The scourge of grizzly bears and pinko liberal wimps, rock's last true wild man, Ted Nugent, gives Kevin Courtney an earful
'HAPPY springtime! Is it springtime in Ireland? Have you killed your bear yet? Hyuk, hyuk, that's right, no bears in Ireland. How about turkey? Whoops, no turkey in Ireland. You poor motherfuckers, you'll just never know, will ya? You don't get to celebrate the perfection of total freedom and biodiversity like Uncle Ted does, which is why my guitar will scare the shit outta ya!"
You don't interview Ted Nugent. You sit tight, shut up and let the Motor City Madman tell you how things really are in the world today. You listen up as he preaches his gung-ho gospel of guns, dirty-assed rock'n'roll and defending America against terrorists and wet liberal assholes. You simper in dumbfounded agreement as he loudly rants against peaceniks, vegetarians, Democrats, gun control lobbyists, anti-fur activists, anti-war protesters and Green Day. He's 3,000 miles away, on the phone from his Michigan farm, but his bull's roar still causes The Irish Times to shake to its foundations.
You daren't challenge him on some of his more extreme right-wing pronouncements in case he reaches down the transatlantic line, rips your head off and feeds it to his pet grizzly. Hope you've got a hard ass, 'cos this is gonna be one hell of a bucking bronco ride.
He may not be quite as famous as Joe Dolan round these parts, but Ted Nugent is a fully paid-up American legend, an unreconstructed rocker, hunter, outdoorsman and outspoken upholder of all things apple pie and patriotic. "I'm the canary in the cave of decency," he tells me. "As long as I keep singing, everything's all right, but as soon as I start pecking at your flesh, you got a problem, baby!"
His fans call him the Motor City Madman or, more simply, The Nuge. He's been rocking hard for nearly 50 years (he played his first gig in 1958), first coming to prominence with 1960s rhythm'n'blues band The Amboy Dukes (their Journey to the Centre of the Mind single is a psychedelic classic, although Ted himself has never taken drugs). Nugent then achieved massive fame as a one-man, axe-wielding army, laying waste to cities with his legendary Gibson Byrdland and his killer rock'n'roll roadshow.
Nugent's classic tunes include Cat Scratch Fever, Yank Me, Crank Me and Wang Dang Sweet Poontang, songs that celebrate sex and rock'n'roll while leaving out the drugs. In 1989, he formed a group, Damn Yankees, that sold five million albums.
Now, at the ripe old age of 57, Nugent is making his first foray into Irish territory. But don't pity poor Uncle Ted: he may not be the svelte rocker of old in loincloth, long tresses and hunting boots, but he's still able to run with the buffalo, bring down a bear at 50 yards, shake a building 3,000 miles away with his commanding voice, and slay audiences everywhere with his righteous rock.
"I've been at this a long time, and I have more piss and vinegar and more energy and enthusiasm for my music than ever before," says Uncle Ted. "I'm also 57 years clean and sober, I'm a hunter and a fisherman, a trapper, and I enjoy that serious hands-on spiritual relationship with the good mother earth that brings my family food and clothing and shelter and medicine."
Ted Nugent isn't just any ol' hunter, heading to the outskirts in his pickup with a gun and a six-pack, and taking potshots at deer. He's the real McCoy, a true-blue throwback to a time when men lived in the wild and hunted for survival. Nuge hunts bears with just a bow and arrow, facing his quarry eye to eye before plugging it with a sharp stick. He's like America's answer to Crocodile Dundee, except this guy's not some rugged movie hero - he's all too real.
"My life is so perfect it's actually kinda scary," says Nuge. "I hunt six months of the year, I rock my balls off the other six months of the year. I head for Alaska with my sons on Friday, and we hunt bear in Alaska and live on a fishing trawler and eat crab and halibut. We catch all our own sustenance and kill rugs and steaks, and celebrate that manly connection that ultimately delivers a father and son emotion and love. And then I go right to rehearsals, and right after rehearsals I go touring for you guys in Europe, and after that I go to Africa to go hunting again, and then I go back to the States and tour for another couple of months and then I go hunting again.
"It's really a rollercoaster ride of outrageous silent spirituality, and then it slams head-on into the sonic bombast of my wonderful, insane, uninhibited, irreverent, brutal rock'n'roll celebration every night. What a perfect extreme dynamic I get to live - and don't think I don't cherish it."
Many find Nugent's grizzly lifestyle distasteful; others say it fits nicely with an American ideal of rugged individualism. He's won numerous conservation awards for his work in helping to save wetlands and eco-systems, and runs his own Ted Nugent Kamp for Kids, where he teaches young people old-fashioned pioneer values and preaches against the evils of drink and drugs.
The Nuge may be an endangered species, but he reckons he shares a lineage with current Detroit rockers such as The White Stripes. He may come on like a wild-eyed, neo-conservative survivalist, but as far as music's concerned, there's room in Ted's world for all types.
"My black influences, Gary Moore's black influences, Hendrix's, BB King's, Wilson Pickett, Stax/Volt, The Rolling Stones, Beatles, Yardbirds, Cheap Trick, even retards like Green Day, all the greatest music that touches the greatest number of people comes directly from hunters.
"Black, quintessentially independent African hunters who celebrated that absolute rugged individualism of a hunting lifestyle and then were horrifically enslaved by their own people. And the angst and the agony and the emotion and the heartbreak and the trauma of going from total independence to slavery is why blues and gospel and rhythm'n'blues erupted. There's not a piece of music that truly moves people that isn't directly linked to those first black celebrations of the memory of freedom, the horror of slavery and the dreams of being free again.
"That's why my music is so hardcore: because I pipeline, I spiritually connect to that hunting lifestyle."
He confesses to a grudging admiration for Green Day, even though their anti-war album, American Idiot, is ideologically at odds with Nugent's views about the war in Iraq. If you're still hanging onto that bucking bronco, here's where you're gonna be sent flying.
"All the statements by Green Day are completely buffoonish. All their political rants are grossly ignorant. Let's put it this way, how mentally ill would a person have to be to claim that war is not the answer? Unless, of course, you want to speak Japanese and live under an emperor, and commit hara-kiri if you're not productive enough.
"You understand how insipid, how mentally vacuous, how spiritually void a person would be to think that war is not the answer? To think that we should negotiate with the Japs and the Nazis, and maybe Idi Amin should have been tolerated and Saddam and Osama and terrorist voodoo pukes should just go ahead and do their evil upon innocent people because war is not the answer after all? Fuck you. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if they jeopardise decent people - kill the motherfuckers!"
His tone softens, as he concludes philosophically, "In the final analysis, when you really listen to the truth and the facts and the history and the current evidence, Uncle Ted has always been right."
Ted Nugent plays Vicar St on Wednesday, June 7
