“Anybody wants to get mellow, you can turn around and get the f-ck outta here!”
To be honest, nothing Ted Nugent might have said after that would have mattered: He’d already won over my 15-year-old soul with that blistering, testosterone-soaked introduction to “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang.”
Nugent’s “Double Live Gonzo” album, released in 1978, was loaded with such morsels. As a teenager, such ebullitions reinforced the insubordinate rock ‘n’ roll creed to which I’d long since committed: Think for yourself, go against the grain, and, most important, make your parents uneasy.
Of course, that last bit only mattered if your folks actually cared about what you were putting on your turntable or into your 8-track.
My alcohol-addled, perpetually-on-the-verge-of-divorce parents were far too checked out to worry about my grades or where I was, let alone my music, so I was forced to look to other authoritarians for credible condemnation: teachers, politicians, police. You know — The Man.
Truth-to-tell, The Man provided the best rebellion fodder for most teens of that era. You see, whereas many of our parents did have some redeeming qualities, the same could not be said of the dingbats running the country: By 1979, with inflation and unemployment at record levels and our international position in the toilet, the government had so thoroughly screwed up almost every aspect of American life that news anchors were routinely referencing a “misery index” as an assessment of the nation.
Indeed, as the decade of bell bottoms and mood rings
