If you’ve wondered why the blog devotes more and more time to Ted Nugent, here’s why.
I use him as a very public face of American crazy extremism. And you can judge its mainstreaming by how Nugent’s currency as a pundit rises and drops and where it does so.
Paradoxically, when Ted Nugent actually sold records and was a leading draw in American arenas, such extremism was unacceptable in the mainstream. Uncivil, polarizing, vindictive and irrational, it never really had a place in Nugent’s act. If Nugent actually was the depressingly mean foaming-at-the-mouth nuts guy then that he is now, he kept a tight lid on it. It had no place, even in rock music magazines or, oddly, the embarrassing-for-different-reasons VH1 Behind the Music documentary on him about a decade ago.
How he went from being the young man jumping off the top of his amplifier stack in the video embedded here a few days ago to furiously screwed-up geezer is a story that cries out to be told. What was it that curdled Ted Nugent so thoroughly?
Anyway, the elevation of Nugent-style thinking to the commonplace in politics and public debate is one symptom, among many, of the colossal failure of intellect in this country. That Nugent as a polemicist has any audience at all — and he has a big one — does not bode well for any belief in the country’s ability to deal rationally with present and future challenges.
Media Matters runs a regular ticker on Nugent, too, and a post today notes an eye-popping run-on sentence from the man’s latest column in the WaTimes.
While Nugent’s weekly rubbish is notorious for run-ons capable of reducing copy editors to tears, even by the lax standards at that real estate, this one was simply spectacularly bad:
In the otherwise universally recognized perfection of the American experiment in self-government, where evil monsters like Che Guevara and Mao Zedong are routinely worshipped by the very imbeciles that these historical murderers would have slaughtered unhesitatingly, to a community-organizer-in-chief whose terminal rookie agenda is maniacally to spend our way out of debt and drop charges against clear and present criminal New Black Panther thugs threatening voters in Philadelphia, to black-robed idiots claiming Americans have no right to self-defense, where pimps, whores and welfare brats party hearty with the mindless fantasy that Fedzilla will wipe their butts eternally, ad nauseam – I am compelled to increase my crowbar swinging to new heights every day.
If one were to liken the English language to a great hunting ground for Nugent, you could say that instead of being of mighty skill, Ted was eaten by a bear and shit out in the forest a long time ago.
Ted, as whacko, was also on Alex Jones last week, that show being one of the top two radio venues in the country for awe-inspiringly stupid crank conspiracy theory. (The other being Coast to Coast with George Nori.)
Ted now calls Texas home. However, Nugent’s brand is frequently too extreme for some kinder parts of it. One Houston newspaper writer noted an upcoming appearance in the suburb of Pasadena:
My problem is definitely in Nugent’s delivery, specifically the toxic way in which he forces his audiences to listen to his rants in-between songs.
Delivering a message in the course of verse or lyric is an honest approach to getting listeners to think and react.
Holding ticket holders anxious to hears ’70s guitar anthems “Stranglehold” or “Cat Scratch Fever” captive while Nugent howls, “Obama, he’s a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun” is cheating the whole creative element a bit …
What Nugent has never understood is that people don’t go to his shows to hear his stump speeches. If we wanted to hear a crazy old man yell political “fire” in a crowded room we could hang out at Walmart or the Greyhound bus terminal downtown for a lot less money.
(The fact that Nugent is out in Pasadena, and not at the more prestigious Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion, make it clear that there are others who have tired of his rap as well.)
Days later, another Houston paper covered Nugent’s performance.
The piece was supremely entertaining, capturing Nugent’s current state as a ranting kook perfectly, along with his small rock audience of bottom-out-of-sighters.
Some excerpts:
We aren’t sure if you can have a painting of yourself running over the President and most of his cabinet as your stage backdrop, but manners didn’t stop Gwar from eating a Dick Cheney effigy on stage for the better of four years in the Bush reign.
———
“Free machine guns for the kids,” Nugent screamed while wielding what we rightfully assume were real machine guns. This was the Nugent that we had been hearing harried and scared reports about for years now. It’s like when you finally get to see Alice Cooper in the guillotine or Slayer’s blood shower during “Reign In Blood.”
What followed was the mother of all tirades against the mayor of Chicago, President Barack Obama, most Northerners, gun-haters and every “Chairman Mao motherfucker in the White House.” We don’t remember hearing this sort of language directed towards Dubya during his tenure in office, at least with not this much volume and hate.
Shit is getting real. He’s preaching. Fuck this and fuck that. He’s railing. It’s awe-inspiring.
I don’t think he likes the President much. I’m swimming in hate.
——–
At this point the little liberal part of Aftermath’s brain wanted to bolt, but instead we walked to the merch booth and bought a shirt for $35. It’s strange how the more heated and aggressive the show, got the more proud we were to have bought the shirt. Free speech isn’t always clean and peaceful, but Nugent believes this stuff, even if there seems to be a pinch of bandwagoneering going on. He didn’t touch on immigrants last night, which would have just confused his message.
He just covered Soul Man ten minutes after the hate-parade. I love cognitive dissonance like whoa.
It’s interesting how the new right wing uses Martin Luther King Jr. as an icon for its perceived struggle, and Nugent interspersed a few photos of the slain civil-rights leader with footage of himself teaching kids about hunting animals. “I celebrate killing shit!” he exclaimed right after the song and video were over.
The writer wryly described the crowd: “Folks in wifebeaters, older gals sporting sweaty cleavage, younger guys in leather vests and a healthy dose of bikers.”
And while they may like to see him these days, it is a group that does not buy Ted CDs anymore.
The government is out of control! I’m heading to the store
for envelopes and baking powder, lads. Bastards will pay!
DD runs a daily search on “anthrax” at the Google news tube. As do many.
And everyone has noticed that minus hits for the heavy metal band named Anthrax, hits on powder hoaxes have ticked up.
The Idaho Statesman, which is in a state with its own anthrax hoaxer, has noticed, too:
Mailing a white powdery substance to scare people can land you in prison – even if the enclosed substance is non-toxic.
Ask Sandy Kevin Lamont Nanney.
The Boise man, who was accused of sending 32 powder-laden letters to hospitals, businesses and government offices in 2003, pleaded guilty to threatening to use a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison; his next scheduled parole hearing is in 2012.
Spectacular fail, of which there has been much in the past couple years, also flushes the kook powder mailers from the woodwork, notes an FBI man:
“[After Ivins’ mailings is] when it became a cottage industry to scare people. It wasn’t really a tactic used much before that,” said Chris Allen, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C.
In 2002, the FBI responded to 2,500 reports of the use or threatened use of anthrax.
Reports nationwide tapered off significantly after 2002 and have been dropping every month – until the past few months, Allen said.
There were about 500 reports in 2008, Bertram said.
Allen said investigators have found there is a flurry of these cases after “key events,” such as the blackout in the Northeast, the Enron scandal and Hurricane Katrina.
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico could be another key event, Allen said.
Since government officials are common targets of anthrax hoaxers, the latter which are — by definition — extremists, one wagers if they vote, and are not already in prison, they’re probably predominantly from the party of opposition to everything. Although no definitive polling survey exists.
[DD challenge to readers: Google map anthrax hoaxer points of origin, by state. Red or blue? Secondarily: Active chapter of Tea Party within 50 miles, yes or no.]
In one instance, noted recently, the anthrax hoax was used as a retirement plan. Of sorts.
When Ted announces he’s selling an album on the 4th of July for 76 cents, he gets very little attention.
However, when he writes one of his WaTimes columns and Media Matters notices, he gets more decent publicity. But it’s the kind that stems from feeding his new audience of extremist white bigots in the GOP/Tea Party.
“In Wash. Times op-ed, Ted Nugent uses New Black Panthers case as an excuse for race-baiting,” reads a post from Media Matters here.
It then excerpts from his column, debunking his claims (in a companion piece) on a new bit of manufactured outrage from the right, a ‘scandal’ tooted loudly all afternoon on Fox.
In his column, Nugent also complains he’s been vilified as racist by other media sources. As proof he is not so, Nugent cites another famous African American as an inspiration.
Over the weekend on Hannity, it was MLK. Now it’s Rosa Parks. (Notably, Ted’s inspirations are always dead so they can’t be reached for comment.):
As a proud, dedicated protege of my hero, the czaress of defiance, Rosa Parks, and as someone who has been unjustly labeled a racist by bottom-feeding, race-baiting human scum, I say if you are going to level the ugly charge of racism against someone, be prepared to back it up with facts or shut up.
However, over the weekend, a fan site devoted to heavy metal news, Blabbermouth, posted the Nuge’s appearance on Hannity, the one in which he invoked MLK.
Ted doesn’t amuse the demographic he owned decades ago, good guitar playing notwithstanding.
As posted previously, Ted can’t evade the belief held by many that he’s a bigot. This comes from his record as a pundit for the extreme right in regular columns charged with race politics, material that simply uses the dodge of vaguely anonymized name-calling to vilify the inner city poor, union workers in Michigan, people on welfare, illegal immigrants and others — like the President.
And everyone understands exactly what Ted means. The cracker whacko wing of the GOP — basically, the entire party — loves him for it.
You, Sean Hannity, and Fox News represent, by word and deed, the pulse of the most productive and conscientious members of this American dream across the board. And I bring you a salute and a thank you.
Which is to validate previous observations on the blog. Ted must suck up to Fox and the Tea Party because that is now the only way to a potential audience for him. His word-of-mouth draw in the world of rock music is far from what it used to be.
Speaking of which, Ted’s 76 cent Internet album, Happy Defiance Day Everyday — the one that compiles the hits from all his records that didn’t sell, collected many favorable reviews on Amazon.
However, there were a couple flies in the ointment, a few one-stars, the most scabrous of which was:
So we celebrate independence day by promoting a racist, misogynist, draft dodging dead beat dad? He represents everything about America that sucks. Good guitar player though.
First, the guitar playing is top notch. The main reason I have always liked Ted Nugent. Second, the vocals are bad. They make Uncle Ted sound like Grandpa Ted. Time to hire a vocalist. Third, next time try using a lot less “F” bombs. Fourth, delete “Girl Scout Cookies” altogether. It just seems weird and not right to hear someone of Mr. Nugent’s age to be singing about this subject matter. Finally, I think the main problem is that I have grown-up over the years and Uncle Ted hasn’t. I can no longer relate to him. With all that sexual bravado, does the aged Mr. Nugent acutually think the girls are interested in anything he has in his pants other than his wallet?
I do agree that Girl Scout Cookies is a poor choice of songs to include. The sexual innuendos about eating girls scout cookies is a bit unsettling, especially for a guy like me with a teenage daughter.
Profanity and flirting with taboos did not grace Ted’s records in the Seventies. They were no-nos.
But tax not so bad a voice to slander music any more than absolutely necessary per set. So, such being the case, one must furnish some kind of filler.
National Georgraphic’s special on electromagnetic pulse doom was hijacked to the web just prior to the weekend.
Originally, it was briefly shamed by Jason at Armchair Generalist here where you could see the initial trailer.
However, publishing the entire thing to YouTube, where one assumes it will soon be yanked for copyright violation, allows the viewer to skip through segments without having to endure the entire thing.
And the immediately noticeable central feature is its total reliance on catastrophism. More specifically the potential imminent arrival of national doom.
What viewers of extended cable service wouldn’t notice is that the show was essentially the work of the small but fanatical special interest lobby — the Cult of EMP Crazy’s poor man’s Umbrella Corporation, so to speak, EMPAct America.
In essence, National Geographic Channel was captured — made into a zombie for the sake of EMPAct America’s end-of-the-nation script. One which will surely come true if we don’t listen to them.
EMPAct America is a reprehensible nuisance. Since catastophe is its only tool of messaging and so determined has it been to push it, this little lobby has actually contributed measurably to end-times hysteria in the US. The kind that’s now the special property of the extremist Republican party.
Here’s the final segment on YouTube, starring Forstchen — who’s usually heard but not seen on Coast to Coast radio — and his small town, persuaded to enact an exodus scene — the hungry and thirsty lost trudging along a rural road, passed by an occasional flivver, the only thing that can still run.
The alleged ‘publication’ of al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire .pdf brought on a media convulsion notable for its collective amnesia.
The publication itself was, outside from the first three pages, a negligible download.
The contents page continues an established tradition of clumsy and/or unintentionally funny bits re the much repeated article (which does not exist in the publication): “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
I’ve spent years looking at various al Qaeda and attributed-to-al Qaeda documents devoted to terror, specifically recipes for making chemical and biological weapons in the home, as well as explosives.
Sophistication and slickness are not in their character. In this, “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” as a usage, is typical.
Rachel Maddow devoted a few minutes of clowning to Inspire yesterday, drawing out the “bomb” bit out for comic effect.
In this she and her staffers missed the point that for the greater duration of the war on terror, such documents, whether they are silly-looking or not, have been portrayed in the western press as very serious business.
And even when they don’t confer any capability — the bomb-making formulations and poisoning advisories being much less than adequate, they have been written of as if they convey great ability to anyone who downloads them around the world.
And in the United Kingdom, no matter how absurd they appear, they have been used as evidence — materials deemed likely to be useful to terrorists — to send over people who downloaded them onto their hard drives for very long prison terms.
Snapshots of various .pdfs from the war on terror show the new al Qaeda publication is not especially out of the ordinary. But it does, in fact, look a bit better than the usual fare.
Here is one bit from an old terror document, actually published by the Washington Post a few years ago, of an infamous poisoner’s handbook, one purporting to give you the ability to make botulism toxin from a few handfuls of garbage and dung. It’s no more or less absurd than a title like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”
And another, the work of a now long-jailed al Qaeda man.
However, al Qaeda men and jihadists have never had much trouble compiling and distributing .pdf files. Which makes the less-than-compelling quality of Inspire — which has apparently purposely been obfuscated past the first three pages, a bit of an embarrassment.
If the purpose is to get the maximum number of readers, the insertion of digital gobble into the .pdf as padding — as this commenter details here — is astonishingly counterproductive.
It essentially creates impressions that the publication is either unfinished, a fake or that its creator greatly overestimated his own cleverness.
“[I] have no idea why it would occur to anyone to try it in the first place,” commented one of DD’s colleagues in e-mail. [Hat tip to SA.]
And the publication’s relatively small number of downloads, in proportion to the news of it, would seem to be proof of fail.
“The language of the magazine, such as ‘Make a bomb in the kitchen of your mom,’ reflects either a poor command of English or a light-hearted sense of self-parody,” writes someone — not very perceptively — at the Atlantic.
“Since I am not completely certain that the clean PDF doesn’t contain a hidden virus, I’ve elected not to post it just yet,” adds Marc Ambinder.
Armbinder’s presumption is silly. The file is harmless.
Nevertheless, even if one makes a joke of Inspire, terrorists have been inspired by similarly feeble work. It often doesn’t take much to motivate a few in the rather small global fan club for these things.
Perhaps the Nuge’s record company — Eagle — wasn’t that thrilled about giving it all away for basically free on-line. Or maybe the Nuge himself wasn’t totally happy with the promotion. Given his well-known antipathy toward the idea of stuff on-line for zip.
Or maybe it’s just likely your standard momentary on-line screw-up. Or maybe, as my grandpap used to say, “He’s got things all balled up.” And he’s desperate.
However, Ted is nothing if not an interestingly amusing hypocrite.
PopMatters.com: How much are you bothered by the fact that many people are getting Free-For-All or Double Live Gonzo! without paying for them via illegal downloading and file sharing? Do you have any thoughts on what the music industry will look like as CD sales continue to dwindle?
Nugent: “All thievery is wrong and upsetting to anyone connected to logic and decency. Fortunately, I have such an incredibly diverse and exciting lifestyle that I am able to escape the violations of my fellow man. My professional management team will always optimize my commercial entities.
And nothing says “I’m a mixed-up loser” quite as emphatically than vague doublespeak like “optimizing commercial entities.”
However for the Wall Street Journal, back in 2001, Ted was much more direct:
Hey Napster, get your greasy paws off my intellectual property.
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To think a third party should be allowed to give away our product
for zero compensation is brain-dead and un-American.
But perhaps Ted Nugent really has changed. And he really does like the Internet, wanting to give a digital copy of his new anthology away for about free for one whole day.
Whatever the circumstances, Nugent has his job cut out for him. Happyl Defiance Day Everyday (Ted’s lame attempt to get Independence Day renamed) is a grab bag of stuff from his days of fail, stuff that his fans — to steal a phrase — trampled and hurdled.
It contains the greatest hits from albums like “If You Can’t Lick ‘Em … Lick ‘Em,” “Little Miss Dangerous” (from when Ted was into Miami Vice), “Penetrator,” “Spirit of the Wild,” “Love Grenade” and the last couple of live albums, which were a move to consolidate some of Nugent’s classic tunes from the arena-busting days as new live versions on platters the man could actually collect royalties on. If you think you’re getting the originals, you’re not.
Of these records, Little Miss Dangerous is the most interesting. It charted a radical departure in Nugent’s sound. A a little more than half, perhaps almost all, of the record has the Scholz Rockman guitar tone that was on the Eighties hits of Def Leppard and ZZ Top. Nugent never went back to it.
The title cut itself, besides being the theme for an episode of Miami Vice, was inspired by Pele Massa, a girl Nugent met when she was underage. Massa spent ten years raising Nugent’s children, leaving when he started screwing others while out on the road.
In Nugent’s Behind the Music episode, Massa infamously described the Nugent credo: “Bag it, tag it, call a cab for it.”
Number of times Ted Nugent called the Obama administration some variation on the “Mao Tse-Tung fan club” in the last week:
The criminality of the Mao Tse-Tung fan club in the White House will go down as … — Broward/Palm Beach New Times
[But] in these here United States of America with a Mao Tse Tung fan club in the White House, our passion for real America drives our musical celebration to new highs knowing that our “we the people” demand for a return to a real America is catching fire all across this great country and it brings us much energy. — The Monitor
To establish a Mao Tse Tung fanclub in the White House is beyond the pale. — Boston Herald
Americans have had enough of political shysters, lawyer lingo, doublespeak, crooks, liars and frauds in Washington. The Mao Zedong fan club will be looking for new digs by deer season … I would much rather put our country’s future in the hands of Wall Street than in the bumbling hands of Fedzilla. — Washington Times, I
After watching Gen. McChrystal in a “60 Minutes” interview a year or so ago, I had no doubt that he believed then that the Afghanistan war was a total klusterphunk in progress because of the community-organizer-in-chief, Mr. Obama, and the Mao Zedong fan club with whom he had surrounded himself. — Washington Times, II
They are nothing but economic parasites who live off the sweat and hard work of the producers. Mao Zedong would be proud. — Washington Times, III
Watch Fox News without radiation shielding for too long and your intellect is shriveled.
Disappointingly, the rest of the mainstream media isn’t much better.
Readers recall a post on the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy about ten days ago. One linking to a KPCC story on the marketing of a survival bunker complex in the Mojave.
That story was noticed by others. And it was exploited, in the process, losing all the sanity the original reporter at KPCC put into it.
Instead, it became a marketing vehicle for the guy selling doomsday bunkers, Robert Vicino and his Vivos firm, abetted by the news agencies.
Most notable is a Fox News segment.
“Something epic is about to happen,” explains the Vivos developer. This in an exchange on why people believe the worst and are lining up to buy time shares in his business.
Savor the hypocrisy of the Fox News host who tries to pin the developer with questions like this one:
“[Aren’t you] trying to profit off people’s fears?”
The Fox News host wants to consider “the ethics of that.”
It is the rankest stuff coming from a news network that makes the idea that the US is facing imminent collapse a part of its regular daily menu of programming.
While not as out there as Coast to Coast radio, which — after all — has done that beat for years, Fox News has probably done more to mainstream US extremism than any news outlet, ever
And with it has come the constant peddling of doomsday, from the disease that’s Glenn Beck, to sunspot causing “the end of life as we know it” to recent humoring of laughingstock Arthur Laffer, who’s shtick is predicting the total collapse of the US economy in January of next year.
“Is the World Broke?” reads a caption on the Fox News screen. It’s one the news organization seems to stick on a lot of its current material.
And it is the application of pure cynicism — existing only to titillate viewers while strengthening the impression the country is going down soon, with the Obama administration at the helm.
Paradoxically, one can make a rational argument that the US is heading into failure. But that the failure won’t be as envisioned by the catastrophists. It may instead be the continued descent into existence as the world’s most powerful banana republic, a hardscrabble place of very little charm, no middle class and no observable social generosity or commitment to quality in civil life.
But that’s not the story the news organizations which use catastrophists like to tell.
They prefer segments puffing investment in a multi-story survival condo envisioned for placement in an old missile silo in Kansas. Like here at ABC News.
Observe again, the standard grinning host. So funny and amusing it is to see more clips from “The Road” and another benighted white guy, tossing his money away while he shows off a pathetic tackle box he has in a closet. Because, ya know, the man and his kid are going to have to be able to catch fish — out in the Mojave Desert — after the end has arrived.
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.
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.
Schools should augment brisk walks by also replacing goofy games during gym time with rigorous calisthenics, including jogging, sprinting, sit-ups and jumping jacks. Kids need to work up a healthy sweat and get worn out during gym class. Huffing and puffing is a good thing.
Every grade school and middle school in America should implement a brisk-walking club in the morning before school starts. Any school that doesn’t implement a before-school walking club for this coming school year should have all public funding rescinded immediately and the principal fired. I mean it.
The goal is simple. Every young person who graduates high school should be able to pass the U.S. Marines Corps fitness test.
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All of this requires effort, commitment, sacrifice and hard work.
Nothing worthwhile is ever easy or cheap. But we must do it. While America faces a number of economic and international challenges, I firmly believe there is no challenge greater than to improve the health of our young people. The blubberization of America must be reversed immediately.
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I am just a guitar player, but I worked up another serious sweat last night when I dragged my dead bear out of the Canadian wilderness. I suppose not everybody can perform such perfect hands-on physics …
In a brief interview with Ted Nugent, the newspaper’s music reporter asks, “If you had not become a musician, what do you think you’d be doing instead?”
Replies Nugent, emphasis mine:
I do so much as it is, musician, writer, speaker, hunting guide, law enforcement officer, off road racer, standup comedian, TV producer, gay rights advocate, Motown dance instructor, professional breeder, etc. etc., that I’m sure my passions would still dominate my American Dream without the music, though the thought of not rocking is rather silly.
The Nuge as a ‘gay rights advocate’ at Human Events, a publication of the far right:
Enter the debate over allowing homosexuals to openly serve in our military. What this issue boils down to is what may or may not happen to the military’s good order, discipline, morale, and unit cohesion if they are allowed to openly serve. Until someone can convince me that by allowing gays to openly serve in our military will improve our ability to wage and win wars, we should continue the 1993 law that does not permit gays to openly serve.
It is possible, I suppose, that a quietly subversive copy editor was having mischievous fun with Nugent re the ‘gay advocate’ thing.
