Album: Ted Nugent
Year: 1975
. . .
So let’s us get the obvious out in the open first. While I’m pretty sure I didn’t know it in the 70s, 80’s or maybe even the 1990s — time has proven Ted Nugent to be one of the worst human beings to ever walk the planet, a sack of enough shit that I was tempted to not even write about him at all. But, of course, Ted Nugent is neither the first nor last garbage person I’ve written about, and the blog is called “Certain Songs,” not “Certain Artists,” so let us discuss for a few minutes the greatest song the man ever wrote, the opening track to his eponymous debut album, “Stranglehold.”
And while 1975’s Ted Nugent was the first solo album he released under his own name, by that time Nugent was a veteran rocker, having recorded six studio albums and one live album with The Amboy Dukes going back to 1967, the only song from which I’ve ever heard is the garage-psych classic “Journey to the Center of Your Mind.” And given that by the time they recorded their last two albums, they were known as “Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes.”
Things happened fast in the 1970s: that final Amboy Dukes album came out in 1974, and within a year of dumping the Dukes brand, Nugent had gotten himself a second guitarist and lead vocalist in Derek St. Holmes and a crack rhythm section — Cliff Davies on drums and Rob Grange (who had actually played a the last couple of Amboy Dukes albums) on bass — and a bunch of new songs, the best of which was the bass-driven jam, “Stranglehold,” which led off the album.
You could do that in 1975: lead off your album with a mid-tempo strutter with about a thousand guitar solos. “Stranglehold” starts off with a feint, though: at first, it’s just Ted Nugent cranking out a cool riff all by himself, until he’s joined by Davies on drums and a big, menacing bassline that pretty runs throughout the entire song, anchoring it through all of the guitar solos, which pretty much come after every single competently-sung chorus by St Holmes.
Because that bassline is so powerful, Nugent takes his times with the long solo break, never getting too flash, letting the notes take their sweet time coming and going — at one point producer Tom Werman used delay to make it seem like a couple of guys were soloing, but apparently, it was all in one take, and climaxes with what is either a rip from “Becks Bolero” or “How Many More Times” — either way, a Jimmy Page tribute — and which sandwiches Nugent’s only solo vocal on the song.
Sometimes you gonna get higher
Sometimes you gotta start low
Some people think they gonna die someday
I got news you never got to go
While “Stranglehold” was also released as a single, it didn’t chart, which wasn’t exactly surprising: despite his ubiquity on FM radio in the back half of the 1970s, Ted Nugent’s highest-charting single was 1977’s “Cat Scratch Fever” and his highest-charting albums were 1978’s Double Live Gonzo and 1980’s Scream Dream, both of which peaked at #13 That said, I doubt he’s hurting for money or anything.
Oh, and despite the fact that Ted Nugent once admitted that Rob Grange co-wrote the song, Grange has never been credited for it, despite — and have I mentioned this — that bassline. Once a shit, always a shit.
“Stranglehold”
“Stranglehold” Live on The Midnight Special
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