I should have been a rock star- The Nuge

The “Nuge”

In college, our heavy metal god was none other than the Motor City Madman, Ted Nugent. I had started buying his albums after I first heard the song “Great White Buffalo” on one of the local Tulsa FM stations. At that time, Ted was still part of his original band, the Amboy dukes.
The guitar amazed me! It was so frickin’ fast! I immediately bought the album, “Tooth, Fang and Claw” and listened to him play the guitar like a Wildman. I read up on Nugent in the Rolling Stone and a few other mags like Creem. He was a wild man of nature form the jungles of Detroit. He didn’t rink and he didn’t take drugs, he just played like one demon possessed.
Listening to Ted play was a cross between running through the woods naked, ready to kill dinner with your bare hands and holding on to both ends of a high tension electrical line!
I finally got to see Nugent at an outdoor concert in Tulsa and then at several other venues in both Tulsa and Wichita. He would swing onto the stage like Tarzan, dressed in a loincloth with his wild hair flying everywhere! He played the guitar like he was using it as a weapon! He rattled off in-between songs in his Nuge speed talk.
“This guitar can knock the balls off a charging Rhino at a hundred paces!” he screamed as he launched into one of the new songs he was playing for the crowd that night. Those songs turned out to be off an upcoming album “Free For all.”
At some show,. The Nuge would even shoot a flaming arrow form his legendary bow. The story was that he hunted and killed a lot of his own food. I could imagine him creeping through the forest, knife clenched between his teeth, crazy look of frenzy in his eyes.
One story said that at one concert, a man in the front began waving a pistol around as Ted played onstage. Apparently, the Nuge continued to wail as the man was subdued by security. It only added to his mystique.
In our dorm room, Nugents songs were blasted at sonic frequencies, straining the capabilities of my poor speakers that drove us into air guitar mob mentality! We jumped around the room, wind milling on imaginary guitars, knee drops into solos, and screaming jumbled lyrics with a pre-game passion. Gutty, our stocky defensive back would climb atop the desks, leaping from one to the other in the midst of “Stranglehold” or “Free For all’s” driving rhythm. He would rub his groin against our second story window as he mimicked the solo from “Cat Scratch Fever” to passer by girls below.
Ted Nugent’s music appealed to us on an athletic level. It was filled with the same abandon and fierceness that it took to survive on a college football field. The meek and mild were soon ground under by the survival of the fittest attitude that every successful football player lived by. It was hit or be hit. It was tooth, fang and claw to beat the guy across from you or be pulled slowly and painfully over the hot coals in the next film session as the coach played and replayed your failed efforts. It was a free for all every time the ball was snapped.
Nugent represented that to us. He was abandon and wild. He was the rhythm to which our collective drums beat. It was his guitar solo that pulsed with our heart rate. His scream was our adrenalin. We knew a kind of call of the wild, and it happened every Saturday on the gridiron. We left there bruised and bloodied, licking our wounds or bursting with excitement from a successful hunt.

It was funny, but not unusual that my listening to the Nuge declined as I left college football. Was it that my attitudes cooled while others still listened to his music? Was it I had changed so suddenly?
Maybe it was that I had been there and done that. I identified with it then, but my life had changed from participant to coach or spectator. The adrenalin I used was a different one.
I had also changed in another way. In the last couple years of college, I had been reading more and more eastern philosophy. I was introduced to novels of Kurt Vonnegut. I really felt like I was becoming more of a whole person; more compassionate, more philosophical, less Darwinian.
I have now coached football for 24 of the 31 years in coaching. At one point sixteen years into the journey, I got out and really didn’t miss it then. In fact, I was having a little bit of a conscious problem with teaching kids in such a violent sport. The 7 years I was out made me realize more than ever that I could coach it and not be like the Neanderthals that give physical sports a bad name. I didn’t have to be the caveman coach, but I could teach them to love it for the sheer joy of competition with others and the battle against their own limitations.
I still listen to Ted from time to time. I still love to hear “Hibernation” and driving guitar of “Stromtroopin”and “Dog eat Dog.” But the adolescent sex jokes of “Cat Scratch fever” and “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang” have little appeal for me now.
Ted, of course, went on the be a spokesman for the goals of the N.R.A. and even conservative talk radio. He still promotes guns and hunting. Me. I became more of a tree hugger and liberal. I don’t hunt. I became a vegetarian and I mediate.
What person watching from the sidelines in those early years would have ever guessed that Captain Crazy would turn out more peace and love than “Dog Eat dog?”