Ted Nugent Nutty Jerry's April 15, 2011
See our pics of The Nuge and his fans in our slideshow.
"The whole world sucks but at least America sucks the best," yells madman Ted Nugent as he wrenches out "The Star-Spangled Banner" from his guitar in front of at least 2,000 souls at out east at Nutty Jerry's in Winnie. Aftermath agrees with his sentiment, and we agree with the guitar solo he will unreel, turning our national anthem into a wickedly raunchy jam.
Friday night's Nugent gig, which featured the welcome return of his early solo collaborator Derek St. Holmes, wasn't quite like the gig out at the Pasadena Fairgrounds last July, which was more like "Uncle Ted's Patriotic Variety Show."
This one featured way more music, digging deep down to his own funk and garage-rock roots, and much less of the fiery speech that colored that eye-popper last summer.
The confines of Nutty Jerry's, plus other factors, had Nugent playing a theatrically scaled-down show. Gone was cartoon backdrop of the Nuge triumphantly barreling over liberal pundits and politicians, the machine guns, and the video presentations.
But for all we lost since last summer, he more than made up for it in riffs and yeah, that righteous Nuge-itude. (Copyright pending...)
For starters, Nugent is a very underrated guitar player. For all the media sensationalism that has been par the course for the past 20 years or so years since he came out as a full-fledged gun-toting, bow-hunting outdoorsy messiah, it's easily lost in the shuffle that he has helped manufacture some of the greatest riffs for over 40 years since his Amboy Dukes' ("Breast-Fed Gator") hit the scene in 1968.
He's Detroit rock, through and through. It's the MC5, early Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, The Stooges, Mitch Ryder, and most everything else that gets pilfered hourly in basements and practice spaces the world over. He just puts a warpaint-stained stank on it that turns off the meek.
During his own "Wango Tango," he managed to fold in The Kinks' "You Really Got Me," The Capitols' "Cool Jerk," and some James Brown gumbo into what is easily his most popular hit. St. Holmes came out a few songs into the show for the cuts he sang on like "Stranglehold" and "Just What The Doctor Ordered" and stuck around for awhile to play with Nugent and his "Funk Brothers."
