The hated guitarist Henry Rollins will always love: “As good as anyone”
Henry Rollins didn’t need a lot of convincing to say what was on his mind.
He was doing everything he could to make people know exactly how he felt, and he knew when the right musician was changing the world and which ones really needed to retire after a while. And while he could wax poetic about how U2 is the worst band of all time and how the golden age of punk was all that mattered, there were a few skeletons in his musical closet that he wasn’t always proud to talk about.
Then again, you can’t really blame Rollins for liking what he likes. He was gravitating towards rock and roll just like any teenager back in the day, and he wasn’t about to back into a corner the minute that he had a disagreement with someone. You either liked what he had to say or you didn’t, and regardless of how it hit you, Rollins was willing to do everything he could to explain his side of the argument every single time he reached an impasse with one of his friends.
But for one of the biggest punks in the world, Rollins was a lot more eclectic with his music taste than most. He didn’t care if the punks frowned about bands like Van Halen. As long as he heard a song that he liked and felt the energy behind everything that a band was doing, it didn’t take much for him to enjoy everyone from The Doors to Van Halen to Black Sabbath to John Coltrane whenever he put something on the turntable.
That said, Ted Nugent has always been a hard topic for most rock and roll stars to handle. ‘Uncle Ted’ does seem like one of the most wild men in the world when he’s onstage, but as soon as you take him offstage, he does have more than a few things to say, and some of them are definitely not for the faint of heart when looking at his habit of killing animals and hunting anything and everything he can find.
Aside from his love of hunting, though, it’s his female company that has put him in hot water time and time again. You can claim that it was a different time all you want, but the idea of someone becoming the legal guardian of an underage solely so they could be his girlfriend is all kinds of gross that it practically defies any kind of explanation. But Rollins wasn’t going to let that get in the way of his love for the man’s songs.
Despite having many disagreements, Rollins felt no one had ever come close to what Nugent did in his prime, saying, “My Nugent records are kind of like my guilty pleasures. I can defend his guitar playing on any battlefield. Then you hear the stuff he says and you’re like, ‘Ahhh!’ It just ruins my day. I can’t do it. But he’s as good of a guitar player as anyone who ever came out of Michigan. Every bit as good as Ron Asheton or Fred Smith. Truly.”
And if I’m being completely objective here, it’s not like Nugent is a terrible guitar player. If anything, he was the kind of wild man that seemed to carry on the tradition of bluesy rock and roll the same way that Clapton did, but when you have a rap sheet that includes a lot more pedophilic tendencies in the background, it’s not exactly going to be the first thing that everyone brings up.
The fact that Rollins was willing to stand by Nugent’s work, though, is a testament to the kind of person that he was. He knew that he and Nugent weren’t going to have the same opinions on most things, but when you look at the way that he talks up his music, you can tell that even the most polar opposite mindsets can still come together over the language of music.
