Ted Nugent has spent fifty years being one of the most controversial figures in American rock — not primarily because of his music, which is the thing that controversies about musicians are usually about, but because of his political positions, his hunting advocacy, his public persona of aggressive confrontation with anyone who disagrees with him on any subject, and his specific gift for making statements that guarantee he will remain in the news cycle regardless of what his current musical output is doing commercially.
This is the part of the Ted Nugent story that the music press has told most consistently and most thoroughly, and it has had the specific effect of making it difficult to discuss his actual musical output with the seriousness it deserves — because the seriousness the music deserves is in uncomfortable proximity to a figure whose public behavior many people find difficult to separate from the work.
The musicians who have been most honest about Nugent’s guitar playing — including people who have been publicly critical of his politics and his persona — have said, with the specific reluctance of people making an admission they would prefer not to make, that the guitar playing is not subject to the same criticisms as the man. That Cat Scratch Fever’s riff, whatever its source in the blues tradition Nugent built his style on, is one of the most immediately effective pieces of guitar writing in hard rock. That the live recordings from the mid-1970s — Double Live Gonzo specifically — document a guitarist operating at a level of sustained energy and technical precision that the era’s more celebrated guitarists, however gifted, did not consistently match in a live context.
1. Stranglehold (1975)
The eight-minute guitar showcase from the debut album — a piece of extended improvisation that demonstrated Nugent’s understanding of dynamics, tension, and release within a single sustained performance. The guitar solo in Stranglehold has been cited by guitarists across genres — including several who have no interest in endorsing Nugent’s non-musical positions — as one of the finest examples of blues-rock guitar playing in the classic rock era. The sustain, the note choices, the specific relationship between the guitar and the rhythm section: these are not things that are diminished by disagreement with the player’s political views, however much the disagreement might make that acknowledgment uncomfortable.
2. Cat Scratch Fever (1977)
The riff is three notes. The three notes have been heard by more people than almost any other three notes in rock history. The specific energy of Nugent’s performance of the song — the aggression that the playing communicates before any lyrical content has been registered — is a piece of guitar playing as pure communication, as the direct transmission of a specific feeling through an instrument, that the people who find the player’s other positions most objectionable have found most difficult to dismiss. The feeling communicated is physical and immediate and does not require agreement with its source to be received.
3. Wang Dang Sweet Poontang (1977)
The song whose title produces the most eye-rolling from people who approach Nugent from the outside and whose playing produces, in the same people who approach the actual recording with the openness of people willing to evaluate what they hear, the specific response of something that is better than it has any right to be. The guitar work in the verses and the break is the work of someone who understands the blues vocabulary at a molecular level and deploys it with a ferocity that the genre’s more celebrated practitioners have often chosen not to match.
4. Free for All (1976)
The title track of the second album — a piece of hard rock construction that demonstrates the understanding of how a guitar riff functions not just as a musical statement but as an architectural element around which the rest of the song is organized. Nugent’s approach to arrangement, however un-discussed it is in the accounts of his career that focus on his persona, is more sophisticated than the genre’s reputation for simplicity usually allows for.
5. Great White Buffalo (1974)
Written as an environmental statement about the destruction of the bison — a position that has an interesting relationship with Nugent’s subsequent public persona, which has not always foregrounded environmental concern. The irony of Great White Buffalo being an early Nugent song is the kind of irony that a person’s career development produces when the positions of the person change faster than the catalog. The guitar playing is extraordinary. The environmental sentiment is genuine to the moment of its writing.
The musicians who have been most honest about Nugent’s guitar playing include several who would prefer to be honest about other things instead. The music is not responsible for the man. The man is not responsible for the music. The relationship between them is complicated, as it always is, and the honesty about the music does not require agreement with the man.