TED NUGENT - The Ultimate Ted Nugent
June 3, 2002, 21 years ago
(Sony/Legacy)
Although skimping on booklet (no liner notes, only a handful of photos, few credits), The Ultimate Ted Nugent does a solid job of summarizing Ted's golden years, offering 32 tracks that sample deeply from the first three records (Ted Nugent, Free For All and Cat Scratch Fever; about 3/4 of each is included), less so from Weekend Warriors, State Of Shock, Scream Dream, Intensities In Ten Cities and Double Live Gonzo. Still, the compilers knew what they are doing, making sure that from the back half, we got the hard-ass Gonzo-only 'Yank Me Crank Me' and the frantic 'Baby Please Don't Go' cover, as well as the caustic and metallic 'Scream Dream', party anthem 'Wango Tango', 'State Of Shock' and that record's amazing 'Paralyzed' track. Weekend Warriors, on the other hand, gets short, erroneous shrift. Still, it's all laid out more or less chronologically, and each song credit gives you the album origin, so you can study along as Ted progresses through a collection of classic riffs that, along with the works of Aerosmith, Kiss, Journey, Styx and Heart, defined a huge American stadium rock scene in the late '70s, these bands pretty much taking hard rock back from the Brits and setting the stage for American metal to go gold and platinum for most of the '80s.
