Is Ted Nugent underrated?

(Sup Forums, /k/, and /an/ not invited to this thread--fuck off)

I'm not too familiar with him outside of Cat Scratch Fever which I really don't like that much.

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stranglehold is a fucking gift

A lot of his stuff is p. good even the first Damn Yankees album. Too bad it's hard to separate the guy's music from his extracurricular activities.

i like him, also this
wouldn't say he's underrated though, hard rock just isn't a very popular genre here.

These, Stranglehold especially has earned him a lot of respect for his musical ability. Dude's a fucking asshole, though.

Rated about right. He's a pretty impressive guitarist--great tone, energy, and imagination, and he stood apart in the 70s with his fast, punk-like music which was not common in that era of slow, laid-back guitar riffs. However, his meathead redneck biker jock whatever lyrics and image made it hard to take him seriously. If he were a better songwriter, he could have been the bridge between Led Zeppelin and punk rock.

Kind of like Van Halen in that way. They had speed, intensity, and technique but not the intelligent songwriting to go with it.

That first album is a classic of 70s AOR and holds up excellently. The other albums are less consistent but most manage to have at least 1-2 good songs on them.

Nugent was one of the few genuine American guitar heroes in the 70s--most of the guitar greats back then were European.

amboy dukes is pretty underrated, ted nugent solo is pretty mediocre

He kind of lost it without Derek St. Holmes who is also a much better singer.

Like Gene Simmons and a bunch of other aging rock stars, he seems hell-bent on ruining his legacy by running his mouth nonstop. I read one of his books and man, does he ever suffer from pathological narcissism. Not that that takes away from the fantastic run of albums he had back in the day.

The critics mostly didn't like TN back in the day (well, Christgau kind of liked him) in particular they said his guitar playing was just aimless noodling with no technique. In fact I have a copy of the July 1981 Trouser Press in which critic Jon Young says "Nugent may be a better guitarist than he lets on, but his non-stop onslaughts don't require much talent." Not that those power pop and punk-fixated critics were good judges of hard rock guitar anyway.

I'm old and I saw the Nuge four times in the late 70s-early 80s. I wore out my Double Live Gonzo LP. If you were a hyperkinetic 16 year old back then, he was the guy for you.

He has some genuine classics in his catalog, I know some people won't ever give him credit because of political shit or whatever but his concerts back in the day were fucking crazy parties with rowdy guys and topless chicks everywhere. We should make a thread about Foghat too--they were great back then.

oh yeah, foghat is nice too

youtube.com/watch?v=vsRHFX-XbG0

I love Terrible Ted. Yeah, he's a cartoon character but so is Kiss, Johnny Rotten and Keef (even if he doesn't realize it, having bought into his own myth) and it doesn't take away from his Amboy Dukes catalog or the first three or four solo albums. Admittedly, his music and image is tied to an era that's long gone but still fun as fuck stuff if you're willing to turn your brain off for a bit.

Van Halen did kind of displace guys like Ted Nugent after 1978 or so.

Blokes like Ted Nugent were proof of why Americans just couldn't play rock and roll at the same level as Brits. Too loud, crude, and lacking in polish or subtlety. I suppose he was alright for American chavs but I look for something else in my music and whatever it is, he didn't have it.

Sup Forumsshit has made it too hard to discuss him objectively. That said, his peak was probably around the Cat Scratch Fever era although some of his 80s stuff wasn't bad and Craveman is surprisingly good for so late in his career.

And started a whole new musical era.

I wouldn't go that far. Van Halen were innovative as far as guitar playing, but overall they were still a pretty conservative band that stayed well within the AOR framework that had been established in the late 60s. The Sex Pistols were truly the guys who started a new era of music rather than Van Halen.

I actually kind of like Ted's playing on some of the 80s albums especially Little Miss Dangerous. It's too bad he went back to his old 70s tone afterwards.

I really don't enjoy his music too much. But Stranglehold is a masterpiece.

I don't consider Ted Nugent as good a guitarist as Hendrix, Jeff Beck, EVH, or Clapton, and he's never made an album in the same league as Who's Next or Pet Sounds. But I don't have a problem with that. My issue is more how the critics back in the 70s, guys who mostly couldn't play an instrument and who'd never written a song in their life were fuming over Nugent's onstage antics and image. And because of that, these critics, none of whom could play a guitar, would then go and shit on his playing abilities.

You can hate his lyrics, image, politics, fine. But none of those detract from his abilities as a guitarist which is what the critics used to shit on him for when in reality, they just didn't think it was fair how a meathead rocker like him had more fans and got more pussy than their pet artists like the Talking Heads and Elvis Costello.

>Admittedly, his music and image is tied to an era that's long gone but still fun as fuck stuff
How do you figure?

Well now come on. All popular music dates eventually, and some of it dates really fast. A knowledgeable enough person will be able to listen to a given song and instantly pick out when it was recorded based on the production, playing styles, subject matter, etc.

Sure, but beyond that that style of music isn't in style anymore. Countless threads about "the death of rock " here based on that very premise. Any band that dips into that well today gets labelled as either derivative or retro PDQ. I'm not just referring to production style or how snare drums sounded on records in 1977. I'm talking about an entire genre that has largely shuffled off into the tar after being dominant in it's time.

I don't think rock is dead, but heavy/blues rock/metal definitely isn't in fashion at the moment. Most guitar music this decade appears to be fluffy puffy indie rock with girl frontmen.

Out of the more than 250 School of Rock episode I've recorded, I never remember Ted Nugent's songs being covered once. I don't know if it's because the show producers don't like him or they just don't think he's important enough to learn from.

>I read one of his books and man, does he ever suffer from pathological narcissism

^This. He always seemed to be to be driven by testosterone rather than skill as a musician. He had a certain image and sound that appealed to white trash teenagers in the 70s and he did well for himself with it, but his music has aged like sour milk.

If you've seen his interviews, he really knows his shit about music. Just so long as he limits the discussion to musical topics and doesn't go off into...other fields, he's very interesting and entertaining to listen to.

My assessments of TN:

1. The S/T was an excellent hard rock album that fortunately lacked most of the fucked up rapey sexual predator stuff of his later albums.
2. Cat Scratch Fever was excellently produced and the songwriting is better than the retarded title song would have you believe
3. The live album Double Live Gonzo went over well and if nothing else held his place at the table.
4. After a few years of dominance, he quickly ran out of ideas and went down the drain releasing absolutely embarrassing albums
5. His guitar playing was always pretty one dimensional
6. He stupidly dumped Derek St. Holmes after CSF depriving his band of a decent singer
7. His persona was so ridiculous that even a 14 year old would have a hard time taking him seriously
8. He's really a pretty unattractive guy appearance-wise, no cool factor at all
The bottom line - the guy's ceiling was very low/limited, and his floor was lower than we could imagine at the time.

As someone who generally likes 70s AOR, I don't think Ted Nugent is one of the better artists of that era, nor has his stuff held up well. His cover of "I Want To Tell You" was pretty cool because it's not one of the better-known Beatles songs.

Continued.

Like I said, Ted Nugent delivered the goods every time I saw him back then. I can't say the same of the Rolling Stones or some other A-lister bands.

Ted Nugent: The American dream of rock guitarists

Well some of you are overrating him for sure. The guy was a monster live performer and not bad at writing riffs until he ran out of good ones, and ok, he's not exactly Bob Dylan as far as songwriting is concerned. As a guitarist his sustain was admirable, his harmonics impressive, and he got a decent tone off that monster Byrdland but it's not what I'd call the best of the 70s. His sound was not really heavy and many were far harder. He had a limited range in terms of style - pretty much basic blues rock. I used to love the instrumental "Home Bound" off Cat Scratch back in my college days but really it's two ideas run into the ground, the verse line and the chorus line with a little bridge and a couple variations on those two. For five freaking minutes. Iommi, Page, or Lifeson could do more twists and turns in just an intro.

Too bad there's no rock concerts like that today and now all you'll find at shows are hipsters with big glasses drinking craft beer.

Ted definitely blew it by breaking up with Derek St. Holmes and having to fall back on his own relatively mediocre singing abilities, plus I think by 1980-81, he was just completely burned out from touring and overexposure and out of ideas.

Cat Scratch Fever cracked #30 on the Billboard Hot 100. That was not a bad showing for a hard rock tune. I mean, most of the time AM programmers wouldn't go anywhere near hard rock--in the late 70s, about 90% of what you heard on AM radio was disco or MOR crap like Debbie Boone.

Plus CSF was short, catchy, and had a simple enough song structure for the radio. Consider the lead single from the S/T, "Hey Baby". That was not a very good choice for a lead single--the song itself is ok but it has no real hooks, is fairly long for the radio at 4 minutes, and has too many guitar leads.

The dude made the greatest live album of the 70's and then quickly became a "1 good song per album" guy

Yeah you reminded me of the people who said the Beatles wouldn't have survived the 70s because they didn't sound like Led Zeppelin and have monster guitar riffs. People forget that hard rock was a relatively niche part of 70s music and very rarely played on the radio. Lots of hard rock/metal bands sold a lot of albums and did well for themselves but soft rock/singer-songwriters/dance music was what generated hit singles and radio play. You weren't likely to encounter hard rock outside an edgy 13 year old's bedroom.

As an aside, how does Nugent get that tone he has on the 70s albums?

I'm pretty sure he's just playing a Gibson with tube amps and well-recorded. You can get a killer tone that way.

Pretty okay. His first three albums are all decent (for what they are) and generally pretty fun. At the same time, I think he'd probably be a cooler dude if he wasn't straight edge.

Ted Nugent is one of my absolute favorite artists. His early albums are pure gold, but my favorite album is Craveman. This is still my anthem:
youtube.com/watch?v=gRG8xNzX7v0