06.10.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 8:59 am by George Smith
This week’s WaTimes wisdom from mean old coot Ted Nugent:
The reason the Obama administration does not want to enforce our immigration laws is that they want to make Democratic slaves (voters) of these illegal immigrants …
The WaTimes should ask Ted to delve into the gray cells more deeply. He’s not giving them their money’s worth, as this has been so much a favorite of the GOP it qualifies as a golden oldie.
The next Tedly excerpt invites readers to play a game of anemic ‘logical’ constructions:
If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely stop the invasion of illegal immigrants pouring across our porous border …
You can play along, too. DD will show you how with a few examples.
1. If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely stop the Deep Horizon oil spill!
2. If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely fix mass unemployment!
3. If we can put a man on the Moon, we can surely eliminate the growing need for food stamps in this country!
4. If Ted Nugent made “Cat Scratch Fever,” he can surely write another album that will put him back in the stadiums!
Ted’s WaTimes columns are so unintentionally hilarious, it’s clear he must spend virtually no time on them.
That’s because he’s busy — on tour in the heart of the nation this summer, playing places like the Donna Corn Maze, a surf ballroom in the middle of Iowa and Fort Smith, Arkansas.
“Ted Nugent will perform at 8 p.m. July 13 at Neumeier’s’ Rib
Room & Beer Garden, 817 Garrison Ave., and those attending will
hear great music and see what possibly could be an unscripted,
rock-and-roll experience,” reads the Fort Smith newspaper.
Venue owner Bill Neumeier told the newspaper:
Uncle Ted always gets wild on stage … Ted Nugent will be the biggest star to have ever played on the Rib Room’s stage … Now to have him on my stage, well, it’s a dream come true, and I hope it’s a dream come true for fans in Fort Smith.
Permalink
06.09.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Sludge in the Seventies at 11:46 am by George Smith
Good news, lads! Good news! This here’s one damn fine movie.
Over the Memorial Day weekend past, DD jammed with a friend. Inevitably, “Black Cat Moan” was performed.
And that jogged the memory that your host had a recording in the can, made after the release of the Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, Black Snake Moan.
The movie so delighted I made one of the posters for it into desktop wallpaper.
The song produced was the “Samuel L. Jackson Stomp,” based to a large degree on the old Beck, Bogert & Appice version of “Black Cat Moan.”
Anyway, here it is, a rhythm & blooz rock groove.
Permalink
06.02.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 9:50 am by George Smith
As predicted here a couple weeks ago, crazy old coot Ted Nugent has written a WaTimes column on how all us stupid punks have the oil spill wrong.
If we didn’t have them, energy would be just too damn expensive. Plus, despising the likes of BP is bad and wrong:
With the possible exception of the tobacco industry, no industry is held in more contempt and scorn than big oil. This is strangely foolish … I’m convinced the energy business could make mining for energy virtually risk-free, thereby making the risk of an oil spill very low. Few if any coal miners would ever get hurt or killed again. However, if such a risk-free model were adopted, the cost of energy would skyrocket and kill the American economy. Seven dollars or more for a gallon of gas, anyone? BP and other energy companies are not evil enterprises that are out to rape the environment.
In conclusion:
Don’t be an American energy idiot.
Drill, baby, drill; demand state-of-the-art intelligent preparation and hold the ineffective, criminal decision-makers [of Fedzilla] accountable.
Permalink
06.01.10
Posted in Phlogiston, Rock 'n' Roll at 6:55 am by George Smith
Being Ted Nugent’s copy editor at the Washington Times said to be a lonely and unappreciated assignment:
These brave American warriors and the warriors who have gone before them humble me to my core.
And there can be no Ted Nugent essay without at least one use of “punks.” It’s in the US legal code.
I’m no military tactician, but announcing when we are leaving the battlefield is analogous to putting an ad in your local newspaper to let all local punks and thugs know when you are going on vacation so they can plunder your home.
The Surf Ballroom & Museum [of Clear Lake, Iowa] has announced the addition of Ted Nugent to its summer calendar. The “Motor City Madman??? will return to the Surf on Friday, July 23.
Ted Nugent has been known for performing like a madman since his days with the Amboy Dukes. In the 30 years since departing from the Amboy Dukes, he has established himself as a solo artist.
Permalink
05.24.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 9:51 am by George Smith
Run off the pages of the Waco, TX, newspaper for being too much the name-caller, Ted Nugent has been pumping out more hilariously extreme columns for the Washington Times.
Railing against ‘Fedzilla’ in every one, he’s found his perfect audience — the lunatic extreme right of the same said ‘Fedzilla.’ So while Nugent works his way through the classic rock oldies ag fair circuit this summer, he still will generate a great deal of accidental humor through weekly trainwrecks of thought committed to print by the Times.
A recent best of:
“Pay attention. Get involved. Demand action. Trample the weak. Hurdle the dead.”
The rest is here.
I am not entitled to a paycheck if I don’t produce. Unless, of course, I am a dependent, bloodsucking punk who expects others to cover for my ineptness. Savings are unemployment benefits for responsible people.
See Greece crumble under its own weight? That’s what happens when you discard accountability and totally disregard the importance of apple quality, apple production and apple value. Or you could always burn down the orchard like Zimbabwe.
Literally. Ignorant goofballs. No bail out for you.
Spend like a gluttonous, spoiled brat with no consideration whatsoever for next year’s crop, and you get a nation of denial-strangled idiots who have convinced themselves that their compensation has no connection to their productivity and sales success rate. Soulless.
Are you listening SEIU? AFL-CIO? Are you listening Fedzilla, you gluttonous, blind pig, you.
The rest is here.
But the absolute finest of Ted’s May declamations are these bon mots.
The New Deal was a raw deal, and the Great Society was for losers.
Who can believe that Fedzilla is taking Goldman Sachs to task …
We are shocked that the president of the United States surrounds himself with self-avowed communists, Marxists, socialists, tax cheats, lawbreakers, far-left animal rights goons, Mao and Che fans, and czars …
A prime motivator for the Tea Party is the example of Martin Luther King Jr. …
Truth, logic and common sense drive our lives and remain common and sensible to us all.
Here.
Krugman’s chart showing the biggest gains for average Americans corresponding to Nugent’s personal belief that ‘the Great Society was for losers.’
Ladies and gentleman, the mean old coot will now play “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” on the stage next to the pig show pavilion at the Donna Corn Maze.
Permalink
05.15.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll, Sludge in the Seventies at 11:08 am by George Smith
Recently, hard rock fan/colleague Chuck Eddy noted in an Internet music chat that he still had an old list of DD’s listener’s choices from 1990 or so. Which was about the time I put it together and sent it to him as a list of titles to check on for his subsequent 1991 book, Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe.
Really.
In the acknowledgements, Chuck wrote: “[DD] mailed me an immeasurably helpful three-page shopping list of obscure metal albums recommended for inclusion, a few of which I actually tracked down (usually at Wazoo Records in Ann Arbor …); [he] also taped me a pile of good out-of-print stuff…”
Chuck’s wife scanned the old typewritten pages and he sent them over. I don’t remember what was taped. And I can just barely recall using a typewriter.
What I do still know was that these records often made up the meat of a radio show I had at Lehigh University’s WLVR called “Sludge in the Seventies.” It went into action whenever the community staff took over, always in the summer and on holidays when Lehigh students were away.
If you like lists of obscure hard rock bands, almost all failed, from the Seventies and Eighties, the artists who now make up the ground gravel on the long road of classic rock, this is one that might float your boat.
We old duffers still enthusiastically discuss the stuff at one of the links in my blogroll. As the younger fans look on in bemusement.
Rulin’.
Permalink
05.11.10
Posted in Rock 'n' Roll at 9:32 am by George Smith
This week, National Public Radio is streaming the new album from a band named Harvey Milk here.
This is hilarious on a number of levels.
Back in 2005, I reviewed an obscure Harvey Milk anthology, assembled by the extreme heavy metal label, Relapse Records.
It read:
Harvey Milk are what you get when a college-town metal trio opts for playing the altie pits over frat beer bashes. Such bands make no money and women shun them — but they do make seven-inch split singles swept up by sweaty hermits who store them in boxes where, under no circumstance, are they ever to be listened to.
More University of Georgia post-football-game orgies would have done the trick, wringing these guys of some of the Leatherface noise that attracts such fans. Flying chairs aimed at the head focus the mind on the classic riffs over underground cred every time.
“Fray-bird!” the sodden 280-pound Bulldog tackle shouts, and instead of giving in to the urge to play something from the Meat Puppets’ In a Car, by golly, you play something pentatonic and familiar.
But don’t go thinking Harvey Milk’s The Singles is an absolute loss, because the music-major guitarist saves the day. Maybe his heart just wasn’t into a complete surrender to pigfuck. Or maybe he just really liked Robert Fripp slumming on King Crimson’s Ladies of the Road.
So, once you filter out the little bit of Texas Chainsaw Massacre singer and lock onto the leaden trudge and titles, Harvey Milk are Budgie, only a little more angry and speechless. “Her Mouse Gets My Dander Up” and “I Do Not Know How to Live My Life” show a talent in the same vein as “In the Grip of a Tyrefitter’s Hand” and “She Used Me Up (and Threw Me Back Down).”
As a bonus, “Easy Thing” furnishes an arena ballad cut-to-order for people who loathe such things, and the recording closes with a friendly traditional mock of Ritchie Blackmore.
By definition, any ‘rock’ recommended to National Public Radio is sonic air freshener for an overeducated upper middle class snob demographic — not anything dangerous or exciting at all. So in five years of toil, Harvey Milk have gone from ‘pigfuck’ and hard rock to stuff for a small nationwide assortment of mostly high button sissies.
That’s progress you can measure. (Previous stuff on nerd rock and NPR here.)
Relapse Records released a great many extreme heavy metal records. I used to review some of them. And they are probably glad I don’t anymore.
Here are some of the best bits from the Voice.
On Unsane:
If success in metal were measured by the degree to which an act is the centerpiece of sadistic, forceful entertainment, Manhattan’s Unsane would be gold. Americans like the sound, look, and feel of strangers being destroyed, but how to make money on that unless you’re in the military or in penology? Unsane will always be in competition for the pennies of swine more likely to, say, want bootlegs of the U.S. Army DVD Another Day, Another Scumbag, in which “hajis” are torn apart by heavy machine-gun fire.
Past Unsane assets include one member beaten by fans until his intestines ruptured, group runs to spill gallons of butcher shop blood on blighted loading docks in the name of album art, and cruel videos of a suicide bomber blowing up the subway or skateboarders in a multitude of nausea-inducing collisions: depleted uranium, hard and stern.
These are young men so tough that if they swing at you and miss the wind gives you pneumonia. Plus they wear baseball caps made of cold-pressed tin! The first few songs on Blood Run are massive and grinding art-death. I’d tell you more about them but for two things: First, the promotional CD had some copy-control trick on it that shows the number of the songs as “54” or “99” and second, it’s time to eat my daily bag of brass knuckles and masonry chips.
On perishers Cephalic Carnage:
Lucid Interval, Cephalic Carnage’s latest, has been described as containing many “mathematical time signatures.” But this is written from the standpoint of someone who thinks counting above four quickly or stopping and starting without warning are remarkable accomplishments. It’s not a compliment you could show to your kid years from now without him laughing at you.
More accurately, the record is excrement, which — as everyone knows — does contain nutrition. But only that which sustains the kind of life most would rather not have anything to do with: e.g., the social juvie -geek equivalent of maggots and flies.
On High On Fire:
“Teabagged by God,” a secret track on High on Fire’s Blessed Black Wings, is so heavy that guitarist Matt Pike’s five tons of Laney amplification groan under its weight. “Deity’s crotch, scary crag/now you suffer the god’s teabag,” Pike mutters. He can’t sing and doesn’t shout well, either, which makes his calling out “Blessed black wings!” over
and over in the title cut cool — second only to the sound of Yahweh’s rusty iron testicles smashing around. “I am managing to stay in key a lot longer,” said the singer to one good publication about a year ago, and it shows.
High on Fire don’t deliver dance beats, and their songs do not feature anthemic choruses, explains The New York Times. Nevertheless, it was reported Pike doesn’t kid around “with his long stretches of the same guitar chord.” Others as knowledgeable even claim High on Fire transcend time: You’d think the metal trio was playing at relativistic velocities — that’s nearing the speed of light — making a few minutes for them an eternity for the observer. This album’s compositions are animals, sensible in the duller parts with meaning even in their snores. And if you imagine High on Fire as many others do, they may yet pass for excellent men. [If] this seems [even] a bit exciting, disregard that stuff about teabagging and testes. It was a flight of fancy. Sorry.
And on Pig Destroyer, a grand rock band name eclipsed only by Bathtub Shitter in the department of memorable monikers:
Now will the sun on the dunghill shine. Breaking out of the pack of faddy shit metal for the small audience that needs it as a cathartic substitute for old-time dresser-top booger collections come Pig Destroyer — a drummer, an axeman, a reciter you can’t hear, no bassist. Prior to the new CD, Terrifyer, they didn’t make it on record unless good equals upgraded Anal Cunt without titles like “I’m in Anal Cunt” and “Your Band’s in the Cut-out Bin.”
Previously, Pig Destroyer were best experienced in a label promo video, taped at a dingy theater in a cinder-block Philly slum during winter. Seeing the pasty young man with a blemish on his face at the mic inspired sympathy and pity. The drummer and guitarist buried him with a shapeless noise; a company-sized group of guys, wearing baseball caps like helmets, looked on, leaden.
Backstage, the Pig Destroyer frontman frowned at his guitarist who blabbed to the camera that his bandmate was still at home with Mom. The small pleasure of being the subject of a video shoot was wrenched away and soiled by public embarrassment.
Permalink
05.06.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll, Ted Nugent at 9:11 am by George Smith
Too over-the-top for the Waco, TX, city newspaper, Ted Nugent has a column at the Washington Times.
Where it gets to be more extreme.
It, along with a love letter he wrote form the exteme right wing Human Events two years ago, probably has something to do with why TIME magazine editors asked him to write a one paragraph hagiography of Sarah Palin.
Of course, they probably cut all the real good parts. Or laughers like this one from 2008:
Gov. Palin is an executive. The mark of an effective executive is to surround herself with bright, talented, capable professionals who share her vision to accurately represent the people they work for: Americans.
Anyway, according to one recent Nuge piece in the WaTimes, the Democrats have evil designs on illegals:
You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see that the grand plan of the Democrats is to entrap illegal immigrants by giving them legal status and then enslave and destroy them with numerous Fedzilla handouts …
While I applaud Arizona for its bold and brave new law, putting illegals in jail is the wrong move. That costs too much. I say Arizona should follow its own American hero, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County.
Sheriff Arpaio keeps crooks in a large outdoor holding facility and makes them sleep in tents. Among other things, he feeds them bologna sandwiches. I hope they are not fresh.
All this from “Immigration Lesson for Numskulls,” of which all not Ted Nugent are guilty of being. Unless you’re giving stale balogna sandwiches to illegals kept in an outdoor tent jail.
And it’s not Wall Street that caused the worldwide economic collapse, it’s the US guvmint. But you saw that coming, right?
America is going bankrupt not because of crooked and unethical Wall Street investment bankers. We are in this financial morass because of a bloated, ineffective, unaccountable and wasteful Fedzilla
I’ll bet the president a backyard beer at the White House that many more Americans would entrust their future to Wall Street bankers than to the elected frauds and idiots who have plundered the national treasury and put America’s future on thin ice.
November is hunting season. No bag limit.
Here.
The last time we looked at Ted Nugent, he was Massey Coal’s celebrity talking parrot.
Next week: Ted explains how massive oil spills show American values and uphold freedom.
DD just bought Joan Jett’s photobiography by Todd Oldham. It’s an excellent example of how to grow older playing rock and roll, keep your self-respect and remain a human being.
Instead of turning into a rotted old public disgrace.
Permalink
04.23.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll at 8:35 am by George Smith
Today Allentown hard rock band Poker Face’s campaign paid off big-time in an unexpected place — Springfield, Ohio.
In the Springfield News Sun, the opinion page of this Allentown Morning Call-sized newspaper, it was said:
The level of craziness that has been whipped up over the last year or so is now the dominant posture of America’s conservative wing.
Not that the left has always been sane — the 1960s are witness to that — but recently the right has hands-down cornered irrational exuberance.
A by-product is the rise of militias to fight off some danger perceived in the minds of talk radio personalities and handed off to their foot soldiers tramping about in the woods in their fatigues and guns.
Locally, there is a website for something called the Constitutional Militia of Clark County, which is a bit of a mystery. The site’s only point of contact with its creator is an e-mail address which doesn’t work.
The page does mention that the militia “is proud to announce the adoption of our new official anthem: ‘I’d Rather Die Than Be Your Slave’ by Pokerface, a political rock band from Allentown, PA.???
(Sample verse: It didn’t matter who shot first that day /
They killed my brothers, they laid dead by me — I’m covered in their blood /We hit them hard we made them pay that day / We hung the traitors from the highest trees — No mercy from me)
Leaving aside the questionable use of the word “laid,??? this song is clearly off the planet in terms of lyrics you’d like floating around in the head of someone with access to weapons.
========
This week marks the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing that took the lives of 168 people, a monument to the irrational mood that comes over our country sometimes.
Let’s turn down the volume.
This despite the quick removal of the ‘US Military Knows Israeli agents did 911’ thing from Poker Face’s website. (DD posted a snapshot of it here earlier this week.)
From the American kook far far right, conspiracy thinking produces a muddle of thought in which denial is the watermark for everything, from 9/11 ‘truth’ movement to the Holocaust and all points in between, no matter the cost to reputations.
In keeping with that, the Poker Face guy quickly followed up with a post today on 9/11 denial:
Sad thing about our accusers, is that they are all living in fantasy land, and dont want to wake up out of their soma coma. They love the entertainment to death drip going in their arms.
Thankfully, others are waking the F-up and have no problem telling the same TRUTHS we tell.
Go back to sleep clueless ones. you only get in the way.
This in a preamble to an article posted from the Holocaust denial publication, the American Free Press, addressing Jesse Ventura’s struggles to keep his cable series on conspiracy theory alive after he associated with 9/11 deniers.
The details of Ventura’s increasing kookiness were explained by Katherine Kersten of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune two years ago. I’ve excerpted some of the best bits from that column, which itself samples from a piece that ran in the Weekly Standard.
Recently, the Weekly Standard’s Matt Labash was in town to report on something we hear little about in the local press: the comings and goings of a guy with “the demeanor of a deranged homeless man.??? Why was Labash interested in this man, when every other reporter in the universe was crammed into the Republican National Convention, which was going on across the river?
The guy in question was our former governor — Jesse Ventura. “The Body??? was back under the big lights, speaking to thousands at the Ron Paul convention at Target Center. Organizers billed the event as a return to Republicans roots. Apparently, they saw Ventura as worthy of star billing.
Labash didn’t pretend to journalistic objectivity. Here’s a sample of his report:
“Backstage I find Jesse Ventura holding court. In jeans and a Navy SEAL T-shirt under a sports jacket, his large shiny head ringed with long wisps of unkempt hair, he has, since leaving office and moving to Mexico, taken on the demeanor of a deranged homeless man.”
=======
The Ron Paul organizers worked hard to prevent fringe groups from hi-jacking their event, according to Labash. They were particularly concerned about “9/11 Truthers,??? who deny mainstream accounts of the World Trade Center’s destruction. The Paul folks saw Ventura as a serious risk in this regard, and convinced him not to broach the subject, says Labash.
But when he chatted with Ventura backstage, Labash says he learned that Jesse was going to break the taboo:
“I decide to bait Ventura, offering that some of the 9/11 Truthers in the crowd are disappointed their viewpoints aren’t being represented.
“‘They will when I get up there,’ he growls. He says he’s been studying the issue ‘for well over a year and a half,’ and he feels ‘very strongly that the truth has not been forthcoming.’
“When asked what the truth is and whether the government had something to do with it, he says, ‘I don’t know. But I know this, I do have somewhat of a demolition background, being a member of the Navy’s underwater demolition team, and I spoke to a few of my teammates a couple weeks ago. We’re all in agreement that buildings can’t fall at the rate of gravity without being assisted. And that’s called physics, that’s not an opinion.’”
Sure enough. Ventura’s speech threw 9/11 red meat to the boisterous crowd, according to Labash. Although he stopped short of accusing the U.S. government of complicity in the attacks, his speech was loaded with enough cryptic questions and innuendo to make clear where he stands on the issue, says Labash.
Elsewhere, Ventura has gone beyond questions and innuendo. Recently, he endorsed Kevin Barrett – who believes the U.S. government was behind the attacks — for a Wisconsin congressional seat, according to the Star Tribune.
========
How did this man get involved with the fringe agenda of the 9/11 deniers?
“Oh God, kill me now,” wrote a waggish critic at TV.com.
“TruTV, which carries such enlightening fare as Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura and Rehab: Party at the Hard Rock Hotel, has okayed Wicked Summah, a reality show in the same vein as Jersey Shore but with “Massholes”—those white-hat, Tom-Brady-jersey-wearing, frat heads—instead of Guidos. Hopefully the house they film the show in will be right next door to the the house where they film I’m Going to Kill My Annoying Neighbors.”
“Hilarious … Oh wait, it’s not supposed to be. Never mind,” judged Newsday.
“Maybe you just want someone to validate a bunch of cockamamie garbage,” opined the Kansas City Star.
“So while it makes for some of the worst investigative television this side of Dateline, seeing a former United States governor sit down and attempt to have a serious discussion with a fat, bearded, middle-aged yokel wearing an undersized 50 Cent t-shirt is the kind of markedly hilarious scenario one could only find on Conspiracy Theory,” said another publication.
Perhaps too unappreciative of art, they are collected at Metacritic here.
The last time DD chatted about Ventura was in December in From Tough Guy to Kook.
Permalink
04.21.10
Posted in Extremism, Rock 'n' Roll at 9:18 am by George Smith
Snapshot from the local Allentown, PA, chapter of the white Christian identity movement and rock band, Poker Face:
Good news, lads! Good news! This will certainly show the ADL and Southern Poverty Law Center what for!
Permalink
« Previous Page — « Previous entries « Previous Page · Next Page » Next entries » — Next Page »