AMBOY DUKES

Marshall Crenshaw

Marshall Crenshaw

Not often you’re confronted with an ethical dilemma at a rock show.

It happened last week at Marshall Crenshaw’s show at New York’s City Winery, first song.

I was probably the only one with the problem, maybe the only one who recognized it. Crenshaw didn’t say anything before or after opening with the case in point, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”

Actually, besides three people I knew in the audience, I was probably the only one who knew the song, let alone that it was the one hit, in 1968, by the Amboy Dukes, Ted Nugent’s pre-solo career band. Ay, there’s the rub.

I loved that song when it came out, so psychedelically positive in its encouraging of self-exploration and discovery: “Take a ride to the land inside and you’ll see / How happy life could be if all of mankind / Would take the time to journey to the center of the mind.”

Contrast this, say, with the words of today’s Ted: “I took my machine gun in the helicopter [and] I killed 455 hogs with my machine gun,” or “Obama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine gun.” Machine gun sentiments like these may work well at tea parties and ammo shops, but I wasn’t about to pour a glass of City Winery’s special Marshall Crenshaw Cabernet Sauvignon and propose a toast.

image003Then again, neither will I deny that I’ve enjoyed Nugent shows in the past, even songs like his most juvenile “Wango Tango” (fave lyric: “Wango wango wango wango / Tango tango tango tango”). An intellectual heavyweight he’s not, but artists of varying degrees of intelligence and varied music genres from Wagner to Hank, Jr. and most recently Michelle Shocked have offended certain segments of the population, if not their own fan bases, with controversial political and/or social comments. On opposite ends of the musical and spiritual spectrum, both The Beatles and Larry Gatlin faced record burnings from strict religious factions upset, in the case of The Beatles, by John Lennon’s misunderstood “We’re more popular than Jesus” remark, and in Gatlin’s, by “The Midnight Choir,” his poignant/humorous 1979 take on drunks trying to talk to God, which was woefully mischaracterized by at least one radio station in Little Rock that burned copies of it.

Again, Crenshaw, who like Nugent hails from Detroit, didn’t say anything about the song at the show.

“I never loved the Amboy Dukes,” Crenshaw said a week later. “I remember being in a debate with my peers when I was in my teens about who was the best lead guitarist in town, Ted Nugent or Dick Wagner—and I took the side of Wagner.”

Wagner had his own popular bands in Detroit (The Bossmen, The Frost) and had another one, Ursa Major, with ex-Amboy Duke bassist Greg Arama, prior to playing on key albums from Lou Reed, Alice Cooper and KISS, among others.

The Amboy Dukes

The Amboy Dukes

“But I saw the Amboy Dukes once and they put on a great show,” continued Crenshaw. “Then I saw him on an outdoor channel a couple years ago, where he sat in the bushes and waited for a deer to come by—then plugged it in the ass with an arrow.”

That’s what kind of did it for me, Nugent’s unbridled joy in killing animals big and small, plentiful or endangered, that, and such incendiary comments as those quoted above.

This isn’t to say that Nugent is wholly lacking in redeeming social value.

“After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, he wrote a letter to the editor at Harper’s Magazine expressing outrage, and all these suggestions for preventing future disasters—and I was impressed with that,” said Crenshaw. “That he’s intelligent can’t be denied, but at the same time he’s out there grandstanding and clowning around with a bunch of idiots like a buffoon. So I try not to think about him too much. He’s a Bozo—and I say that with some affection.”

Too bad that of all the places Ted Nugent’s traveled in search of death, the one place he never really made it to, with some affection, was the center of the mind.

Jim Bessman

 

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