Ed. Note: Conducting an interview with one Theodore Nugent is a simple process of pressing the "record" button on your tape machine and kicking back for an hour or two. But making sense of the transcript afterwards…ah, that is the true challenge.

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I remember seeing Ted Nugent live for the first time when I was a freshman in high school. It was quite a feat to talk my parents into allowing me to attend any rock concert, let alone a performance by the Motor City Madman. Luckily, my folks weren’t really hip to what The Nuge was (and still is) all about.

As a lad of 13 or 14 with the physical and emotional maturity of a 10-year-old, I couldn’t go just anywhere I pleased without permission–especially to a scary event like this. I always had to ask my parents well in advance if I wanted to see whatever big rock show came through town. Then we’d go through the usual dance where my folks would tell me I could go to the show if and only if my grades got better in the meantime. The next few weeks on the home front were punctuated by seemingly endless debate on whether or not I was performing at an academic level high enough to earn the right to rock. The controversy over the Nugent concert had predictable results: My parents begrudgingly allowed me to go to the show and my grades didn’t get any better.

The day after the concert, I knew I wasn’t just a mere freshman anymore. I had entered the lower echelon of the bad dudes club at my high school. I was a member of a special fraternity of rockers who had attended the show.

After seeing the Nuge in the flesh, we were one step closer to manhood. We all hung out in front of the band room with a newly acquired swagger, sporting our concert T-shirts, talking about how much our ears were ringing and performing replays of Nugent’s on-stage raps.

The show had been worth all of the gnashing of teeth, cursing, and groveling it took to get me in the door. It was violent, profane, and just flat-out bludgeoning–everything a pubescent teenage male wants to see. Clad only in a loincloth and swinging from atop one massive stack of speaker cabinets to another, Nugent assaulted the audience verbally and with his guitar. At the end of the show all in attendance shared a kind of post-bacchanalian bliss. Spent and happy, we went back to school to regale our friends with legendary tales about the Motor City Madman, Young Ted, The Nuge.

That was 20 years ago, and during the last two decades Nugent has gone through a transformation of sorts. He’s just as rowdy and outspoken as ever, but somehow between the ’70s and the ’90s, the public perception of Nugent has shifted. Once famed as a rock ’n’ roll troubadour in testosterone overdrive, he is now more famous for his non-musical activities. The Madman of Rock ’n’ Roll has now been dubbed "a great, conservative rocker" by none other than Rush Limbaugh, a close friend of Nugent’s. Only in America…

The new, renaissance Ted Nugent is more than just a rock ’n’ roll machine. He’s a nonstop explosion of energy, dogmatic opinion, and no apologies. Rapid fire, he jumps from one subject to the next, describing a world where politics, survival of the fittest, rock ’n’ roll, ego, and aggression are inexorably intertwined.

Though the mindset of the rock ’n’ roll world may have changed in the 30-odd years of his career, Nugent claims he’s always stayed true to his original vision.

"You can look at the cover of Rolling Stone magazine from 1978," says Nugent. "What’s that in my hand? It’s a fucking gun! What’s the whole article about? That I kill my own dinner. That I’m an individual. That I know what the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means. It means that in order to have life, you gotta live. How do you live? You kill shit and eat it and have a gun and shoot bad guys that wanna take your life away. What else does life mean? I’m just the only one honest enough to fucking stand up for it and I’ve always done that.

"I never consciously decided to be political. I’ll tell you what I do: I consciously live. My conscience, my level of awareness, guides the very level of my momentary existence accumulated into days and weeks and years and a lifetime of absolute dynamo hummage, man. I’m on fire. I scare white people for a living, and I get paid to do it quite handsomely. I get to go and hunt six months a year, and my life is dicked. I’ve got it down to a fucking dream. And these guys that write about me–they can’t stand it because I’m on the board of directors of the NRA. I promote true conservation, which means hands-on utility of renewable resources to feed the gut and the soul. And I do it so fucking good that Bambi-ists and the Communist anti-gunners out there can’t stand how effective I am."

A self-proclaimed enemy of political correctness, Nugent goes to great lengths to be sure that the public is aware of his uncompromising ideas. He tours half of the year, then hunts the rest–all the while writing several newspaper columns, hosting a morning radio show in Detroit, producing an outdoor magazine that he writes entirely by himself, serving as a member of the board of directors of the NRA, participating in the D.A.R.E. and M.A.D.D. programs, and a multitude of other projects. Nugent claims that his outspoken ideas have resulted in a lack of airplay for his music.

"It’s outrageously apparent that great, great music created by me and my brilliant, virtuoso collaborators, or the unprecedented sales of my guitar instruction video is being ignored by the media," says Nugent. "It’s outrageous, but on one hand I celebrate it because do you know how proud I am when assholes hate me? If the assholes hate you, it proves you’re not one of them!

"It’s amazing how deep the media's denial goes. It’s amazing. This musical escapade of mine has never approached the dynamic of the last few years, not to mention last fuckin’ night. But as I sell out night after night, as I drive people wilder than any Limp Bizkit/Kid Rock-rap-paroled-cocksucker band in America does, they pretend I don’t matter because I’m not fashionable.

"It’s not about Ted and what Ted does: it’s about how they hate what Ted stands for. I’ve always stood for the same thing: the celebration of the Motor City Madman and the intensity of the primal scream that has always been my music. I always proclaimed the fact that I am a hunter, I am a gatherer, I am a nature guy, I’m militantly anti-drug abuse and fucking trends. I will squash trends with my left nut."

Not one to skimp on adjectives in conversation, Nugent seems to have never been hindered by modesty or humility. He is especially proud of his new band, a trio that also features journeyman drummer Tommy Aldridge (formerly of Black Oak Arkansas and Ozzy Osbourne's band) and noted bassist John E. Gee.

"I’m telling you–I know when I’m good and I know when I’m grand and my worst concert is a fucking joy. The worst I can do is awesome. I got Tommy Aldridge playing drums and we could get up there on stage and shit green rivers and it would be fucking musical gyrating primal scream, soul of man celebration. We’re just too dedicated to do anything but great. On a brilliant, spirited night we’re downright spooky."

Next: The True Meaning of "Liberal"

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