Ted Nugent: Scream Dream : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

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Painted in contrasting shades of urban blight, suburban boredom and rural decay, Michigan is perfect primitive rock & roll territory: a place where nothin' to do ain't an attitude but a fact. The natives are restive and clannish, expressing themselves in a natural idiom of hostility and shamelessness. Indeed, what links Motown and the MC5 isn't so much the feigned connections between R&B and heavy metal, but the shared assumption that respect isn't something you earn, it's something you seize. None of these guys is much for playing by the rules.

I wish Mitch Ryder would remember. At his peak, he was the white Wilson Pickett: i.e., one of the two or three greatest white soul singers ever to stalk the stage. But Ryder is one of those rock & roll characters who got caught by fame in a transitional moment and never realized his due. "Devil with a Blue Dress On/Good Golly, Miss Molly" and "Jenny Take a Ride!" were terrific records, and if they'd been released a year sooner or five years later, Mitch Ryder might have become a superstar. But he got his hits with reworked R&B material at a time when writing one's own songs was obligatory, and he's been trying to live down that stigma ever since.

Naked but Not Dead, like last year's How I Spent My Vacation, is an attempt to catch up, to make a personal and artistic statement about serious matters. On How I Spent My Vacation, there was enough rage and self-loathing left in Ryder to render the effort credible, even if his songwriting skills were marginal. This time, without the instrumental firepower of Wayne Gabriel's guitar to add some electricity, he's simply overextended himself. The compositions are clearly cut to fif the lyrics, and the lyrics are usually embarrassing. "Ain't Nobody White" starts out as a tough guy's refusal to believe he can't sing the blues, then descends into a sardonic affirmation of Elvis Costello's brand of racism. "War" is a high-school cliché, while "I Don't Wanna Hear It" is absolutely virulent in its sexism. And so forth.

These days, Ryder is trying to substitute words for what's missing in his music. Yet the passion found in his best music wasn't verbal, it was visceral. And Naked but Not Dead is about as visceral as a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. Because the band is continually held in check–always tasteful, never risking silliness–the results are all the more absurd. Say this for Berry Wordy: when he released The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart, he never apologized. There's a message for Mitch Ryder there. He should stop yakking about kicking ass and just go out and do it.

That's what Ted Nugent does. Nugent has been recording almost as long as Ryder. He went without a hit (much less respect) a hell of a lot longer, but he's never complained, backed down–or matured, for that matter. If anything, he's grown even more free-spirited and less disciplined, without ever trying to elevate himself from a trashy, heavy-metal context. (When Nugent's original group, the Amboy Dukes, cut psychedelia like "Baby Please Don't Go" and "Journey to the Center of the Mind," they made LSD seem the equivalent of a case of beer and a pizza.)

Recently, Nugent has achieved some measure of critical notoriety by the very shamelessness of his act. He's become the thinking man's heavy-metaler, because all the rock writers think that someone so smart must be putting the world on. Double whammy: Ted Nugent really likes his music this way, meaty and brain-shaking, with all the intellectual content of Outdoor Life. I mean, Nugent's no different from John McLaughlin – he used to jam with Jimi Hendrix and everything. It's just that he prefers the simpler pleasures of life. Like enough wattage to take the hair off your scalp.

Nugent has never been identified with a single song, probably because he's never written one worth remembering until Scream Dream's indelible opener, "Wango Tango." This tune is an exuberant yawp somewhere between "Wooly Bully" and "Born to Be Wild": a tribute to a woman whose "face is a Maserati." A jive rap that Peter Wolf might envy, an act of Cro-Magnon brilliance, "Wango Tango" is a pure aberration that confirms Nugent's genius for taking the low road.

The rest of the record is the usual lengthy dialogue between Nugent and his guitar, with the added fillip of his own vocals. which distract him (and the listener) sufficiently from the Led Zeppelin scraps he's taken to recycling endlessly. Who cares if "I Gotta Move" was done cleaner and more succinctly on Led Zeppelin II? Unburdened by a hippie like Robert Plant, Nugent's version is better cannon fodder for a Saturday night beer blast anyhow.

Still. Scream Dream boils down to "Wango Tango," and "Wango Tango" is nothing less than Ted Nugent's tribute to his roots in the original Sixties punk trash. Yet this isn't anything akin to the nostalgia of Bob Seger's "Night Moves": no attempt is made to poeticize a dimly remembered and unreachable past. "Wango Tango" is the Sixties, warts and all–not from the campus protesters' point of view but from the memory of a guy with a tape deck, a beat-up '57 Chevy and not enough sophistication to imagine anything more ideal.

Nobody's going to write an essay about Nugent's lyrical mastery or his sensitivity, but I suspect that suits him fine. He'll play the aborigine as long as you let him play his goddamned guitar as loud as he wants. Ted Nugent doesn't need essays, because he doesn't read them, or have much to say to the sort of people who write them.

Which is exactly why I find him more and more irresistible. Sometimes you discover your roots where you least expect them. These are mine, and I make no apologies.