Legendary rocker TED NUGENT is featured in a new Niagara Gazette Q&A; conducted by Thom Jennings. An excerpt is available below:

Q: You began your career with the AMBOY DUKES in the 1960s. In an era filled with indulgence and drug use, how did you manage to avoid the pitfalls of your peers?

A: "I have no peers. I am smarter than all of them. I don't play stupid suicide games and refuse to poison my sacred temple. I am a bow hunter and a guitar player and get the most out of life with a higher level of awareness. A higher level of awareness provides the defiance to stupidity that guarantees a higher quality of life. Only fools don't get that."

Q: 'Stranglehold' is without a doubt one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded. Can you share some memories about how the song developed, especially the opening riff and when the drums enter?

A: "It is a stone cold killer isn't it? This masterpiece, like all of my songs, erupted spontaneously from impromptu jam sessions with gifted virtuosos throughout my life. I crank out killer riffs every time I beat on a guitar, propelled by the animals I have on drums and bass. It still happens nonstop to this day."

Go to this location for the complete Q&A.;

Rob Cavuoto from Guitar International spoke Nugent recently about a number of topics. A few excerpts from the chat follow:

Guitar International: "When you look back on your career and you look back on the early days, what’s the most important thing you ever learned?

Ted Nugent: "Discipline. I’m clean and sober for 63 years, and even though I look like a shadow of my former self, this is our eighth concert in a row this week. Eight in a row and we’ve only had three days off since June 18. This is an adrenaline junkie tour, which describes every one of my tours. I look back at the discipline of my parents, the discipline of the hunting lifestyle, that conscientiousness of stealthy maneuvers to get close to game, the aim, small-miss, small mantra of marksmanship and then life itself. Discipline, being the best that you can be, something Amy Winehouse should have been forced to adhere to and Jimi and Janis, Bon Scott and Keith Moon, etc. Clean and sober and the discipline to always take good care of your sacred temple is the secret to my tsunami of happiness."

Guitar International: What do you think has been the biggest challenge, musically and professionally so far in your career?

Ted Nugent: "I challenge myself more than anybody else can. It was a challenge at first when I was getting a lot of pressure from the industry people, from producers and A&R; people to add keyboards here and get more vocals there and I defied that. I said, 'No. ‘Stranglehold’ is what it is. It’s got one singer.' They go, 'What’s the chorus?' and I go, 'My guitar solo. My guitar licks the chorus. Now shut the fuck up and push the record button.' Those kinds of moments of friction, I don’t look at them as challenges but rather gifts, because it made me examine myself intellectually and spiritually and determined by a much more powerful source of direction than A&R; and industry people, the people at my concerts going berserk 300 nights a year. You mean to tell me, Mr. New York City CBS Records guy that you know more than the last 100,000 people I played in front of and those gorgeous chicks dancing like that? Those gorgeous chicks dancing like that outvote your ass. As a kid and as a teenager, I looked at things as a confusing moment, but a very small moment, because my confusion came and went in a flash. Because I was referencing what was clearly the more powerful indicator: the clenched fists, the smiling, laughing faces, the grinding bodies to what my band and I were creating. There is no other indicator of worth: not sales, not industry okays. Watch what I do to these people tonight. Watch what my music means to these people tonight. It means so much to them. Just two days ago, I was at the Bethesda Naval Hospital and a half of a marine, there’s only half of him left, who was more full and complete than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, told me that the 'Fred Bear' song is helping him heal."

Read the entire interview here.