TED NUGENT: BAMBI FOR DINNER, THUMPER FOR DESSERT

TED NUGENT: BAMBI FOR DINNER, THUMPER FOR DESSERT

Sylvie Simmons

In this ever-changing America etc. etc. Ted Nugent is one person you can rely upon to stay pretty much the same. Give a few switch-arounds of notes, his songs sound like the raw-meat howl of a tornado hitting a safari park. Like the mutilated moan of chainsaw fighters in a frontloading washing machine. The tortures of the damned put through three quarters of a million dollar’s worth of sound system. Ah, I’m felling better already. While most American heavy metallurgists have “matured,” started concerning themselves with such bizarre notions as “meaning”— you know the sort—Ted remains as deranged, excessive and as dangerous to the ears as ever. He’s already lost the use of one of his own.

Bom in Detroit, December ’48, Ted survived school, rock ’n’ roll, and cars. He had a dangerous habit of tuning in tp James Brown or the Yardbirds driving down the freeway and losing all semblance of humanity. “1 would put that sonofabitching car—on the freeway honey, doing 75 mph—slap it into neutral, open the door, climb on the roof and START BOOGIEING. I don’t know how I survived that shit.” When he wasn’t old enough to drive cars he nicked them (“there were a few stolen car incidents” (and when he wasn’t old enough to nick them “my intensity would manifest itself in different ways. I would run home from school, slap my amp in the window, and play rock ’n’ roll songs to the kids coming home from school.” He’d go to gigs and “crawl round on the floor and come up under chicks’ dresses....

“I just knew how to live it up right away.”

He picked up a guitar at seven, strumming Elvis tunes on the acoustic. Took a couple of years of lessons, played live at 10, put the Lourds together at 14 and opened for the Supremes in Detroit, “getting less white all the time.” He moved to Chicago with his folks, put together the Amboy Dukes, started playing psychedelic guitar and doing albums with dippy titles like Journey To The Center Of Your Mind and all this without the use of drugs. Ted doesn’t like them. Fires his bands for using them. Some people are just born amphetamines. Anyway, by tender 21 he was a has-been, couldn’t get a contract, went solo, stuck on a loincloth, played everywhere for four years and finally got Epic to sign him, where he bestowed upon them mighty piles of platinum until he left for Atlantic last year. “You can’t,” says Ted, “keep a good dog off your leg.”

Ted, says Ted, is “fanfuckingtastic.” Ted’s guitar playing is “incredible. Like an absolute motherfucker.” His music is “a pure-bred butt-fucker, and if you want to edit that, real neat.” His definition of rock ’n’ roll is “an unthought-out unprovoked good time. Anyone who wastes their time attempting to analyze what goes down in the spirit of rock ’n’ roll has missed the boat anyhow.

“Surely you don’t want me to be sensitive about rock and roll? That’s a joke and it ain’t no fun. It’s like going to a whorehouse with your dick in traction.”

Talking of which, Nugent is one of the few remaining American rock ’n’ rollers who actually enjoys the fruits of the road. Last time I was at one of his shows, all the girls under 17 had backstage passes. And. there was a room backstage, filled with enough spandex to stretch from L.A. to Copenhagen, waiting to meet a man who considers them “THE overwhelming inspiration of being on the road and who am I to deny myself? The road is wall-to-wall women. I’ll make this statement. THE ROAD IS THE ULTIMATE.” And after he’s—uh—mingled for a while, it’s back to the hotel with whatever hapless band happens to be supporting him to chuck the Holiday Inn bar band offstage and jam all night or until the police pull the plugs.

But there’s a tender side to Ted, as Barbara Walters might say. The Ted that loves little animals—he has his own Ducks Unlimited Organization, devoted to preserving the little feathered pals’ lives, and “pays animals the ultimate compliment” of mounting their little dead heads on his wall. The Ted who’s well-loved by his neighbors—“I eliminate all pests from the neighborhood.” The Ted who loves women—“I’ve got many girlfriends and I do treat them with feeling. When I’m with some chick I’m not going to put her in a chokehold and go ROCK AND ROLL MOTHERFUCKER!! You don’t get laid if you do it like that.” The Ted who’s a family man and pillar of his community. In the six months that he spends off the road each year he’s with his two kids (he got joint custody when he divorced Sandra Nugent and makes the most of it) he’s a substitute teacher at their school, he’s den father of his daughter’s Girl Scout troop, helps out the local police and brings up his children to be “like me. Perfect humans.” Ted himself is so perfect that nowadays he’s his own manager, record producer and “totalitarian dictator—total control.”

“I consider myself,” says Ted, “a master of the life game. I happen to think that I have got it down, and it’s because I don’t deny myself any of the serious experiences of life and any of the mindless crazed rock ’n’ roll. There’s the two and you’ve got to have those and everything in-between. I especially,” he smirks, “like the stuff in-between.”

"Surely you don't expect me to be sensitive about rock 'n' roll!"