Ted Nugent: Weekend Warriors : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Having spent a week locked up indoors with Ted Nugent's four most recent records (probably the best examples of aural Ambesol our culture has yet produced), I'm forced to confess I've truly undergone the heavy-metal experience. My bones are crushed, my senses deadened, and I may not be able to walk again. I guess I like Ted Nugent. Though Nugent's rock & roll is certainly old hat–the guitarist unabashedly peddles such late-Sixties/early-Seventies technoraunch techniques as distortion, feedback and sledgehammer riffs–it hardly ever comes off as if stuffed with mothballs. Owing as much to Muddy Waters as to Bethlehem Steel, Nugent makes heavy metal sound exactly like it's supposed to: like a motorcycle gang who's come to take your daughter away.

If Weekend Warriors doesn't break any new ground, it isn't meant to. "One Woman," in fact, boisterously loots its opening riff from "Cat Scratch Fever," the title track of Nugent's last studio album. Undoubtedly, the artist's principal mission here is to celebrate the painful pleasure of high voltage. While this could surely be an aesthetic dead end, Nugent and his new band still play with fluency and passion. And you've got to hand it to him for refusing to submit to what generally guarantees hard-rock musicians plenty of airplay these days: Nutty Squirrels harmonies (Boston), clean-shaven squareness (Foreigner) and gooey sweetness (Heart).

As abrasive as Weekend Warriors' whiplash rock & roll may be, the songs themselves are never subversive or harrowing. Instead, they're conventional ("Need You Bad," "I Got the Feelin'"), thunderously optimistic ("Good Friends and a Bottle of Wine") or just plain goofy ("Venom Soup"). This is disappointing. Nugent could benefit from some conceptual audacity to really forklift his music. His singing, decent though it is, doesn't carry the same threat as his guitar. In "Name Your Poison" and "Venom Soup" (a tune that boasts such Silly Putty lyrics as "You are the demon's right arm/Dishing out your venom soup"), he sneers and snarls like Dennis the Menace on the rampage. You have to laugh. If the current LP is connected by a theme, it's about breaking out, turning loose, cruising, getting sloshed on the weekend–and then going back to school or work on Monday. (Which explains perfectly why so many American teenagers can easily relate to these songs, yet not to those of the Sex Pistols.)

But Ted Nugent, of course, is more concerned with the Almighty Axe than little things like vocals or lyrics. By offering a veritable catalog of hot-guitar styles, he lays convincing claim to his enviable position as a guitar hero. While not particularly inventive, Nugent is able to move comfortably from the dizzying speed of Johnny Winter and Alvin Lee through the melodramatic bombast of Jimmy Page to the feedback excursions of Jimi Hendrix. And along the way, he nails you to the floor and keeps you there.

Though we're rapidly approaching the Eighties, Nugent continues to cling to the Seventies as if he were single-handedly responsible for keeping the heavy-metal tradition alive. Fortunately, the best moments on Weekend Warriors suggest that this veteran still has a real future ahead of him. His ferocious zeal seems as instinctive and unforced as ever. For all I know, we might have to listen to this stuff until the year 2001 rocks & rolls around.