They say the first step in overcoming a problem is admitting that you in fact have a problem. So with that in mind…
My name is Jeff. And I like the Damn Yankees.
Now, this was not a problem back in 1989 when the band formed. The Damn Yankees were a rock supergroup1 consisting of Ted Nugent, Tommy Shaw of Styx, Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, and drummer Michael Cartellone2. At that time I was a pretty big Ted Nugent fan, which today seems both absurd and problematic. However, allow me to offer a few facts in my defense.
First, I was only 17 or 18 when this group came together, and I was hardly the paragon of maturity. And second, Nugent hadn’t yet become the far right lunatic we know today, though that’s partly because it was pre-internet and, well, it was difficult to actually know what he was all about. It’s not like you could look up Ted Nugent in the encyclopedia, so if you were a rocker living outside of Seattle basically you had his albums, their liner notes, and maybe an entry in some kind of music book like The Harmony Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock by Mike Clifford. I had said Encyclopedia, and the Nugent entry was comprised of four paragraphs that exclusively covered his musical history. If I wanted to learn anything else about him in 1989 I’d have had to drive to the library and browsed through copies of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature to find listings of magazine articles about the Motor City Madman, write them down, take them to a librarian, and then wait while they checked to see if any of those magazine back issues were on site. If they were, I could read them in the library, and maybe make a photocopy, but you couldn’t check out magazines. Given that that was basically my only option, I hope you can understand why I never bothered to do this level of research. That kind of thing was reserved for school term papers.
Those are some facts in my defense. The prosecution, however, can point to a few facts of its own. First, The Nuge was a well known NRA member and gun advocate, though that in and of itself wasn’t a very big deal at the time (he was also well-known for being a hunter and a proponent of gun safety classes). But more damning was, well, the song titles from his long solo career. You know, gems like “Thunder Thighs”, “If You Can’t Lick ‘Em… Lick ‘Em,” “The Harder They Come (The Harder I Get)”, “Wang Dang Sweet Poontang”… I think you get the gist. So the misogyny was on full display. I have no excuse on this front. Mea culpa.
Later, of course, we learned a lot more about ol’ Ted. Like how when he was 30 he became the legal guardian of a 17-year-old so that he could then legally be in a relationship with her and take her across state lines, a move he may very well have picked up from Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler who did the same with a 16-year old back in the early 1970s. He’s also said some pretty racist stuff, like a 1990 interview with the Detroit Free Press in which he stated African apartheid “isn’t that cut-and-dry. All men are not created equal,” was a proponent of the “Birther” conspiracy, and made an implied threat to kill Barack Obama (and plenty more). The super-patriot also claimed in multiple interviews to have shit and pissed his own pants leading up to his military physical during the Vietnam War as a way to avoid being drafted. He later denied this, stating that he lied to the reporters as a joke, but Snopes reviewed his draft record and verified he was given a 1-Y draft designation after his physical, which labelled him as “qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency”, a designation that was later changed to 4-F, “registrant not qualified for any military service”. He also claimed to have taken meth right before the physical, a crazy admission for the notorious teetotaler.
So Ted Nugent definitely sucks as a human on a lot of levels.
As for the Damn Yankees, they were legitimately popular for a few years in the early 1990s. Their 1990 self-titled debut went double-platinum and reached #13 on the US charts, and its big single, the ballad “High Enough”, got all the way up to #3. That’s not bad. They definitely had a sophomore slump, though. 1992’s Don’t Tread couldn’t quite crack the top 20 (topping out at #22) and only sold well enough to reach gold status. And with that, according to the band, their label Warner Bros. was done with them. Per Jack Blades the band did well enough to recoup their advance, which triggered a clause giving them a million dollars for their third album, but Warner Bros. simply paid them the million to NOT make the record, which is wild. Shaw and Blades continued on via the unbelievably named Shaw Blades, and supposedly the entire group reunited to record an album called Bravo in 1999 that was never released. RIP Damn Yankees.
So why am I writing about Damn Yankees? Well, I have an odd story to share. But first, let me just say that I still like this record. “Come Again” and “High Enough” are good ballads, “Coming of Age” is decent, and I always enjoyed “Piledriver”, a song that featured Ted on vocals and is the closest thing on the album to a Ted Nugent solo song. I even saw them on the Damn Yankees tour, which I believe had them doing some dual-headlining dates with Bad Company and featured Nugent shooting an arrow (from an actual hunting bow…) into the crotch of a cutout of Saddam Hussein (…. this was during the first Persian Gulf War….) on stage.
ANYWAY… back in 2018 Mrs. Life In the Vinyl Lane and I went on a trip to Seoul, South Korea, then onto Japan. Seoul has these interesting underground areas that allow pedestrians to cross some of the huge thoroughfares easily and protected from the weather, and most of them also have shopping. One near our hotel was sort of a focal point for the city’s used record stores, so of course I made a visit. I was mostly on the lookout for Korean rock and metal bands and I found some cool records by Sinawe, Asiana, Crash, and Black Syndrome. I also distinctly remember running across a Korean pressing of Damn Yankees and gave serious thought to buying it, but ultimately passed and have been sort of kicking myself about it ever since, if for no other reason that it would be fun to have a Korean pressing of it (why this particular record got a pressing there, I have no clue).
Fast forward eight years, and my friends over at Volver Records announced they were taking a trip to Seoul, so I shared my Damn Yankees story in the shop’s group chat. And what did they find and buy over there? You got it, a Korean pressing of Damn Yankees (with insert). However, there were no holds, so this morning I got to the store about half an hour before opening so I’d get first crack at it. And I’m glad I did, because a group of guys also showed up early and one of them mentioned to his friends he was going to grab that particular record, which meant the pressure was on! Luckily for me all the records the shop brought back from the trip were put in two bins, so that meant I got first crack and was able to snag Damn Yankees. Who knows, maybe it was even the same copy I’d seen eight years ago. Stranger things have happened.
While I still like the record, I’m a bit uncomfortable associating myself with anything Nugent-related. This gets back to the age old question, is it OK to appreciate the art of an artist who is a bad person? I’ve certainly thought about this a bit, not just as it relates to Nugent (today I only have one other Nugent record, Weekend Warriors) but also with some other… troublesome artists on my shelves. But that’s an entire blog post in and of itself, and best left for another day. Today I’m going to see if I can still hit the high notes like Tommy Shaw does on “High Enough”.3
- To call them a “supergroup” is really, really, really stretching it, but that is how they were described back in 1989. ↩︎
- Or as I used to describe them, ‘Ted Nugent, the singer from Styx, a guy from Night Ranger, and a drummer”. ↩︎
- I actually was playing this album on Spotify as I wrote this post. And what song do you thing the algorithm served up after the last song on Damn Yankees? Winger’s “Seventeen”. Which is pretty apt… ↩︎