In a quarter-century of playing pile-driving guitar, of hanging out with rock musicians, of being on the road for months at a time, Ted Nugent claims never to have toked on a joint, never taken a drink, never so much as smoked a cigarette.
For many years, he says, this made him a minority of one in the freewheeling music world. But he was not a silent minority. He recounts with glee how he would crash musicians` heroin-shooting parties in Detroit in the late `60s and early `70s, armed with a turkey baster filled with red dye and the surgical tubing from his slingshot.
”I looked like the ultimate hippie,” he said. ”I was 18 years old and I had a scrawny little beard, and I had my hair all over town, and I always had
two . . . fine . . . babes with me-in skirts that weren`t really there-and I had bell-bottoms for yards, and I had spike-heeled snakeskin boots, and I had jewelry made of . . . wild boar claws and teeth and stuff. I was the Motor City Madman.
”I would come to these parties and they`d all go, `Oh, no, what a bummer. It`s him.` And I would take my slingshot and wrap the rubber around my arm, and I`d slap my veins, and I`d drool and stuff and I`d have snot coming out of my nose so I`d look like everybody else.
”And I`d take this turkey baster and I`d go”-he let out an extended scream-”and there`s . . . it looked like blood pouring out. And I`d squeeze it like I`m shooting stuff into my veins and I`d get on the floor and I`d flop like a gaffed . . . tuna. I would be the ultimate disgusting human hippie scumwad jerk drug-looking scab of a human being. I want a quote on that. Write that down.
”I was the baddest trip, man. I was the devil himself. I was like the ultimate mom-and-dad-gone-hippie devil. And I thrived on it. I would do what I could to try and show them how . . . lame they looked. And they didn`t get it.”
At this, Nugent let out a laugh that was high-pitched, a little maniacal and next to impossible to represent phonetically: ”Neh-heh-heh” is a poor approximation. It should be pointed out here, too, that whenever there is
an ellipsis in this story (. . .), it very probably represents a vulgarism beginning with the letter ”f” that the 41-year-old father of four bandies about as though each mouthing of it will earn him a C-spot.
The present is, of course, a long way from Detroit and the era of casual hard-core drug use. As he told the baster story, Nugent was riding in the back of a limousine taking him from O`Hare International Airport to an engagement in Lake County, Ill. It was a trip from one passion, the one that forced him into a front-row seat on the drug scene, to another, the one that he says helped him to resist it.
He had been on the road with his new and popular band, the erstwhile supergroup Damn Yankees, and was taking advantage of a break in a heavy touring schedule to fly into Chicago and head to an outdoors show at the county fairgrounds, where he would hold forth for most of the day on bowhunting.
Hunting, he said, and especially bowhunting, ”is a pivotal element. It`s not a sport with me. It`s a lifestyle.”
Nugent, in recent years, has become almost as well known for his prowess with a bow and arrow as with the guitar that churned out hits such as ”Cat Scratch Fever.” He hunts four months a year and says his family hasn`t bought store meat in longer than he can remember. He has appointed himself the
”whackmaster,” ”whack” being his term for a killing with bow and arrow.
He claims more than 600 of them and, later in the day, at the Midwest Hunting & Outdoors Show, he gave a taste of how he does it. In front of 500 people, standing about 25 yards from a foam-deer target, Nugent shot just two arrows and thwacked both into the circle that marked the mock animal`s heart. It was a clean kill, or would have been, and the crowd ate it up.
He then played a couple of hunting songs he has written: one about the legendary Michigan bowhunter Fred Bear, Nugent`s ”hero,” and one called ”I Just Wanna Go Huntin`,” a verse of which encapsulates his hunting philosophy: God told me in the Bible
`Go ahead and whack `em, Ted.`
So I take my kids hunting
So I don`t have to hunt for my kids.
Changing the world
Hunting is not only a lifestyle for Nugent, it`s a second career. A sort of CEO in camouflage gear, Nugent runs Ted Nugent`s World Bowhunters empire based in Grand Haven, Mich., and, whenever he can, he mans the organization`s booth at shows such as the Lake County event.
The empire encompasses Ted-guided hunting trips to game preserves that he manages, a Ted-sponsored bowhunting camp for youth, a line of Ted-endorsed bowhunting gear, a line of Ted-stalking-game videotapes, three retail stores in Michigan, and Ted Nugent`s World Bowhunters Magazine.
The magazine, launched last December, features a monthly editorial by Ted and the ”Woman`s Perspective” column by his wife, Shemane. A bimonthly, it has 4,000 subscribers.
Having the magazine has been ”beyond fun,” Nugent said.
”I`m a thinker,” he explained. ”I`m alive. I`m a believer. And being able to articulate and deliver my beliefs and my feelings as my own editor?
Whoa! God bless America.
”And, you know, the bottom line is, I am changing the world. I am getting kids out of the malls, getting kids out of the tattoo, ear-piercing parlors. I`m teaching them that (if) you want to learn ecology, grab a handful of dirt. If you want to know why the water stinks, walk upstream.”
While Sting and other rock and Hollywood heavies stump for such causes as the Brazilian rain forest and world peace, Nugent has become the de facto celebrity spokesman for the less-popular world of hunting, an arena that has seen considerable conflict as the ”anti-hunters” have gained a platform for their views and the hunters have organized to fight back.
Actually, ”anti-hunters” is the term Nugent uses when he`s feeling charitable or politic, which is almost never. More frequently, he calls them
”animal Nazis.”
”I am the master at offending people,” he proclaimed in a 45-minute monologue interrupted by no more than six questions.
”Maybe I`m a dissident SOB,” he admitted. ”You want radical? You`re looking at . . . radical.”
Sober, Nugent is so wired that you find yourself being thankful that he spurns drugs. Sometimes in the limo, he worked himself into a shouting rage, talking about the animal Nazis and how they know nothing about game management and nature. Sometimes, he quoted the Bible.
For example, ”There`s the one that says, `All moving things that liveth shall be meat for you. Even as the green herb, I give you these things.`
That`s pretty cut and dried: salad and . . . steak. It couldn`t be more succinct.”
Nugent contends that animal-rights activists make a lot of noise about animals without understanding or helping them. It`s the hunters who know the necessity of culling the herd to avoid starvation deaths, he says, and it`s the taxes on hunting products that pay for game management.
He holds an annual ”Freezer Cleaner Boogie Barbecue” at his place in Michigan for his friends from New York and Los Angeles. When they see the array of game on the grill, he said, ”they go, `There`s probably nothing alive within 100 miles of here.`
”And by the time they`ve taken an hour drive with me, they go, `God, you and hunting are nothing like I thought. If hunting means killing, then why are there more deer on this property than anyplace else I`ve ever seen?` And I say, `Because I`m a hunter. Because I respect the equation, and the equation is Ted plus Intelligence equals Critters.` ”
He accuses animal rightists and anti-hunters of being more concerned with ”cute” animals than, say, the pig they might eat for dinner, and of being unaware of the destructive ironies in their own lives, like cutting down trees to pay for pamphlets.
”Anybody who professes that my newborn son has no more rights than a goat-because that`s what they believe-do I have to try and tell you what`s wrong with these people?”
`Another smelly bowhunter`
At the Lake County outdoors show, Nugent seemed at home in blue jeans and a gray camouflage shirt, posing for pictures with people who buy his products and those who don`t.
Duck calls filled the air. A man walked by in a T-shirt that read, ”We interrupt this marriage to bring you the hunting season.” Nugent gnawed on buffalo jerky.
He signed an autograph for Ike Theoharis, 19, a bowhunter who works in a transmission shop. ”It`s kinda cool to see somebody like we are,” Theoharis said, ”playin` rock and shootin` deer.”
”I like your views,” a fan told Nugent. ”I`m tryin` to spread the word,” he responded. ”The more support I get, the more power I have.”
To a man who confesses that he is a rifleman, not a bowhunter, Nugent said, ”It`s a step in the right direction.”
Rick Weisharr, communications coordinator of the Illinois State Rifle Association, said: ”He`s on our side. He may be abrasive to the older bowhunters, but he tells it like it is.”
At the ”bowhunting seminar” where Nugent sang his hunting songs-he`ll have an album of them out probably next year-he spent most of his time slamming anti-hunters and answering questions both technical and fawning from the crowd. ”You can`t take Bambi home and cuddle him,” Nugent said. ”I ate him years ago.”
Describing himself as ”just another smelly bowhunter,” he urged the crowd to join the NRA and local hunting groups and to recruit young people to hunt. He said he hates dilettante bowhunters who come home and say, ”I didn`t kill any, but I hit two.”
”The mortal sin,” he said, ”is to wound an animal.” He says he has not sinned yet this year: 22 arrows shot, 22 kills.
Spiritual slam-dunk
Nugent has hunted, he says, since he was a boy, only recently going public with his love of it.
”It`s very different (from rock music), but it`s really the same. There is nothing more virile and electric than touring. I don`t care if you`re sacrificing virgins in an active volcano, there is nothing more energizing. There is an hour and a half of sheer borderline danger in my body, and I use it every night on stage.
”Equal intensity, with opposite manifestations, surfaces in the wild. I must apply the same concentration if I want to shut up and melt into a . . . oak thicket. But where one is extremely peaceful and silent and alone, the other one is mayhem. Neh heh heh. They are absolutely the ultimate sounding board for each other, and that`s why I`m good at both.”
The way he figures it, there are just a few ”timeless human functions”: birth, sex and killing. ”And, yes, I do get an absolute, spiritual slam-dunking out of a kill. Killing. Not hunting. Killing. I`m not talking about mindless assembly-line killing. I`m talking God`s order: `Hey, whack me a deer.` `Go there, for I pray thee, take thy weapons, thy quiver and thy bow, and take thee some venison.`
”And when you do that, yes, there is a tear that wants to come out. But you don`t dare. It`s like when I watched a cheetah tackle a gazelle while it was birthing in the Sudan, the mother howling in agony, the baby being aborted, a bit late, and the cheetah getting dinner. What, is that ugly? No. Is raping and bludgeoning a jogger in Central Park ugly? Yes! That`s ugly. But is a coyote getting his dinner, and even playing with the rabbit until it dies, is that ugly? No, that`s called Earth, captain.
”When Ted chooses not to stand in line and buy tainted beef and instead goes out and with a bow and arrow tries to get close enough to kill his own food, is that ugly? No, that is the essence of life.”
