During a recent edition of “The Nightly Nuge”, a news-style clip in which Ted Nugent offers his take on the news of our world every night, the legendary rocker was asked for his opinion on the “current state of music in America.”
He responded in part:
“Well, thank God I was born in 1948 because Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and Little Richard and James Brown and Wilson Pickett and the Motown Funk Brothers and all those great soulful musical authorities inspired all the best music that we still love today. So I’m spoiled to a fault, because I lived in a whirlwind, the energy vortex of the most intense work ethic-driven music.
“The reason we love Aerosmith and AC/DC and ZZ Top and Heart Journey and Cheap Trick and Foreigner and so many bands I could name… I cannot overstate the incredible animal work ethic that we put forth to practice and practice and practice, because the music makes us do it,” he continued.
“And as young kids, all we wanted to do was be as tight as James Brown, as energized as Chuck Berry, as soulful as the Motown Funk Brothers and Wilson Pickett and Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters and Mose Allison and Lightnin’ Hopkins. We wanted to get that black soulfulness, so the work ethic was unbelievable.
“Now, we’ve still got some bands that are doing it, like Greta Van Fleet out of Grand Rapids, Michigan here. There are some bands out there — certainly the Foo Fighters with the great Dave Grohl; they still play fire-breathing real soulful tight music. But I’m afraid it’ll never be like it was with The [Rolling] Stones and The Beatles and The Who and The Kinks and Led Zeppelin and what Van Halen created and what the Ted Nugent band and Ronnie Montrose and what Sammy Hagar still does — so many people out there still doing it. But I’m afraid that most of the successful music today — some of it is mind-boggling.”
Ted added: “I don’t know this gal’s name with the long legs, but she gets a thousand bucks a ticket or whatever it is.” When co-host Keith Mark threw out Taylor Swift’s name, Nugent said: “Yeah, Taylor Swift. But that music, to me, sounds like cartoon music. It sounds like if I bumped into a child’s cartoon show on a Saturday morning, I would probably hear the No. 1 country song or I would hear the No. 1 pop song, because it’s all formulated to give a certain vocal delivery and a certain chord change and a certain tempo that they examine so closely that it’s not organic and instinctive and sexy and unleashed and genuine and believable.
“I liked it when we were in the experimental stage of trying to duplicate what Chuck Berry had invented, what Little Richard had invented,” Nugent said. “And again, there’s some great artists. I got to play some of my songs with the Big & Rich band, with the Toby Keith band, and these bands are unbelievable. There’s a Tim Montana; I got to play ‘Cat Scratch Fever’ with the Tim Montana band. Ira Dean, who co-wrote that amazing Aaron Lewis song ‘Am I The Only One’. There’s some great, great musical moments still happening — but not the unlimited flurry of incredible music in the late ’50s and the ’60s and into the ’70s. And even the Poison’s and the Warrant and — I can’t think of all those… RATT and some of the big hair bands, they played really good — they were great musicians. But there will never be a 1966 ever again, because it was so raw and primal. Now it’s predictable, and I’m afraid it’s mostly cookie-cutter stuff. Now, only the guilty need to feel guilty, ’cause there’s some great artists out there that are making some wonderful music. But it’s just not as raw and primal as my original inspirations, and I cling to that.”
