Music reviews. CD reviews. Critically hip!

Terrible Teddy Nugent is back. He never went away, really, and he hasn’t been exactly quiet, but like the class clown who has been sitting quietly all day until 15 minutes before dismissal and whose Ritalin suddenly wears off, Ted Nugent has jumped back to center stage and made LOVE GRENADE, arguably the best album of his four-decade plus career.

I had a conversation a few years ago with a gentleman who is an executive with one of America’s premier guitar companies. He was bemoaning the fact that there were fewer and fewer guitar heroes. True; that may all change, however, as LOVE GRENADE may be just enough to get a few ten year olds up and back into the guitar store, inspired by what they hear on this disc. It is freaking killer from beginning to end, from the title track, through the anthemic “Still Raisin’ Hell and “Funk U” (wherein The Nuge gives Eddie Van Halen a lesson in how to write a song about school) the delicious “Girl Scout Cookies” all the way to the lawsuit-potential “Bridge Over Troubled Daughters” (I can hear Paul Simon now… “Can he do that?! I mean, can he DO that?! Don’t I own the English language?!”), and, to close things off, “Lay With Me,” a twelve bar blues. Nuge even includes a cover of the song that introduced The Nuge to the world, “Journey To The Center Of The Mind,” the Amboy Dukes classic, and it’s so good it almost brought me to tears. The solos on LOVE GRENADE are killer, each and every one an outside-the-textbook illustration of what a guitar is for by the man who wrote more than a few of the chapters in the book to begin with.

Strange as it seems, it took until 2007 for the definitive statement of what rock and roll is and was all about to be released, and it took a 58 year old man to do it. The release is LOVE GRENADE and the man is Ted Nugent.

I would of course be remiss should I fail to note that LOVE GRENADE is full of wonderful graphics on the cover, jacket, and label (of which the unforgettable “platter girl” is a highlight, yes indeed!). But even with such a feast for the eyes, it is the music in general and the pyrotechnic guitars of The Nuge that make LOVE GRENADE an explosive, unforgettable, and instant classic. If you don’t have this one in your music collection, bucko, you don’t have a collection. Put this one on eternal repeat.