People like to make fun of Ted Nugent—and he is a funny guy. But he does a wide range of outdoorsy, populist things and I give him props for that. What I like most is that he made his big mid-90’s comeback with this album, “Spirit of the Wild.” This is when he really came out publicly as a bowhunter with the song “Fred Bear” and that’s what made his career again. He coulda never known it would pay off. He was just paying his respects.
It’s a case of two totally separate worlds if you ask the consultants—pop music and bowhunting. But it turned out that a lot of people who like Detroit rock also like the up north woods. It was a fresh, improbable populist stroke of genius. And it’s a great song. Fred Bear was a hero of Michigan—a gangly, quiet, woodsy guy who humbly started bowhunting as we know it and was the biggest employer up north for a couple decades. I think it’s just way cool that the Nuge stood up and paid massive, national respect to this sleeper of a role model. Turns out
he wasn’t so sleeper after all. Fred Bear was a role model to millions—me, too—who remember him well even though he was never in the mass media spotlight, and the public rewarded Ted for his gesture. As Ted says in the lead-in to the subsequent acoustic version of “Fred Bear”: “I want to thank you all for making this the greatest song of a musician’s life.”
