http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/features/article571538.eceTed Nugent: Off his rocker?
He owns 350 guns, wants to nuke Iraq and makes his friend George W look like a liberal. Now 1970s heavy metal star Ted Nugent has his sights set on a new target: entering US politics
Published: 28 May 2006
During the private inaugural party at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in 2000, President George W Bush glanced across the room and recognised a man who - by his own account - has urinated on a nun, soiled his trousers for a week in order to avoid the draft, and been detained on a charge of indecent exposure, after experiencing difficulties with his loincloth in Little Rock, Arkansas. The President confronted him as a matter of urgency.
"When he noticed me," Ted Nugent recalls, "he was surrounded by these huge bankrollers from his campaign. He literally swept past all of them and said: 'Laura! Look who's here! It's Ted!' Then he hugged me and took me by the shoulders. He said: 'Just keep doing what you're doing. Don't think that we don't know what you're up to out here. Stay on course. You're doing great.'"
Like Jesus, Gandhi or Hitler, Nugent tends to inspire this kind of extreme reaction. He rarely gives interviews to the British press; the last time he did, some years ago, he managed what is possibly the most extraordinary achievement of his remarkable career - proving too right-wing for the Daily Telegraph.
Ted Nugent, 57, best known for his 1977 hit "Cat Scratch Fever", has sold 40 million records over four decades. The Detroit-born guitarist, once described as the missing link between Iggy Pop and the White House, used to perform dressed as a Neanderthal - a prophetic gesture, some would argue, given his emergence, in middle age, as an arch-conservative National Rifle Association board member, and obsessive hunter. Nugent, who has personally slaughtered all the meat he's eaten since 1971, hosts two reality shows from the 300-acre ranch - just up the road from Bush's compound in Crawford - where he lives with his second wife Shemane and son Rocco, 15. In 2004, while filming Surviving Ted, in which city dwellers strive to replicate his uncompromising lifestyle, he almost severed his (omega) leg with a chainsaw. The musician, who owns seven other properties in the US, arranged to meet me at a truck-stop café in the centre of this one-street Texan town. Famous for songs such as "My Baby Likes My Butter on Her Grits", "*****whipped" and "My Love is Like a Tire Iron", Nugent is not known for his intuitive connection to his feminine side; he arrives wearing a camouflage cowboy hat, his shorts supported by a belt housing a Glock revolver. I don't, at this stage, notice the .22 which he will discharge in 45 minutes' time.
We sit down to coffee, eggs and grits. Ted is 6ft 3in; to get a sense of his general demeanour you could do worse than imagine the body of John Wayne possessed by the spirit of Ian Paisley in one of his less conciliatory moods. He launches into a fevered monologue about how much safer Britain would be with more guns on its streets.
"Never has there been such an upsurge in crime since they confiscated all your weapons. Why don't you arm yourselves? You Limeys have a zipper that's locked in the closed position, because you don't have a constitution. You're rewarded for shutting the **** up."
He explains his political philosophy which, as I understand it, is based on extending the death penalty to a far wider range of crimes than homicide, then arming any survivors to the teeth. He owns around 350 guns himself - more than one for every household in Crawford.
British police who don't want to carry firearms are, Nugent says, "out of their minds. I say if somebody robs you, shoot 'em. I'd like all thieves killed. And all rapists. And carjackers. No more graffiti. No more..." - this next phrase is a Spoonerism, rather than some Texan term for gross indecency - "snatch-pursing."
"For an unarmed force," I suggest, "the British police have shot quite a few people. Did you hear about Jean Charles de Menezes?"
"That was horrible. An American cop would have just beat the **** out of him."
Nugent has had a Sheriff Deputy's badge since 1982, and recently assisted with federal raids, "kicking down doors and arresting people". A keen admirer of fellow-guitarist Tony Blair, he abhors drugs, including alcohol, and maintains that he has never used such substances. He considers homosexuality morally wrong. He speaks about Muslims in a way which, were he to repeat it on globally networked television, might endanger his life. Nugent is aiming to run as Governor of Michigan in 2010.
"If Yusuf Islam is a threat to world peace," I tell him, in response to his anti-Islamic rant, "I'll run your campaign myself, wearing cactus shorts."
"Only the guilty need feel guilty," he replies. "These jihadists want to kill us and Cat Stevens. The message to send to a coyote is: the next time I see you, I'll shoot you."
He went to Fallujah in May 2004, as part of a tour with the USO (the same organisation that sent Bob Hope to entertain on the front line).
"And I visited Saddam Hussein's master war room. It was a glorious moment. It looked like something out of Star Wars. I saw his gold toilet. I **** in his bidet."
In Iraq, he says, he was allowed the opportunity to man automatic weapons. "Our failure," he tells me, "has been not to Nagasaki them."
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