The track Ted Nugent’s label wanted off his album because “nobody is gonna play an eight-minute song with all that ‘guitar’ in it”
Ted Nugent has revealed the time he had to fight tooth and nail to record one of the biggest hits of his career, Stranglehold.
Speaking on the Dr. Music show, Nugent recounts the pre-recording intervention staged by his label, producers, crew, and bandmates to talk him out of including the eight minute-track on his debut album.
READ MORE: Marty Friedman isn’t the hardest Megadeth guitarist to emulate, according to Teemu Mäntysaari
According to Nugent, the meeting took an unexpected turn when co-producer Lew Futterman delivered the verdict: Stranglehold was to be axed from the album due to its lack of a chorus and its lengthy guitar solo.
“All of a sudden, the tone of the meeting, I sense some confusion, I sense some [discomfort] in the room,” he recalls [via Loudwire]. “I think it was Lew Futterman, it’s almost like he got a nod from the bosses of the record label, and went, ‘Well, we’re excited about the songs, Ted. We’ve all talked about it. Everybody voted to not record Stranglehold because it doesn’t have a chorus, and nobody is gonna play an eight-minute song with all that ‘guitar part’ in it.’”
Not one to let his magnum opus be silenced, the rockstar replies: “I said, ‘I love you guys, but that’s insane! Since when is there a rule: ‘A song has to have a chorus’? It doesn’t have to have a chorus. It’s a movement, it’s a song.”
“And by the way, you all signed me and gave me a lot of money because you came to ten of my concerts and you saw how the people love the song ‘Stranglehold.’ And now you want to take it off the record?”
“I was wondering if you guys got the alert,” he continues, “and it sounds like this: ‘Fuck you! Double fuck you!’ By the way, we have a recording session that starts in one hour. Let’s go to the studio because I have a song to record. The first one’s gonna be fucking Stranglehold.”
Nugent’s stubbornness eventually paid off. Not only did Stranglehold made it onto the album, it also became the opening track of his self-titled debut, which went on to sell over two million copies. The song was also ranked the 31st greatest guitar solo of all time by Guitar World Magazine.
“What it teaches me, and it taught me a long time ago [is] if you are doing something onstage every night that just causes the people to just go nuts, that’s what you need to do,” Nugent adds. “I do it because I go nuts, and I’m a music fan before I’m a musician. And if I see the corroboration of the entire audience going berserk with me, I go, ‘well, we might want to keep that move!’”
The post The track Ted Nugent’s label wanted off his album because “nobody is gonna play an eight-minute song with all that ‘guitar’ in it” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
