{"id":9865,"date":"2013-05-16T18:38:31","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T01:38:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/?p=9865"},"modified":"2013-05-16T18:38:31","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T01:38:31","slug":"amboy-dukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/2013\/05\/amboy-dukes\/","title":{"rendered":"AMBOY DUKES"},"content":{"rendered":"

AMBOY DUKES<\/h1>\n
\"Marshall

Marshall Crenshaw<\/p><\/div>\n

Not often you\u2019re confronted with an ethical dilemma at a rock show.<\/p>\n

It happened last week at Marshall Crenshaw\u2019s show at New York\u2019s City Winery, first song.<\/p>\n

I was probably the only one with the problem, maybe the only one who recognized it. Crenshaw didn\u2019t say anything before or after opening with the case in point, \u201cJourney to the Center of the Mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s pre-solo career band. Ay, there\u2019s the rub.<\/p>\n

I loved that song when it came out, so psychedelically positive in its encouraging of self-exploration and discovery: \u201cTake 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contrast this, say, with the words of today\u2019s Ted: \u201cI took my machine gun in the helicopter [and] I killed 455 hogs with my machine gun,\u201d or \u201cObama, he’s a piece of shit, and I told him to suck on my machine\u00a0gun.\u201d Machine gun sentiments like these may work well at tea parties and ammo shops, but I wasn\u2019t about to pour a glass of City Winery\u2019s special\u00a0Marshall Crenshaw Cabernet Sauvignon<\/i>\u00a0and propose a toast.<\/p>\n

\"image003\"Then again, neither will I deny that I\u2019ve enjoyed Nugent shows in the past, even songs like his most juvenile \u201cWango Tango\u201d (fave lyric: \u201cWango wango wango wango \/ Tango tango tango tango\u201d). An intellectual heavyweight he\u2019s 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\u2019s misunderstood \u201cWe\u2019re more popular than Jesus\u201d remark, and in Gatlin\u2019s, by \u201cThe Midnight Choir,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Again, Crenshaw, who like Nugent hails from Detroit, didn\u2019t say anything about the song at the show.<\/p>\n

\u201cI never loved the Amboy Dukes,\u201d Crenshaw said a week later. \u201cI 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\u2014and I took the side of Wagner.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\"The

The Amboy Dukes<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cBut I saw the Amboy Dukes once and they put on a great show,\u201d continued Crenshaw. \u201cThen 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\u2014then plugged it in the ass with an arrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what kind of did it for me, Nugent\u2019s unbridled joy in killing animals big and small, plentiful or endangered, that, and such incendiary comments as those quoted above.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t to say that Nugent is wholly lacking in redeeming social value.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the Exxon Valdez oil spill, he wrote a letter to the editor at\u00a0Harper\u2019s Magazine\u00a0<\/i>expressing outrage, and all these suggestions for preventing future disasters\u2014and I was impressed with that,\u201d said Crenshaw. \u201cThat he\u2019s intelligent can\u2019t be denied, but at the same time he\u2019s 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\u2019s a Bozo\u2014and I say that with some affection.\u201d<\/p>\n

Too bad that of all the places Ted Nugent\u2019s traveled in search of death, the one place he never really made it to, with some affection, was the center of the mind.<\/p>\n

Jim Bessman<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AMBOY DUKES Not often you\u2019re confronted with an ethical dilemma at a rock show. It happened last week at Marshall Crenshaw\u2019s show at New York\u2019s City Winery, first song. I was probably the only one with the problem, maybe the only one who recognized it. Crenshaw didn\u2019t say anything before or after opening with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4976],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9865"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9870,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9865\/revisions\/9870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mmusicmag.com\/m\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}