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Ted Nugent
NBC The Source NBC 82-37
Broadcast date: October 15, 16, 17, 1982
recorded at:
Cobo Hall
Detroit, MI
September 3, 1982
01 George Taylor Morris - NBC The Source NBC 82-37 Intro
02 Ted Nugent - Wang Dang Sweet Poontang
03 Ted Nugent - Dog Eat Dog
04 Ted Nugent - We're Gonna Rock Tonight
05 George Taylor Morris - NBC The Source NBC 82-37 Break
06 Commercial - Budweiser (George Thorogood)
07 Commercial - Levi's
08 Ted Nugent - Cat Scratch Fever
09 Ted Nugent - No, No, No
10 Ted Nugent - Fightin' Words
11 Commercial - Levi's
12 Commercial - Atari
13 Ted Nugent - Bound And Gagged
14 Ted Nugent - Good and Ready
15 Ted Nugent - Free-for-All
16 Ted Nugent - Hey Baby
17 Commercial - Budweiser (Leon Redbone)
18 Commercial - Atari
19 Ted Nugent - Stranglehold
20 George Taylor Morris - NBC The Source NBC 82-37 Break
21 Commercial - Levi's
22 Commercial - Budweiser (blues)
23 Ted Nugent - Wango Tango
24 George Taylor Morris - NBC The Source NBC 82-37 Outro
Flac files of wavs. Includes a print ad and newspaper coverage of Nugent's car crash and a concert review. No cue sheet or disc scans. Thanks once again to Sam Eliot's Mustache for providing a rip of the original vinyl for me to clean up.
Here in the U.S. of A., we've had the Seven Dirty Words. I shall shade them slightly: sh*t, f*ck, c*nt, a**hole, p*ss, c*cksucker, and m*therfucker. Sorry, that last one is "motherf*cker." Or at least those were the words that comedian George Carlin put in his famous 1972 comedy routine about censorship. There are plenty of other words that are avoided. What's avoided isn't always clear, and geography matters. If you say t*ts on the air in Manhattan it's not the same thing as broadcasting it in Muleshoe, Texas. Syndication took the words everywhere.
What IS clear is syndicated rock radio show producers didn't want controversy. They didn't want program directors skipping shows, they hated offending advertisers with products next to aural filth, and they didn't want angry parents calling the station. The fear of filth ran all the way up to powerful parents in Washington: Tipper Gore helped form the PRMC just a few years after this concert.
But what do you do when rock stars misbehave? Do you drop offending songs from the broadcast because of one word?
There are several remedies. There's the ham-fisted hard edit: cut the word out. That's obvious. Music has rhythm, and you drop a beat or three and it sticks out like a sore thumb.
You can BEEP. You put an electronic blip over the word. That's a standard solution, and often used on live broadcasts, where the "seven second delay" keeps offending words from slipping out. (Editor’s Note: Jeez, what a job...you have to listen with your finger poised on the beep button and you better not miss your chance to keep the kids from hearing ****.)
But there's another trick, and it's a bit of a weird choice. Back-masking. You reverse the word or phrase. It keeps the timing right, but boy, does it stick out.
Which leads us to the Nuge and this show. Ted lets the profanity rip five times in "Bound and Gagged" and once in "Free-for-All" with words you can't say on the radio. The Source fixed them. They're backmasked.
How they did this in 1982 is lost on me. They're dealing with very small snippets of sound... less than half of a second. Did they cut the tape and splice it? These days it's easy to do in Audacity: you mark the start and end of the word, highlight it with your mouse, click the Effects drop-down menu, hit "Special" and click "Reverse."
Easy, huh? So, that led to a small internal conversation. My goal has been to give you guys an exact duplicate of the show as a starting point. You can drop commercials, delete announcers, throw away promo spots...it's your choice. What I've prepared is exactly what's on the discs. This archival approach leads me to think I shouldn't engage in any changes to the broadcast. I don't try to "remaster" it.
But I also am a curious monkey: what is Ted saying? I want to know; I can't help myself. When they reverse one word in a song, it's half a second of "what was that?" and back to the music. With Ted cursing five times in one song, it keeps poking at you. What? What just happened? I want to reverse the reversed word and reveal the hidden word.
Plus, it's not just a record of what was broadcast, there's the issue of preserving the actual performance. I'm undoing an edit that was placed on top of the stage performance. So... what to do?
Solution: you can have both versions. I've prepared the broadcast "as is" in a "Censored" version, and then an "Uncensored" version with the words restored (to the best of my ability).
Performance: Ted does his usual Motor City Motormouth Rock Glossolalia: "AWWL right, how ya doin' my friends, I said I know what I gotta do now baby, I know what y'all gotta do, I know what I gotta do, I know what we all gotta do, I like it, I like it, I like it, I like it, I said I gotta rock, you gotta rock, we all gotta rock, Deeetroyeet!"
If you consult your English-Gibberish dictionary, you'll find this translates as "we're going to play rock music." And Ted does just that, to his credit.
Ted crashed his 1972 Ford Bronco after the front axle broke and he hit a tree the night before (Thursday Sept. 2, 1982). He missed that night's show in Lansing due to head and facial injuries. But Ted's a trooper, and I don't hear any signs of brain damage in his guitar playing, and his stage patter sounds like that even when he hasn't hit his head.
Commercials: the Leon Redbone "Budweiser" interests me in that it's a sixty second spot, and he lets the old-timey music run for forty-five seconds without a word about the beer. The clarinet solo is longer than the product pitch. Come to think of it, there's a clarinet solo on an ad in a Ted Nugent show...wouldn't it make more sense to have a hard rock band doing the jingle?
One of the Levi's commercials is a bit odd. It starts out "in the last known photo of the Dalton gang, Bob and Grat Dalton are both wearing Levi's original blue jeans." They claim this is because the pants are "honest and long-lasting." What's odd is "we'd like to think the Daltons gave their choice a lot of thought, but they probably had other things on their minds."
The last known picture of the Dalton Gang has them stacked dead in a row in Coffeyville, Kansas, shot after a botched bank robbery. I don't know if Levi's knew this, but there's a sly tone in the announcer's voice that makes me think they knew exactly what was on the Dalton’s minds in their last known photo: nothing, they were dead.
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What was on their minds?
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The Dalton knuckleheads weren't known for giving anything a lot of thought. They ended up on display because they tried to rob two banks at the same time, splitting the gang of five into groups of two and three, and picked a town where they were known. It didn't end well. Back then the local hardware store was like an armory and within minutes each small group faced a dozen men armed with Winchester rifles, shotguns, and pistols.
I hope one of Our Beloved Audience can help me here...who is it singing that "Blues" version of the Budweiser jingle?
UPDATE: Due to the large file size on the above download link, I'm making this available as two separate downloads. The artwork and text files are duplicate in each download.
