“The IRS is a Nazi-type jackbooted organization who runs with impunity and will do what they damn well please.”
If you’re enjoying the current crop of outdoor-related reality programming, you may want to check out — and thank — Ted Nugent’s Spirit of the Wild. Now entering it’s 25th season on Outdoor Channel, Spirit of the Wild is an up-front and unsanitized look at hunters and hunting starring Ted and Shemane Nugent doing what they love.
This writer was honored with the opportunity to speak to Nugent about his show, but also his music and his unfettered political opinions — and anyone who’s heard Nugent interviewed knows the best thing the interviewer can do is get out of the way and let Nugent take over.
The new season of Spirit of the Wild debuts Tuesday, July 2nd at 8:30pm EST on Outdoor Channel.
Carter: I’ve been looking at the sample videos of your show, Spirit of the Wild, and I find them refreshing. There are so many reality shows that are “unscripted” but have writers. Your show looks so off-the-cuff. How much of that is scripted or plotted? How do you do it?
Nugent: Well, first of all, I’ve never done a “take two” in my life. I think that then spontaneous instinctual first reaction, first statement is sacred ground. Just go back to the Stranglehold guitar solo. It was a “take one” jam session, we caught the magic right then and there — and you just don’t tamper with that kind of spontaneity and that kind of unleashed honesty.
And that’s why Spirit of the Wild is so popular. I have such an incredible, very very intense connection with people in my travels. People stop me all the time, and the really amazing emotional communications we get via email and otherwise is a testimony that what you’re identifying is the pulse of what the hunting lifestyle should be, and actually is real working hard, playing hard families across this country. They know that I get genuinely tickled when I shoot a woodchuck! And they see that it’s a youthful enthusiasm, because the hunting lifestyle is in my blood. I’ve been doing it for sixty-four and a half years. I started shooting suction cup arrows at stuffed animals probably before I was two years old! And I haven’t stopped since. I shot a red squirrel this morning, and you’d think I’d just shot the world record elk. It was really kind of cute.
[…]
