07.29.10
Album Art
Album art for US of Fail. Now we only have to find someone to put it out.
Big version at Mark Smollin’s place, Artscape, here.
Would anyone be interested in T-shirts?
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07.23.10
Rock ‘n’ Roll for Friday: Overture to US of Fail
Overture to the United States of Fail
In .wav format, so it’s a longer download than your average tune. In Cinerama.
Logo by friend and co-conspirator Shmokin’ Mark Smollin who came up with a bunch for me to look at yestiddy. Thanks!
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07.22.10
More scenes from Ted’s summer tour of assorted firetraps and casinos
Ted Nugent’s summer tour of rib shacks and an astonishing number of casinos is being shot by amateur videographers and posted to YouTube.
Presumably, they’re devoted fans.
Here’s a Ted rant, deployed nightly, just as described by a Houston newspaper reporter days ago.
“All the children get a free machine gun,” roars Ted. The mayor of Chicago is a piece of shit. Is Chicago in Canada? On the president: “I have a love song for the rookie clueless piece of shit.” “This song is for all the motherfuckers that are fucking with me all the time … hey Barack,” etc.
And then he goes into a cursing instrumental he coined at a happier time in 2000, “Klstrfuckme.” Performed with somewhat less vigor than I have on record.
And here is a video, taken from the Pasadena rodeo near Houston, of a biographical short Ted projects behind hisself during shows. At about 1:30 you’ll notice the startling appearance of Martin Luther King amidst the imagery of camo and shooting stuff. You can date the various stills by eyeballing Ted’s middle, which spreads as he nears 2010. It’s like using carbon-14, only easier.
Jump on the grenades at your discretion.
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07.14.10
Best Preview of the Nuge’s Third Tier Tour
Ted Nugent is in Nashville today. The local altie weekly can’t stand him and explains why.
From the Nashville scene:
If you disagree with Ted Nugent’s politics, it’s tough to like him. That said, he’s by no means a stupid guy, and his charitable work for military veterans is without a doubt admirable. His opinions are generally well-articulated even if they do often include threats of violence against his critics. But therein lies the rub: Dude’s a fucking prick, and not in that likable-asshole kind of way. No, his general dickishness comes in the way of suggesting Iraq should have been nuked and his frequent suggestions that those occupying the opposite end of the political spectrum should “suck on my machine gun.??? Sure, there are plenty of attendees at a Ted Nugent concert who can’t wait for his inevitable mid-set tirade wherein me might fantasize murdering Hillary Clinton or threaten to shoot that commie Obama in his non-American face, but some of us just want to hear “Stranglehold.???
Such previews are proof it’s impossible to defame Nugent. He may complain loudly in columns that he’s been dubbed a race-baiter unjustly and that people better get their facts straight. But his own persona has created a substantial body of opinion that he is precisely what he says he is not.
In mid 2003 Nugent had a big gig lined up at the Muskegon Summer Celebration in Michigan. He then went on a radio show in Denver to do his inimitably Ted thing. The radio hosts pulled the plug on him.
The result — Nugent summarily dropped by the concert. Billboard, at the time:
“Derogatory racial remarks made by veteran rocker Ted Nugent have cost him a gig at the Muskegon Summer Celebration. Festival officials cancelled his concert following an interview last week with two Denver disc jockeys in which the DJs said he used slurs for Asians and blacks.”
Three months later Nugent sued the Muskegon concert officials for defamation. In his complaint, it was linked to a tortured argument about violation of his 14th Amendment rights and breach of contract, which had deprived him of an $80,000 guarantee.
The Billboard image/article is here in a parcel of articles and comes from the case files entered by Nugent’s legal team. (DD has more and may get to them in a future post.)
The lawsuit became a celebrity trial in Michigan during the course of which Nugent’s defamation claim was tossed out. Nugent eventually took the stand, saying the DJs had misinterpreted his use of the n-word in a conversation. Nugent said he had related a story about how an African American had told him, after watching him in performance: “If you keep playing … like that, you’re going to be an ‘n word’ when you grow up.”
Whether this was all Nugent said during the course of the radio appearance was not determined. No tape of it existed, apparently.
“Unmentioned at the trial were news accounts of Nugent’s use of the other words,” reported the Muskegon Chronicle in 2005.
Continued the newspaper:
Asked about it later by a Chronicle reporter, Nugent said he referred to “Jap guitars” in the context of a conversation about how some guitars are soulful, others not. Nugent said one of the disc jockeys then said the word “Jap” is offensive — a point Nugent disagrees with — and that he jokingly responded something to the effect of, “That’s not offensive. g—–‘ is offensive. [Apparently gooks.]
I didn’t call anybody a g—,” Nugent added.
Nugent claimed a subsequent Rocky Mountain News story about the radio interview — which generated a wire story that ran in The Muskegon Chronicle, launching the Muskegon uproar — was biased and false, although his own account of his on-air words resembled that given in the newspaper story.
By today’s Nuge-standard, it all reads rather mildly.
While the defamation part of the case was dismissed, Nugent was successful in his breach of contract suit. He was eventually paid his guarantee although Muskegon Summer Celebration lawyers had to prod him into admitting it had been settled.
What had and has been determined is that Nugent was a highly divisive character — and not in any good way, to paraphrase the Nashville Scene — someone always accompanied by maximum ugly controversy.
In a newspaper article after the trial’s conclusion, one read:
Shoppers at The Lakes Mall who had been following the case of rock star Ted Nugent and his lawsuit with the Muskegon Summer Celebration committee weren’t surprised by the outcome. A jury Thursday afternoon returned a quick verdict awarding Nugent … his breach-of-contract suit against the summer festival.
“I love Ted Nugent’s music. I understand Nugent has to be taken in context. Everybody don’t see it that way,” said Mike Elijah, 49, who is African-American and a fan of the festival.
“Most people see things as black and white,” Elijah said.
Elijah said he agreed with Summer Celebration’s decision not to allow Nugent to appear at the festival after allegations he made racial slurs during a live Denver radio show.
“Several teenagers asked for comment about the Nugent case were unable to do so without first receiving a briefing that Nugent was once a rock star,” added the newspaper.
07.06.10
Then & Now: Well, there’s always Hannity and cursing the Obama administration
Ted Nugent then:
At the height of his power, what the Brits would call a performance on sulphate. Even after doing a badly executed jump from the top of amplifiers. No profanity. Deemed a classic from German music television.
More recently:
Keep the shirt buttoned, not like the cartoon on the bass drum head. And that’s “No shit!”
Derek St. Holmes, the black-haired guy to the left of Ted in the “Motor City Madhouse” video from the mid-Seventies, is the more-dapper-than-Ted guy with the shaven head.
How to look, how not to look — when you’re an old rock ‘n roller. No gettin’ around it, deterioration and the depradations of gravity aren’t optional.
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06.29.10
Seventy Six Cent Nugent Album Trampled, Hurdled
About an hour after Ted Nugent announced he was going to sell a new double-CDs worth of tunes, Happy Defiance Day Everyday for 76 cents on-line on July 4th, Amazon’s order page for it was inexplicably removed. (Now restored.)
And the link from tednugent.com also went dead.
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.
Here he is, just a month or so ago:”
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
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06.25.10
Take advice from the ninny Nugent
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.
But back to the WaTimes:
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.
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06.23.10
TV Music Interlude
This DD tune was done a few years ago on a spur of the moment, the moment being the idea to write TV theme music for “The Amazing Harry Hoo,” an episode of Get Smart.
Bond movie songs, can’t do. Get Smart, yes!
This blog perfectly describes the Claw Craw, one of the most fondly remembered comedy villains:
The Claw … was an evil villain of Asian ancestry — a distant cousin to Bond’s “Dr. No.” The Claw was so called because one of his hands was missing, a la Captain Hook. In its place, as I recall, was a powerful shoehorn-shaped magnet. (There you go — two strikes already, both disability and ethnic stereotyping.) The Claw spoke English with a heavy accent, which was a good part of the joke. Picture Smart holding him off at gunpoint. Smart would turn to his sidekick, the lovely Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), and say with a squinted brow, something like: “Well, 99, I see it’s our old nemesis, the Craw.”
Before 99 could respond, the villain would break in, growling: “No, not da Craw — da Craw!”
The episode is also described here.
The trick was to work the verbal joke into the instrumental. Dialogue from the show made it easy.
“The Amazing Harry Hoo” — the fictitious theme, not the episode — is here.
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06.22.10
Ted Nugent — big fan of Mr. Woodcock
From the WaTimes column by Ted Nugent last week, a physical fitness lecture — perhaps reminiscent of Billy Bob Thornton’s Mr. Woodcock, only not as eloquent as “Set of 10!”:
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.
=======
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 …
And this is what happens when you cut your entertainment staff, like Creative Loafing’s Tampa operation, I presume.
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.
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06.14.10
The Texas Coot’s Biggest Fan
Is not me. No, it’s himself.
However, DD is so impressed by Ted’s WaTimes columns, including this week’s in which he breaks his arm patting himself on the back, I’ve decided to turn over the entire blog to rechanneling the wisdom of Nugent.
Only kidding. Sort of. At least for this minute.
“The embarrassing disconnect of an increasingly spoiled nation of freedom abusers has created a serious anti-American mess here, and I just thought the old guitar player could shine the spotlight of common sense on some ridiculously simple basics for y’all,” writes Nugent, in what seems like a sign-off.
Nugent reveals he’s had double-knee surgery, if you cared, before delivering some pro forma praise of the jobbers in his backing band.
“I could be fat, soft and slow thanks to the new American sport of gluttony, but I am not,” he continues.
“My name is Ted Nugent, and I have no peers, thank you,” it reads. It comes off sounding a little desperate.
Nugent mentions his Trample the Weak/Hurdle the Dead tour — the one stopping at the Donna Corn Maze, Neumeier’s Rib Shack and a surf ballroom in landlocked Iowa — twice.
“There is only time to trample and hurdle,” Ted adds. Including the tour name mentions, that’s four uses of the phrase in the column.
The only thing actually left unsaid is what website to go to to purchase your own “Trample and Hurdle” T-shirt.
Ted Nugent is returning to the Valley with his “Trample the Weak, Hurdle the Dead Tour” on Wednesday, Aug. 11, for an intimate show at the Celebrity Theatre in Phoenix. Tickets go on sale at 10 a.m. on Monday, June 7, and are priced at $35, $50 and $60.
Intimate Ted Nugent, threat or menace?
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