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This post, written by Howie Klein, originally appeared on Down With Tyranny!
There were always two distinct groups of people interested in the 60s "drug culture." For some, pot, mescaline and LSD and the socio-political subculture that thrived around them were experiences in consciousness-raising, quests for enlightenment and spirituality, escapes from the dark tyranny that had enveloped America in the stultifying McCarthyite 50s. And then there were the mindless, soulless creeps who read about it all in Time, glommed on to what seemed to be happening and never had any clue about any of it whatsoever.
Ted Nugent was one of those behind Door # 2. He has always tried to portray himself and his musical output as part of the creative cultural explosion that included The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Dead, Jefferson Airplane, The Byrds, Cream, The Who, Pink Floyd... He wasn't... ever. Nugent had his own fans and he may mock the "dirty, stinky hippies" to his Republican pals today but the unpleasant smells Nugent is complaining about are far more likely to have emanated from the kind of crude and unwashed louts who were enthusiastic about his own high-volume/low-consciousness, uninspired commercial pap. In the 60s I booked every single musical artist mentioned above to play a concert at my college-- except one: Ted Nugent. Even though his 60s band, the Amboy Dukes, tried to capitalize on the drug culture, he was never taken seriously by anyone with more than a two-digit IQ. (To this day Nugent claims he never knew Journey to the Center of the Mind was about drugs.)
The most right wing of the quasi-respectible, neo-fascist propaganda sheets, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, has decided to celebrate Independence Day by inviting the washed up rocker to pen a story about dirty, stinky hippies. Before I go through Nugent's latest raging insanity with you, let me make a disclaimer. When I was part of senior management at Warner Bros-- a divisional president-- many of my colleagues were repulsed by Nugent's bombastic music, bad attitude and reactionary politics. By then he was part of a latter-day hair band called Damn Yankees. There was always a drumbeat of people who wanted to drop them. I wasn't among them. Well, I was among those who found his music, etc. beneath contempt, but my feeling was always that our duty to the company's shareholders, the owners, had to transcend our own sense of taste. Damn Yankees had two commercially successful albums, the 1990 eponymous debut and the less successful Don't Tread. They both sucked but there is always a market for music that sucks and Warner Bros was more famous for music that didn't suck.
In 1967 my friend Bob and I decided to hitchhike from New York to Mexico City. It was a wild, adventurous journey for two teenagers and after Mexico we wound up in San Francisco, in the midst of what is commonly called "The Summer of Love" and what Nugent has dubbed "The Summer of Drugs." I was way into the love part, too broke-- having been robbed of everything but the clothes on my back at the Alamo-- to get much into the drugs part. Nugent's typical publicity-craving outburst today was brought on by the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.
The Summer of Drugs climaxed with the Monterey Pop Festival which included some truly virtuoso musical talents such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, both of whom would be dead a couple of years later due to drug abuse. Other musical geniuses such as Jim Morrison and Mama Cass would also be dead due to drugs within a few short years. The bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood.
Still bitter about not making the grade as one of the "cool kids," Nugent is intensely jealous of the figures who became famous for their songs and music rather than for their gimmicks and empty outrageousness. (He spewed out over 30 albums, most unlistenable, and had one good song, "Cat Scratch Fever," in 1977. Find me a fan who would put Ted Nugent in a class with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison or Mama Cass (I thought she OD-ed on a sandwich, not drugs), and I'll show you why Nugent thinks music fans have bad personal hygiene.
Nugent is a voice of ultra-reaction, something like Ann Coulter, with the craziest corner of modern day Republicanism. Like the Germans who blamed their predicament on everyone but themselves after World War I and constantly agitated for fascism, Nugent is incapable of learning anything from history.
The 1960s, a generation that wanted to hold hands, give peace a chance, smoke dope and change the world, changed it all right: for the worse. America is still suffering the horrible consequences of hippies who thought utopia could be found in joints and intentional disconnect.
A quick study of social statistics before and after the 1960s is quite telling. The rising rates of divorce, high school drop outs, drug use, abortion, sexual diseases and crime, not to mention the exponential expansion of government and taxes, is dramatic. The "if it feels good, do it" lifestyle born of the 1960s has proved to be destructive and deadly.
Nugent's next masterpiece, Love Grenade is about to hit the stores, where it is widely expected to flop, like all of his recent output. But he does have fans, although they're not likely to be people you would invite into your home. He was well-received when he spoke at the NRA's 2005 convention in Houston when he advocated killing suspects pulled over by the police. "I want carjackers dead. I want rapists dead. I want burglars dead. I want child molesters dead. I want the bad guys dead. No court case. No parole. No early release. I want 'em dead. Get a gun and when they attack you, shoot 'em." Gee, I even want Bush and Cheney to have fair trials first.
Tagged as: conservatives. the 1960s, music, nugent
Howie Klein was president of his freshman class, drove to Afghanistan and Nepal, became the president of Reprise Records and started a blog called Down With Tyranny!. He's always hated tyrants.
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