The Amboy Dukes - Biography
The Amboy Dukes only had one hit record — the 1968 psych rock and Nuggets perennial Journey to the Center of the Mind — but their lead guitar player was the Motor City Madman Ted Nugent, who went on to a solo career as a gonzo, loincloth-wearing, guitar-slinging rocker best known now as an advocate of bow and arrow hunting, an anti-drug spokesperson, conservative political fanatic, and reality television star. The Dukes showed off Nugent’s already considerable fretwork with an instrumental frenzy and volume, matched by few acts of the era.
Nugent was bitten by the rock and roll bug early and was playing professionally around Detroit, Michigan at the age of 11. By the time he was 13, his band the Lourds was good enough to open for The Beau Brummels and the Supremes. The band was about to break up when Nugent’s family moved to Chicago, Illinois and Nugent’s father, a strict disciplinarian, dragged the young Nuge with him. Nugent put together the first line-up for the Amboy Dukes while he was in high school in Chicago but, as soon as he got out of high school in 1967, he moved the band back to Detroit. A few personal shifts took place and the band started gaining a reputation for their fierce stage show and Nugent’s amazing guitar work.
The Amboy Dukes created a buzz with their blistering version of the blues classic “Baby Please Don’t Go,” but then Nugent got drafted by the US army. Many sources report that Nugent stopped eating, bathing, and shaving for a month before his physical, and showed up flying high on meth. He was turned away and he went back to his band.
The group signed with the small Mainstream label and in 1967 they released their first album, The Amboy Dukes (Mainstream), which features “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The album was made in one night on a four-track tape deck. After the album hit the streets, there was another shift in musicians while Nugent and rhythm guitarist Steve Farmer started to work on Journey to the Center of the Mind, their one true popular hit.
Their second album, 1968’s Journey to the Center of the Mind (Mainstream), features album art covered with drug paraphernalia in keeping with the times. Relentless touring and a high energy stage show pushed the album up to number 74 on the Billboard Hot 100, while the title single just missed the Top 10, stalling at number 16.
Nugent brought in a new singer named Rusty Day and the band released 1969’s Migration (1969 Mainstream). Farmer’s usual sprinklings of drug references in the lyrics are toned down for a slightly more mainstream sound. The album even features a doo-wop cover of Frankie Lymon’s “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” Migration failed to gain an audience but Polydor Records, impressed by Nugent’s playing, signed the band and released Marriage on the Rocks/Rock Bottom (1970), possibly one of the oddest albums Nugent ever made. The album boasts the prog-rockish suite “Marriage: Man, Woman, Music” and the ten minute plus “Inexhaustible Quest for the Cosmic Cabbage,” which includes a portion of Bartók’s Second String Quartet as well as a Beach Boys sound. Survival of the Fittest (1971 Polydor), a live set with the band paired down to a quartet renamed Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes, shows off Nugent’s guitar shredding, thus laying the foundations for an American heavy metal sound.
Frank Zappa, always one with an ear for the bizarre, signed Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes to his own label DiscReet Records. They released Call of the Wild (1973 DiscReet), which features a cartoon jungle cat on its cover, and Tooth, Fang, & Claw (1974 DiscReet), which features Nugent’s face superimposed on the head of a jungle cat. Tooth, Fang & Claw is virtually a solo album for Nugent with free-form excursions like “Hibernation” and “Lady Luck.” The album contains no psychedelic touches at all. It sounds like a prelude to his first solo outings, Ted Nugent (1975 Epic) and Free-For-All (1976 Epic), but that’s another story.
