Love Grenade

by Stephen Thomas ErlewineTwo songs into 2007's Love Grenade, his 20th album, Ted Nugent spits out that he's "Still Raising Hell" -- a sentiment that he's been recycling for about 20 years now, when he was mounting a comeback in the late '80s in an attempt to reclaim his mid-'70s glory days. Back then, he was just another old arena rocker scrambling to get his new stuff heard on radio, but in the two decades since he's craftily positioned himself as something of a right-wing icon, beginning with his enthusiastic embrace of hunting, which moved toward vocal pro-gun support and then just a general pro-Republican gadfly, appearing as a talking head on Fox News, writing books about "God, Guns and Rock & Roll" (the title of his 2001 tome), and penning the occasional rambling editorial. It was quite a feat, turning from a rude rocker to a pundit who is taken so seriously that his rumblings about running for governor of Michigan aren't immediately laughed out, but the Nuge has to go and sabotage that hard-earned reputation by releasing a record as tacky as Love Grenade. Not that Nugent has ever been about good taste, but it would seem that a rocker so enamored with his red state reputation might not want to write sleazy sex songs about "Girl Scout Cookies" ("I like to eat my Girl Scout cookies/I like to eat them all night long/That coconut drives me wild/I get my cookies fresh from a child/That peanut butter gets stuck to the roof of my mouth"), or sneer at education in his smarmy sub-Diamond Dave romp "Funk U" ("I graduated magna cum loud mouth!"), or lecherously extend an offer to be a "Bridge Over Troubled Daughters." Such sentiments tend to undercut his good-old-American stance, even if he does offer some red meat for the red states in the form of the dog devotional "Broadside" and "Stand," where Ted shouts down commies as if it was the thick of the Cold War, while he offers up yet another version of "Journey to the Center of Your Mind," almost as a reminder to his conservative fans why they chose to care about this guy in the first place. Nugent spends less time celebrating family values than he does trying to position himself as a kindred spirit with natives of any stripe -- he identifies equally with Geronimo ("Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse/Geronimo and Me/We are blood brothers/Warriors fighting to be free"), aborigines ("I'm an aborigine/You're an aborigine/We're an aborigine," as if we'd all like to be a pepper too), and even the "Spirit of the Buffalo" running wild on a free-range ranch -- but despite this heavy section of Americana in the middle off the album, what sticks in the mind is the sleaze that opens and closes the record, whether it's the slippery slide guitars of "Love Grenade" or the clumsy 12-bar blues "Lay with Me," incongruously dedicated to the Funk Brothers and James Brown. This is the same old hard rock that Nugent has been cranking out for over three decades now, and it sure sounds like he's been doing it that long, as the riffs are recycled, the production is too clean, and the performances too professional. All this sterile hard rock only draws attention to what Nugent is saying, and this collection of bad sex, hammy patriotism, and Wild West rhapsodies does indeed act as some kind of grenade -- it explodes the myth that Nugent is some kind of reformed red state hero, revealing him just as the dirty old man he's always been.