Sure, he’s a gun control advocate’s worst nightmare, and his music has always leaned heavily towards the stupid, but I happen to like both guns and stupid—as I’ve noted before, during my formative years my younger brother and I used to get drunk and take our dad’s .22 cat rifle to the basement of the house, where we’d fire it at the brick wall maybe 8 feet away in a game we called “dodge the ricochet.” So I can sort of relate to Ted Nugent, although you’ll never catch me shooting deer, moose, or darling little chipmunks, or whatever else happens to be in season at the moment, with a bazooka.
Me, I prefer Nugent’s unique brand of stupid to the Kiss brand of stupid, or any other brand of stupid (Grand Funk!) that comes to mind. That said, I can only handle it in small quantities, which is what makes 1998’s Super Hits so nice. Ten songs, all of them stump dumb in an addictive sort of way; who needs, or even wants, anything more? Granted, both the sublimely dim Masters and Johnson primers “Yank Me Crank Me” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” are MIA, but we all have to make sacrifices for brevity’s sake.
You can say what you want about crazy Ted, but I love the sound of his guitar, and the fact that his songs don’t mess about: most of them are jacked up on crank, even if Ted the anti-drug advocate isn’t. And he knows how to write a decent melody, too, which is ace. Why, I would almost go so far as to say I don’t see the downside, except that Ted is, well, an asshole. But he’s asshole with wango tango, capiche? As is evidenced once again by the generically titled Super Hits, which covers must of the bases, although it does include a few tunes that are both dumb and lame.
From “Cat Scratch Fever,” which features one great riff and the usual sexual innuendo to the monstrously hypnotic “Stranglehold,” which sounds like the kind of song Robin Trower wishes he could write, Super Hits delivers. As rock crit Robert Christgau noted, speaking for me and perhaps even for you, the Nuge’s “musclebound gooniness is a hoot,” before noting that, “it’s a distortion to pretend that he or anyone in his audience takes his bullshit more than half seriously.” Why, the fellow’s gonzo!
I would run down the songs in detail, but why bother? If you don’t know them it’s because you don’t want to know them, because you’re a better person than I am. Me, I ignore the cave man sexual politics and just listen to the music, which doesn’t make me an innocent. No, I’ve got my head in the sand, and Ted’s pounding it, the sand that is. So here’s the short version:
“Stormtroopin’” makes me nostalgic for and sounds pretty much just like the Third Reich’s 1939 invasion of Poland (just kidding), “Free for All” kicks ass and features Ted holding his dick in his hand, “Cat Scratch Fever” is one loony tunes of a great tune, “I Want to Tell You” is slower and has no goddamn place on this compilation because it’s romantic and sucks, “Take It or Leave It” does nothing for me and should have been replaced by the great “Motor City Madhouse,” “Need You Bad” demonstrates conclusively that Nugent should never sing about needing a woman and would have been better replaced by the thought-provoking “Jailbait, “Wango Tango” is proof positive that Ted is Jimmy Buffett after receiving 600 courses of shock treatment, “Snakeskin Cowboys” is a slow starter but insidiously worms its way into your earholes, “Stranglehold” is one of the greatest songs of all time, and “Dog Eat Dog” is vintage Ted, howling at the moon and tearing holes in the thin fabric of human decency with his electric guitar/frequent penis surrogate.
I fully understand that Terrible Ted, who is probably in the woods at this very moment stalking your wounded grandmother with a bow and arrow, is not to everyone’s taste. He’s a jingoistic blowhard and NRA lackey, and has no doubt built a secret bunker somewhere to hide when Hillary Clinton hunts him down to repossess his impressive collection of fully automatic weapons, including, for all I know, a Gatling gun.
But he’s good for a chuckle, and his songs sound super on the car radio, and what more do you want? Sure, he’d gladly shoot your cat Boodles and wear its head as a hat, but he’s a better human being than Rick James, Phil Spector, Ike Turner, and some other people I can’t think of at the moment. Like Heaven 17. He’s definitely a better person than Heaven 17. So much better that he has all of them, or their heads at least, stuffed and framed on the walls of his hunting cabin.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B
