A courageous conservationist speaks out ...

[TBird1958]

 The only album of his that I can say I like is "Ted Nugent" "Hey Baby" "Stranglehold" "Snakeskin Cowboys" etc., pretty decent but I give most of the credit to Derek St. Holmes - Nugent's ego got rid him quickly enough.......The result is  bombast, crappy simplistic tripe. 

[westen44]

Whitford & St. Holmes

[Pilgrim]

Cat Scratch Fever is the only Nugent tune that I recognize. But his general type of music isn't something I follow.

[gearHed289]

Sweaty Teddy was right up there with bands like Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, and Rush in the late 70s, at least as far as touring. He got some decent airplay with those first three albums too, but not a lot of big hit songs. I was in 8th grade when the live one came out, and I was amazed to hear someone swearing on a record.  I think Wango Tango was the last real single of his. That was 1980.

[Pilgrim]

Sweaty Teddy was right up there with bands like Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, and Rush in the late 70s, at least as far as touring. He got some decent airplay with those first three albums too, but not a lot of big hit songs. I was in 8th grade when the live one came out, and I was amazed to hear someone swearing on a record.  I think Wango Tango was the last real single of his. That was 1980.

Clearly, you post-date the Fugs of the 60's. 

[Rob]

Clearly, you post-date the Fugs of the 60's. 

NICE PIL!

[uwe]

Sweaty Teddy was right up there with bands like Aerosmith, Thin Lizzy, and Rush in the late 70s, at least as far as touring. He got some decent airplay with those first three albums too, but not a lot of big hit songs. I was in 8th grade when the live one came out, and I was amazed to hear someone swearing on a record.  I think Wango Tango was the last real single of his. That was 1980.

Tom and his sheltered upbringing ... 

[gearHed289]

Tom and his sheltered upbringing ... 

Ha! Yeah, if my family hadn't moved to suburbia when I was in 8th grade, I might have gotten tipped off to more stuff like this. Why was the MC5 not bigger? Did they implode? Maybe just not the right time. If they'd come out in '76 they might have made more of a mark.

[TBird1958]

Tom and his sheltered upbringing ... 

Music was better when some of us ugly people got to make it.

[the mojo hobo]

The Amboy Dukes recorded three or four albums after Journey to the Center and each was different transforming more to the Nugent solo style, and I don't think there was a hit on any of them. The follow-up to Journey, Migration, is likeable. We played it in my post high school band.

The only other song I remember from that record:


MC5 was loud!

[Highlander]

I had all of those early albums too... enjoyed most of them back in the day... I think I may still have a single called Scottish Tea... instrumental, iirc...

[uwe]

Ha! Yeah, if my family hadn't moved to suburbia when I was in 8th grade, I might have gotten tipped off to more stuff like this. Why was the MC5 not bigger? Did they implode? Maybe just not the right time. If they'd come out in '76 they might have made more of a mark.

I dunno. Why Grand Funk Railroad and not them? It's the same question with The Stooges, The New York Dolls, The Dictators (who owed quite a bit to MC5 and admitted as much) and the Ramones, none of these bands meant much commercially in their heyday and they were derided, yet critics' darlings a few years later. I guess commercial success and being seen as having a pivotal counter-culture impact is mutually exclusive. Quality of management, record company support and tenacity/resilience of the musicians (think of how long Kiss took to crack the market) play a major role I think. And being at least not too unlucky with drug intake.

You could of course say that all the bands named above were not exactly brilliant or even just solid and reliable musicians in a technical sense - Foghat, to name a critics' nightmare, could have wiped the floor with MC5, Stooges, NYD, Ramones or Dictators at any given stadium gig in the mid seventies. But then neither were Kiss at least initially and look where they got - experience elevates talent mediocrity if you hang around long enough. Does the  public have an ear for musically and instrumentally outstanding talent after all, just like they recognize very good athletes? Being good at what you do is not sufficient for a music career as everyone knows, but it doesn't hold you back either if there are other aspects in the equation in favor of you.

[westen44]

^^^
I would say Grand Funk Railroad instead of MC5 because GFR was a better band.  I can remember as a teenager buying one of the early MC5 albums.  I didn't know anything about them.  I was just hoping it would be a good album.  I disliked it so much I got a refund.  I think I had only listened to it once, but that was more than enough.  Grand Funk, on the other hand, was one of my favorite bands for a while.  Our band loved playing their songs and the crowd was very receptive, too.  Now that I look back at it, I would say my dislike of MC5 is that I was  never a big fan of the genre they were associated with which is now called proto-punk rock.  My taste in music has changed some.  Most likely I would be more receptive to it now, but certainly not when I was a teenager. 

[uwe]

GFR were no doubt the more organic, groovier band and better, more experienced individual players than MC5 though early Grand Funk was still a rough sounding, earthy affair (which was part of their appeal, but they honed their sound quite radically and quickly). I'm a great fan of GFR though I prefer their later phase with Craig Frost as added keyboarder.

That "proto-punk"-badge was in my impression attached to bands like MC5, Stooges and New York Dolls in hindsight (long after they had actually all split up) by British journalists (especially the NME) when punk raised its spiky head in the UK in 1976. Before that all these bands were simply considered "hard (or heavy) rock" bands,

the bland definition of hard (or heay) rock in my book being
mid- to uptempo music with a focus on distorted guitar riffs,

just not instrumentally very skillful ones. Sort of hard rock without the Cream-indebted virtuoso/improvisational component. But in the summer of 76 it was all of the sudden de rigueur as an up and coming Brit punk musician that you were of course weaned on MC5, Stooges and NYD records, when in fact - as the singer of Eddie & the Hot Rods once admitted - "none of us had actually heard these records, but saying instead that we grew up with The Rolling Stones, T. Rex, Bowie, Sweet, Status Quo, Led Zep, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath wouldn't have sounded nearly as cool".

Sex Pistols Svengali Malcolm McLaren had of course managed the New York Dolls (when they were already disintegrating after having failed to crack the US market with their first two albums), so he was always keen to point out a connection there.

[gearHed289]

Nice insight, thanks. That all makes sense.