I don’t have a final opinion. I just present this article as a starting point for research.
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/features/article571538.ece
>>In Iraq, he says, he was allowed the opportunity to man automatic weapons. “Our failure,” he tells me, “has been not to Nagasaki them.”
“Is that opinion shared by your friends in the Republican Party?”
“Most of them feel that way.”<<
>>His father Warren was a drill sergeant who went on to become a steel executive. Ted has an older brother Jeff who is “a great guy - he served in the United States Army”. The musician pronounces this last phrase as though it’s the highest praise imaginable. “As a boy,” he adds, “I was inundated with discipline.”<<
>>In the late 1960s he lived with the MC5, a group which was the prototype, musically and pharmaceutically, for acts including Iggy Pop, The Clash and The Sex Pistols. “I shared a house with those dope fiends. I was moved by their music.”
“In February 1977, People magazine reported you as saying that you’d smoked ‘50 joints in the 1960s’ and tried ‘two lines of cocaine’.” “What I actually said to People was that on an average night at the MC5 house I’d turn down 50 joints and refuse cocaine.”<<
>>He has the rage, but he doesn’t have the war record. At 18, he was called up to serve in Vietnam. “In 1977 you gave an interview to High Times [the cannabis user’s journal of record] where you claimed you defecated in your clothes to avoid the draft.”
(”I got 30 days’ notice of the physical,” Nugent told them. “I ceased cleansing my body. Two weeks before the test I stopped eating food with nutritional value. A week before, I stopped going to the bathroom. I did it in my pants. My pants got crusted up.”)
“I never shit my pants to get out of the draft,” says Nugent, good-naturedly.<<
“”In the late 1960s he lived with the MC5, a group which was the prototype, musically and pharmaceutically, for acts including Iggy Pop, The Clash and The Sex Pistols.””
“Kick Out the Jams! MotherFu****s!
In case anyone doesn’t know the reference (MC5). I first listened to them in 69.
“”While “Ramblin’ Rose” and “Motor City is Burning” open with inflammatory rhetoric, it was the opening line to the title track that stirred up the most controversy. Rob Tyner shouted, “And right now it’s time to... KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFU**ERS!” before the opening riffs. Elektra’s executives were offended by the line and had preferred to edit it out of the album, however the band and manager John Sinclair adamantly opposed this. Instead, two versions were released, with the uncensored version sold behind record counters.””