad odor of Ted’s attitudes and politics toward Detroit.
The only significant item appeared in the Royal Oak newspaper, a reprint of a trivial Gary Graff wire news piece which was published at Billboard a few days ago.
And did Graff ask Nugent about what he thought of the auto unions now, for a Labor Day gig? Nope. That would be possibly rife with unpleasantness.
If you find anything in Graff’s Billboard piece on Nugent in late August of last year about the man’s animus toward union workers and Detroit, you’re better than me.
At the time, from the Nugent tab here, I wrote:
Someone with guts might have chosen to make Nugent actually look at himself in a mirror, for a change.
Good job, Billboard and Gary Graff! Get that news on Nugent’s next album, supposedly featuring “‘ stone cold motherf***king songs’ ready to go when he takes his band into the studio later this year … ???
Guts, of course, are almost entirely ruled out in music journalism. It’s a black mark, a sign of mental illness and unreliability to have any.
But back to today’s Billboard piece on Nugent, again by Graff, which skips all mention of Nugent’s virulently anti-union piece for the Labor Day weekend in the WaTimes. The same weekend Ted played his “homecoming” gig in Detroit.
An enterprising reporter might have pleasantly asked Ted if he took time to share any of his opinions with the crowd at the DTE theatre in Clarkson.
Ted often shares his opinions, sprinkled with profanity, from the stage.
Here’s what could have been asked:
So, Ted, did you tell your crowd in Detroit last night that auto unions fucking suck, teachers unions blow and you despise them all? If not, why not? Did you not have the time?
It’s simple, really. You just have to be prepared to hear Ted curse at you and call ya a “limey prick” or something.
As a Texas resident for the past six years, a diehard conservative and a personal friend of Gov. Rick Perry, there’s no question where Ted Nugent’s loyalties will lie during the 2012 presidential campaign. His capacity to be vocal about his candidate, however, is still up in the air …
“I don’t know if I’ll get a stamp of approval because I am so volatile and because the line in the sand in a political campaign can be so ambiguous — and I’m anything but, [Nugent tells Graff]. The reality is that Perry must penetrate what is presumed to be the non-Perry demographic, and if I scare them away so he doesn’t get their ear, then I’m being counterproductive” …
“That bully pulpit can also have a serious tone to it,” Nugent explains. “But on a rock ‘n’ roll stage, I can tell Hillary Clinton to straddle my machine gun. The more something causes problems with people, the more I’ll say it ’cause it’s rock ‘n’ roll and you can eat me. But that’s a rock ‘n’ roll show. I know how to change the tone …
“Volatile.” It’s like calling the first H-bomb test, the one that dug a crater a mile wide at Bikini atoll, a “big bang.” Here’s Ted being his usual tricky self when he knows a journalist won’t call him on it.
The tone in Nugent’s regular opinion pieces for the WaTimes contains no real differences from his stage rants.
Well, wait, let me correct that.
There is one difference. Ted is not allowed to use a constant stream of profanity at the WaTimes.
But otherwise, it’s the same. Ted hating on huge swaths of American society — condemning teachers, education, all aspects of the government, all Democrats, Muslims, just about everyone not exactly like him.
It’s easy to review and DD has done so. Hey, Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and it did not miss Nugent’s anti-labor Labor Day generosity this weekend.
Gary Graff, and Billboard, I’m reasonably certain, know all this. They just choose not to share it with readers or take time to make Nugent defend himself. It’s just too damn distasteful to have to walk Nugent back over most of his proclamations, particularly those which are totally indefensible in a reasonable society with any kind of heart.
At one point Nugent is asked about his “I Still Believe” song.
He seems to acknowledge it’s a duff piece, asserting that if only he’d had more money to spend on it, that would have fixed things:
[Nugent] considers it more of a demo than an actual single.
“It’s [sic] doesn’t have the big, musical sound I’d normally get,” he explains. “The guitars aren’t what they need to be. The drums aren’t what they need to be. But I’m not going to spend $100,000 to give something away. I’ll spend $10,000 to give something away, and I wanted to get that song out there.”
Ten thousand dollars to give that song away? More horseshit.
The Billboard piece includes the Ted concert vid on YouTube, the one I laughed at and linked to over the weekend here.
Nugent threatens a new album, one he knows his current audience won’t buy.