Rot Gut

The Zoo Crew has the needle down on a nasty little blues bomb called Rot Gut, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one does not show up on the jukebox at the corner store. Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes cut it for Call of the Wild, the record that landed on Frank Zappa's DiscReet label in September 1973 after the band spent June and July of that year holed up at Sleepy Hollow Studios in Ithaca, New York. It clocks in at about two minutes and forty-five seconds, it is an instrumental, and the writing credit belongs to the whole crew in the room: Ted Nugent, bassist Rob Grange, keyboard and flute man Gabriel Magno, and drummer Vic Mastrianni. Producer Lew Futterman and engineer John Childs kept the tape rolling while Andy Jezowski handled the singing elsewhere on the album, which left Nugent free to lean into the guitar and let the band chase a slow, greasy groove that feels more like a back-room jam than a single. Side two of Call of the Wild was sequenced so Renegade, Rot Gut, Below the Belt, and Cannon Balls run together like one long stretch of road, and the folks who still pull that vinyl out of the crate will tell you there is no filler in that run. One listener over on the Discogs notes called the stretch from Renegade through Cannon Balls all killer, and another flat-out named Call of the Wild a favorite Amboy Dukes record, with Tooth, Fang and Claw sitting right behind it. A later write-up compared Rot Gut to Joe Perry trying on a Jeff Beck mood, which is a fair way to hear it if you have ever stood in front of a stack and felt a slow blues riff crawl up your spine.

That Ithaca session was the sound of a band that had already shed the psychedelic clothes of the late sixties and was heading toward the hard-rock roar Nugent would take out under his own name a couple of years later. He told interviewers around the time of his solo breakthrough that Call of the Wild was the turn, heavier and more metallic than the old Dukes records on Mainstream, and the lineup with Grange and Mastrianni gave him a rhythm section that could hang with the guitar instead of getting run over by it. Fans who lived through those shows still single out Pony Express and Rot Gut as the tracks that kick the hardest, the ones that sound like the band remembered it was a bar band from the Motor City even while the label on the jacket said DiscReet. The album cover later made a Metal Hammer list of hilariously ugly rock and metal sleeves, which only adds to the charm if you ask the Zoo Crew. Nothing about Rot Gut was built for the AM dial. Sweet Revenge was the single they pulled, and Rot Gut stayed where it belonged, buried on side two for the people who played the whole record. Over on THE ZOO that is exactly how the Zoo Freaks like it, deep cuts and no commercials getting in the way of the riff.

Theodore Anthony Nugent came into the world in Detroit on December 13, 1948, and the guitar bug bit him early. He has said the rock and roll explosion of the late fifties got him, and by the time he was about nine or ten he was already performing. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and Little Richard were the records on the turntable. Around 1960 he was out front with a local outfit called the Royal High Boys, and not long after that he landed in the Lourds, where he crossed paths with John Drake, the singer who would later front the Amboy Dukes. The Lourds won a battle of the bands with a teenage Nugent cutting a solo up on the judge's table, and they opened shows for the Supremes and the Beau Brummels at Cobo Hall. Then the family moved to the Chicago area, and that is where the Amboy Dukes name got hung on a new band. Nugent has told the story a couple of different ways over the years. Sometimes he says he borrowed it from a Detroit group that had already broken up because he thought the name sounded cool, and sometimes the credit goes to Irving Shulman's novel about a street gang. He has also said people kept handing him copies of that book and he never actually read it. Either way, the first lineup started working The Cellar, a teen club in Arlington Heights, in the mid-sixties while he was still at St. Viator High School, sharing the circuit with bands like the Shadows of Knight until the Dukes became a regular draw.

He hauled the name back to Detroit in 1967 and built the lineup people remember from the hit years: Drake on vocals, Steve Farmer on rhythm guitar, and a rotating cast that included Bill White, Rick Lober, Dave Palmer, then later Greg Arama and Andy Solomon. Baby Please Don't Go gave them a Midwest foothold, and in 1968 Journey to the Center of the Mind climbed into the national Top 20, usually listed around number 16. Farmer wrote the lyrics and Nugent wrote the music. The sleeve was covered in drug paraphernalia, and for decades Nugent has sworn he had no idea the song was about getting high. His line has always been that he thought it meant look inside yourself, use your head, and move forward, and he has been just as plain that he never smoked a joint and never touched the stuff. That stance cost him bandmates. By the early seventies he had fired players over drug use, taken on the road manager job himself, booked the dates, driven the truck, and kept the books. The name on the marquee shifted to Ted Nugent and the Amboy Dukes once they signed with DiscReet, and Call of the Wild was the first studio album under that billing, followed by Tooth, Fang and Claw in 1974. After that he retired the Dukes name and went out as a solo act, with Grange sticking around into the early solo years. The guitar that carried Rot Gut was the same wild, loud instrument that had been cutting heads in Detroit clubs since he was a kid, only now the psychedelic fog had burned off and what was left was boogie, blues, and a stack of amplifiers.

If you want the long trail of that story straight from the source, the official home is Ted Nugent, where the catalog, the road dates, and the Nuge Vault sit in one place. The verified page is Ted Nugent on Facebook, the photo feed runs through Ted Nugent on Instagram, and the short-form roar is over at Ted Nugent on X. Fans who still trade stories about the DiscReet years and the old Dukes sides gather in the Official Ted Nugent Fans group. Rot Gut will not make the highlight reel of the solo hits, and that is fine. It is two and a half minutes of a Detroit guitar player and three partners in a New York studio, chasing a slow blues until the tape ran out, and that is plenty of reason for the Zoo Crew to let it ride.