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August 26th, 2007

The Tragedy Of Burned Out Hippyness

Tragically, not all of my fellow boomers made it out of the 60s and 70s sane.  Many of them are stumbling through life now, middle aged pathetic burned out shells of their former selves.  One case in point being the drooling jackass who wrote this last week in the Wall Street Journal…

The Summer of Drugs
Forty years ago, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in and drop out."

BY TED NUGENT

Forty years ago hordes of stoned, dirty, stinky hippies converged on San Francisco to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," which was the calling card of LSD proponent Timothy Leary. Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, hippies instead opted for a cowardly, irresponsible lifestyle of random sex, life-destroying drugs and mostly soulless rock music that flourished in San Francisco.

Irresponsible lifestyle of random sex…did you say Ted…?

The first time that I got it
I was just ten years old
I got it from some kitty next door
I went and see the Dr. and
He gave me the cure
I think I got it some more

They give me cat scratch fever
Cat scratch fever

It’s nothin dangerous
I feel no pain
I’ve got to ch-ch-change
You know you got it when you’re going insane
It makes a grown man cryin’ cryin’
Won’t you make my bed

I make the pussy purr with
The stroke of my hand
They know they gettin’ it from me
They know just where to go
When they need their lovin man
They know I do it for free

Do it for free do you Ted?  Got it from a lady next door when you were just ten did you Ted?

That Nadine, what a teenage queen
She lookin’ so clean, especi’lly down in between; what I like

She come to town; she be foolin’ around
a puttin’ me down as a rock-and-roll clown
It’s all right

Wang Dang Sweet Poontang

Wang dang, what a sweet poontang
a shakin’ my thang as a rang-a-dang-dang in the bell

She’s so sweet when she yanks on my meat
Down on the street you know she can’t be beat
What the hell 
 

Wang dang Ted…

I don’t wanna hand nothin’ to ya
I just wanna sit back and do ya
Dontcha make me stand up and chase it
I just wanna lay back and taste it
Come and get it right here for you

I would never want to bore you
No

Come and get it
Come and get it

Come on girl and sit down beside me
Let me tell ya whats burnin’ inside me
I want you to take it
I know that you’ll like it
Sit right down and grab it and bite it

Come on girl its right here for you 

Yes…I think we can see what’s burnin’ inside of you Ted… 

Looking for trouble, looking for sex
Walking on the wild side, she’s so complex
She’s on fire, the heat is coming on
The girl’s on fire, she burns all night long
High hell sneakers
Head to toe in lace
Such a dangerous body
With a little girl’s face

Turned off by the work ethic and productive American Dream values of their parents, was it?  Well I’m sure there wasn’t a father anywhere in this country back then Ted, who wouldn’t have felt completely at ease letting you be alone with their little girl.  No random irresponsible sex for you.  With…little girls…

I with you Ted, when you morn the deaths of all those amazing talents back then.  They died way too young and it was a tragedy.  Just think where they’d be now if they had lived on.  For one thing, I don’t think Hendrix or Joplin or Morrison would be writing editorials for the Wall Street Journal.  I mean…just try to picture it.  Would John Lennon be writing for the Wall Street Journal?  Would the Wall Street Journal let John Lennon fucking anywhere near it’s pages?  But then it wasn’t drugs that killed Lennon…it was some burned out lunatic with a gun.

And speaking of burned out lunatics with guns… 

I was in Chicago last week I said, "Hey Obama, you might  want to suck on one of these, you punk?" Obama, he’s a piece of shit and I told him to suck on one of my machine guns. Let’s hear it for them. I was in New York and I said, "Hey Hillary, you might want to ride one of these into the sunset you worthless bitch." Since I’m in California, I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns. Hey, Dianne Feinstein, ride one of these you worthless whore.

I can understand why you’re so pissed off Ted.  I can understand why you hate all the dirty hippies.  Hendrix…Joplin…Cass Elliot…Jim Morrison…John Lennon…  They’re still taking the spotlight away from you, aren’t they?  Their music lives on generation after generation…long after their pointless deaths.  Kids who were born long after they’d died are still groovin’ to their music…and you still can’t raise your act much higher then the gutter trash crowd.

You understand why that is…don’t you Ted.  In a world where Hendrix can still sing Foxy Lady to us, why would anyone want to listen to a burned out lunatic belching Kiss My Ass

I believe in animal rights
I let my dog hump on my shin

Right.  Whatever.  You’re howling out abuse at the hippies so you won’t have to face the fact that if it wasn’t for the greats who took rock and roll from the back streets to Woodstock you wouldn’t have a stage to prance around with your…machine gun.  You’d be just another long haired weirdo with a guitar and an open guitar case on the sidewalk in front of him with a little card in it asking for spare change.  I mean…it certainly isn’t your music your audience comes to you for now is it…?

Oh look…a naked woman tied up and served on a platter like a pig, with a hand grenade in her mouth.  So nice of the Wall Street Journal to give you a forum to bitch about hippies, drugs, cowardly irresponsible lifestyles of random sex, and…soulless music. 

There is a saying that if you can remember the 1960s, you were not there. I was there and remember the decade in vivid, ugly detail. I remember its toxic underbelly excess because I was caught in the vortex of the music revolution that was sweeping the country, and because my radar was fine-tuned thanks to a clean and sober lifestyle.

So tell us Ted, what this clean and sober lifestyle has to do with naked ladies bound on silver platters and gaged with hand grenades.  And…does being clean and sober help much for getting on stage and announcing to the world that you want a black man and three white women to suck on your…machine gun? Wow…it must have been awful…simply awful…getting all caught up in that toxic underbelly of excess back then.  Good thing you made it out of there clean and sober.  Every father would want his son to grow up clean and sober…

 

It’s really cute how the Wall Street Journal ends your editorial with "Mr. Nugent  is a rock star releasing his 35th album, "Love Grenade," this summer."  Perhaps they should have put a photo of the cover art there too.  Or one of these souvenir stickers they’re selling now on eBay… 

I’m picturing you looking at the cover art for your new album, and thanking your lucky stars that you weren’t caught up in any toxic underbellies of excess…

…and I’ll take what all those Haight-Ashbury hippies gave the world over this ugly shock jock crap any day.  See…the hippies shocked the establishment, but they weren’t About shocking the establishment.  They rejected the empty values and broken promises of the 50s…they were reaching for something they really thought was a better place.  You just want to shock.  And the problem with shock is that it gets old.  People get used to it.  So to stay in the spotlight, you have to keep ratcheting it up…increasing the dose.

…which makes you the drug Ted.  You and all the other shock jocks who’ve been busy ever since the Reagan years, dragging America into the gutter for money.  Rush Limbaugh…Michael Savage…Don Imus…  You.  You’re no Hendrix.  You’re no Morrison.  You’re no Joplin.  You’re sure as shit no John Lennon.  Drugs may have killed some of the best musical talent of my generation Ted, but they left behind a little beauty and wonder for the rest of us and for generations to come, and that’s something you’ll never be able to say on your deathbed.  You’re the symptom of cultural decay Ted.  You’re one drop of the heroin coursing through America’s veins now.  You give your customers a quick little high, a cheap little thrill, and when you’re done with them they’re a little less then they were before. 

Wang dang, what a sweet poontang

I’m gonna find Barbara Boxer she might wanna suck on my machine guns…

…and your wallet is a little bigger.  How fitting that you’re in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, so soon after Rupert Murdoch bought it.

[Update…]  Via Harp I learn that Nugent’s new album has a cover of the old Amboy Duke’s psychedelic hit Journey To The Center Of The Mind.  A quick visit to the CD listing on Amazon.Com confirms it.  This is rich…

The Amboy Dukes, some of us still recall, was the 60s band Nugent made a name for himself in.  Sweet.  Here we have Nugent bellyaching in the Wall Street Journal about the 60s drug culture, and hippies and LSD and how "the bodies of chemical-infested, brain-dead liberal deniers continue to stack up like cordwood"…and the album he’s releasing this month has a cover of one of the quintessential songs of that period, and that culture.  Christ…I’ve heard of playing both sides of the street, but this is really brazen.

One Response to “The Tragedy Of Burned Out Hippyness”

  1. Jeff Blanks Says:

    I think it was Digby who suggested that the editorial appearing under the Nuge’s name might’ve been ghost-written, or more accurately that they already had it and wanted to attach somebody’s name to it. I can’t do a stylistic analysis and compare it to TN’s other prose–I wonder if there’s someone out there who could?

    Then there’s the question of how he got to be a right-winger in the first place. Often in the case of those young people of the ’70s and ’80s there’s a single hook, and I suspect that in Nugent’s case it was his love of hunting–“LIBERALS WANT TO TAKE AWAY YOUR GUNS!”, and it was all downhill from there.

    For a lot of people it was Rush’s “2112”, even though Neil Peart’s vision is much more humane and, well, liberal than the modern Right’s; Peart has never claimed to be a conservative of any sort (I seem to remember him calling himself a “moderate” once, though he seemed to regard liberalism as “mindless change”, which tells me he took the bait himself). For some it might even have been The Lord Of The Rings (a book I love dearly, BTW; I like “2112”, too). But yeah, some people just reflexively believe that a liberal world would automatically be even worse (probably has to do with HIGHER TAXES TAKING THEIR MONEY). I notice that most of them are white males, BTW; it seems the Republican movement has targeted them especially, because if they lose the overwhelming majority they have with white males, it’s “game over” for the GOP.

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