Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
The nation's most heavily armed rocker extols his new book, "Kill It and Grill It," blasts hippie environmentalists, praises Rush and says the success of "The Osbournes" reveals the soullessness of mankind.
Jun 11, 2002 | Ted Nugent would make a good cult leader. He's got all the ingredients: charisma, fame in a popular art form, a highly articulate and highly singular worldview and a badass public persona. Also, the man is heavily armed.
Nugent (aka The Motor City Madman, Uncle Ted, The Nuge, leader of Tribe Nuge) started bowhunting, at the age of 5, in 1953 and started playing guitar in 1956. Since then, he's pretty much conquered a world of his own making, a world in which seemingly contradictory beliefs are fused in a bath of undeniable testosterone. He's a rock star (since releasing his first album in 1967) who has been clean and sober (no drugs, alcohol or tobacco) his entire life; a Christian, a hunter and a conservationist. He hosts a radio show, edits and publishes a magazine (Ted Nugent Adventure Outdoors Magazine), produced a PBS series ("Ted Nugent's Spirit of the Wild"), is a board member at the National Rifle Association, and is a national spokesman for Rush Limbaugh, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, DARE and MADD. He's the founder of Ted Nugent United Sportsmen of America, Ted Nugent Kamp for Kids, Ted Nugent Bowhunting School and Sunrize Safaris. He is also the author of three books, "Bloodtrails: The Truth About Bowhunting" (1990), "God, Guns and Rock n' Roll" (2000, and a New York Times bestseller) and now -- what else was left? -- a very special cookbook.
"Kill It and Grill It," coauthored by Nugent and his wife, Shemane Nugent, is probably the only cookbook you will read this year in which the instructions read: "First step: Kill something!" After you've taken down a beast with your own two hands, you too can move on to such concoctions as Sweet 'n' Sour Antelope, Pheasant Chow Mein and Bubble Bean Piranha à la Colorado Moose, then finish with Banana Chocolate Crepes, adapted from Caviarteria, Ted and Shemane's favorite Vegas restaurant. (Shemane advises: "Oh and ladies, you'll need high heels and a nightie to serve this.")
Needless to say, this is not a book for vegetarians. (Though Nugent writes in the first chapter, "Vegetarians are cool. All I eat are vegetarians -- except for the occasional mountain lion steak.") It is, however, an extreme take on the natural foods movement. ("I got your whole foods right here!" reads the caption under a photo of a beaming Ted holding up the carcass of what looks like a rather large buffalo.) Tribe Nuge (i.e. Ted and his relatives) have not eaten commercial meat for over 30 years, a practice that is certainly easier when one lives on a 2,000 acre ranch stocked with fish and game, as the Nugents do, and when one makes a habit of exotic hunting safaris.
Hunting is undeniably an outlet for the Nuge's animal instincts. "I hump the wild to take it all in," writes Nugent, "there is no bag limit on happiness." Ted and his trusty Labrador retriever, Gonzo the Wonderdog, get a "full predator spiritual erection" from pursuing "bear, lions, coons, housecats, escaped chimps, small children, scared women, and everything else that can be chased and/or hunted." He also takes plenty of predatory digs at those he considers to be his human prey: He names a wild boar after Janet Reno ("the only thing missing was the purple dress and he-man haircut"), and describes the same boar as emitting a "Courtney Love-like squeal," while the remaining boars mill around like "a throng of stoned, lost Grateful Dead fans."
But Nugent also argues, to some degree persuasively, that if you are going to eat meat at all, getting the stuff yourself is better morally, ecologically and nutritionally than relying on a factory farm to provide it for you. (Though for a guy who touts the organic purity of his protein, he sure seems to rely heavily on such nutritionally suspect ingredients as Velveeta, Lipton onion soup, Accent seasonings and garlic salt in his recipes.) "Freerange chicken aint [sic] free and that aint no range," writes Nugent. "Chickens are incarcerated; some are more feces-pecking, deathrow toxic than others."
Not content to simply call for a revolution in American diet, Nugent takes on the English language as well. In his "Note on Style," he explains that George Bernard Shaw, "a sandal-wearing socialist vegetarian," tried to reform the spelling of the English language. But that isn't good "enuf" for Ted, who claims to have Nugetized it. Ted's Nugetization mostly takes the form of replacing "s" with "z" and "gh" with "f," devising his own contractions and a whole host of nicknames (Sir Tuskerdo McPork, Mr. TuffGuy Hawk), not to mention his tendency to exclaim "YOWZA, YOWZA" at appropriate intervals.
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