The Nineties’ first supergroup Damn Yankees actually lived up to the hype and promise in their pedigrees: containing Styx singer/songwriter/guitarist Tommy Shaw, Night Ranger’s singer/songwriter Jack Blades, veteran drummer Michael Cartellone, and whackmaster Ted Nugent, the Damn Yankees debut in February 1990 sold a whopping two million copies of melodic rockers “Coming of Age”,”Runaway”,”Come Again”, and the soaring #3 hit single “High Enough”.
But as you’ll hear in my rowdy classic rock interview, these guys had way too much fun that is legally allowed making those, and the 1992 Damn Yankees follow up Don’t Tread.
“I’m from the Motor City,” Ted Nugent reminded us, “and we’re the ‘Murder Capital’ not because we are more violent. It’s because we are better shots!”-Redbeard
I can’t think of a better song/ performance combo to rock us into the 4th of July holiday weekend than the song “You Can Still Rock in America” by Night Ranger, one of the Eighties’ signature bands, performed in concert by the Nineties’ first supergroup, Damn Yankees. Here is the guy who originally wrote and sang it, Jack Blades, out front of Tommy Shaw, Michael Cartellone, and Ted Nugent in Denver’s Mile High Stadium three decades ago firing up a huge crowd with their encore. –Redbeard
The singing, harmonizing half of the separate project Damn Yankees, Tommy Shaw and Jack Blades, also recorded a fine album in March 1995 entitled My Hallucination, and while promoting that effort Tommy and Jack took their musical comedy act on the road calling themselves the “Neverly Brothers”. They interrupted their hysterically funny modern day Smothers Brothers routine just long enough to sing an acoustic version of one of the big hits they contributed to the Damn Yankeestwo million-seller debut from February 1990, “High Enough“, live on my Q102 Dallas/Ft.Worth afternoon radio show. –Redbeard
When Tommy Shaw, just recently estranged then from arena-fillers Styx, brought his Girls With Guns solo band to a Ft. Worth nightclub in an otherwise empty strip mall on a chilly Sunday November night in 1984, what I expected to see and hear, and what was actually offered up, were two completely different things, providing a real learning moment for me in my career. Standing in the dressing room surrounded by singer/ songwriter/ guitarist Shaw, Billy Joel saxophonist Richie Cannata, and Paul McCartney and Wings drummer Steve Holley, I expected to hear these three veterans of playing “the big rooms” lament slogging back to the bars as if it was a minor league assignment. Boy, was I wrong. What you will hear in this radio interview which Tommy Shaw did with me before the live performance later that night is how big-time professional musicians approach their craft regardless of whether it is a 20,000 seat arena or a nightclub in Ft. Worth. Shaw had just come off the Styx Kilroy Was Here arena and stadium tour a year earlier, a rock musical which was probably ahead of its time by about fifteen years and most definitely not suited for the stadiums and sports arenas in which Styx had staged it. With his first solo album and tour, Tommy Shaw was hungry to reconnect with the fans on a level where every bead of sweat was counted, and every note played was accountable. You’ll hear “Girls With Guns”, “Come In and Explain”, a live “Man in the Wilderness” with Styx, “The Race is On” with Richie Cannata steaming on sax, and finally the In the Studio acoustic version of Tommy Shaw’s “Crystal Ball” as performed live on my ROCK 103 radio show in Memphis in 1983. –Redbeard
Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever clawed its way to #17 on the Billboard album chart, becoming his third consecutive multi-million seller after 1975’s Ted Nugent containing “Stranglehold”, and Free for All the following year. Nugent would take Cat Scratch Fever‘s instant success and transform it through the remainder of 1977 into the top-grossing rock concert act that year. But it hadn’t always been that way. Far from it.
Tyranosaurus Ted and I still reminisce about him playing the tiny Findlay (Ohio) College gym with the Amboy Dukes in Fall 1971 to an audience of about 100. Or the following Summer 1972 playing in a cornfield outside North Baltimore Ohio, where someone in that crowd had tossed a tomato at Ted’s head during a guitar solo. Even though blinded by the glaring stage lights, Nugent spotted the incoming red missile hurtling out of the darkness and miraculously caught it one-handed while never missing a note on the guitar neck with his left. When the song ended, Ted stopped the show, calling out the cowardly perpetrator in the inky blackness of the crowd while holding the tomato in his fist and shouting,” Is this what you wanted to see?” Nugent suddenly smashed the tomato on his face, then launched into a blistering song while the audience absolutely erupted!
There is no denying that Ted’s Motor City motormouth has immersed his rump in hot water in the past due to his sharp elbowed political views. But love him or loathe him, it’s truly remarkable…even admirable…that after almost fifty years since the Amboy Dukes sang “Journey to the Center of Your Mind”, Ted Nugent is not only ” workin’ hard and playin’ hard”, but working at all. This TED talk may have nothing to do with technology, but it has everything to do with passion, conviction, and a most colorful storyteller. – Redbeard ( At Nugent’s Central Texas ranch, L-R my brother Rob,Ted, Redbeard )
Nineties super group Damn Yankees featuring L-R Michael Cartellone, Tommy Shaw, Jack Blades, and Ted Nugent live in Denver June 20, 1992 performing Tommy Shaw’s Styx song “Renegade”. Turn this one up!
The Nineties’ first supergroup Damn Yankees actually lived up to the hype and promise in their pedigrees: containing Styx singer/songwriter/guitarist Tommy Shaw, Night Ranger’s singer/songwriter Jack Blades, veteran drummer Michael Cartellone, and whackmaster Ted Nugent, the Damn Yankees debut in February 1990 sold a whopping two million copies of melodic rockers “Coming of Age”,”Runaway”,”Come Again”, and the soaring #3 hit single “High Enough”.
