Friday, May 19, 2003
FEATURES - ACCENT & ARTS 10F
By Aaron Beck
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
A "little ol' band from Texas'' and a madman from the Motor City set Germain Amphitheater in summer motion Wednesday night.
ZZ Top, the boogie-rocking blues trio from Houston in wraparound Ray Bans, and Ted Nugent, the guitar-playing, unabashedly right-wing hunter-gatherer from Detroit, are staples of "classic-rock'' radio programming.
Try to avoid either any day on WLVQ (96.3 FM), which tied in the concert with its 26th anniversary, and you will fail.
More than 8,000 beer drinkers and hell-raisers turned out to hear ZZ Top play Tush, Gimme All Your Lovin' and Sharp Dressed Man and to hear the Nuge remind them -- if they had forgotten on the way to the former Polaris Amphitheater -- that they do, indeed, still live in America.
Mawkish flag-wavers Lee "God Bless the USA'' Greenwood and Darryl "Have You Forgotten?'' Worley have nothing on uber-patriot Nugent. He played an hour from a bunker-style setup: sandbags, assault weapons, cattle skulls, camouflage, "victory'' talk. Nothing like bombs dropped on evildoers to help a man who rallies round the flag 24/7 to rally and rock a little harder.
Nugent preached to the proverbial choir with jingoistic hoo-ha, but at least he did it with a thick backbeat, acrobatic guitar chops and a sense of humor.
The concert had tones of an infomercial, with Nugent wearing one of those Time Life-style "operator-standing-by'' headset mikes. He strutted in front of a backdrop of an American flag emblazoned with "TedNugent.com'' and dedicated "the whole night to our armed forces'' and "President Bush, a real American cowboy.''
"There ain't no French cowboys,'' Nugent said during one of many rants. "There ain't no German cowboys. There ain't no Jap cowboys, those weaselly (expletives).''
Nugent, a nimble yet purposefully over-the-top guitarist who played with an able-bodied bassist and athletic young drummer, began his hard-rock-athon with the Pledge of Allegiance and ended it with The Star-Spangled Banner, filling space between with patriotic ditties such as Stranglehold and Stormtroopin'.
Nugent bad-mouthed the Dixie Chicks; shot with a bow and arrow a cardboard cutout of Saddam Hussein; told Jesse Jackson and "animal-rights people'' what to kiss; and waved an M-16, presumably unloaded.
The preachin' and rockin' -- or maybe it was the drinkin' -- wore down a few of the Nuge's flock. By the time ZZ Top hit the stage, three people in my row were sleepin'.
ZZ Top, with the same lineup since 1970, soon will release a new album, Mescalero. But the trio -- Frank Beard (the one without the beard), bassist Dusty Hill and guitarist supreme Billy Gibbons -- played the hits the crowd came to hear. Compared with Nugent, ZZ Top was a study in subtlety and soul.
The props: a Mexican cantina, where banditos might have congregated in the 1800s; velvet ponchos; two bottles of whiskey; a couple of fur-covered guitars; and those trademark beards, which hung from Hill and Gibbons' faces like Spanish moss. They were powerfully effective.
Gibbons played as usual like a man possessed by Bo Diddley, strutting in sync with Hill. ZZ Top was as long-gone cool Wednesday as when the group wrote lines such as "Jesus just left Chicago / and he's bound for New Orleans.''
Yeah, yeah.
abeck@dispatch.com