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Dukes, who were making a rare appearance at the Grande. The Amboy Dukes were great guys, but Ted Nugent—how could you trust a guy who didn’t get high? Anyway, they had a place they played all the time in Northland Mall called the Mummp. It was like a dome, and they played there every weekend.
    Don Was: The Mummp was formerly Northland Playhouse, which was like a regional theater. It was taken over by the Weinstein family of Oak Park, and the house band was the Amboy Dukes. I could lay in bed and listen to the Dukes on Friday and Saturday nights, it was that close to my house when I was a kid.
    Bill White: I met Ted at the Mummp. They were playing, and they didn’t have a bass player and he announced it on the PA. So I went back and met him, then went over to the house and played and I was in.
    Ted Nugent: It didn’t really matter where we played. As long as we didn’t blow the power and the amps kept working, I was a happy man. I mean, early days you look at the Crow’s Nest East, the Crow’s Nest West, and the Crow’s Nest South, you look at the Birmingham Palladium, you look at the Hideouts, you look at the Shindigs, and the Hullabaloos, and the Fifth Dimension, I mean, they were all just makeshift facilities that were, you know, just rooms with the dividers blown out so we could pack in a lot of people and play. I loved ’em all. I loved the intimacy.
    Russ Gibb: John Finley was this young kid who worked for me, one of the original Grande kids. I always used these kids as a gauge for what was popular, who people would go see. John helped me develop the Grande actually. He went to Redford High School and would hand out handbills for the shows, so we’d always have all these Redford kids coming in. So he was a very early opinion maker. He introduced me to Ted.
    Donny Hartman ( The Frost, guitarist ): When the Frost broke up, Ted called me up and goes, “Hey, man. Ted Nugent.” I go, “How the hell you doin’, Ted?” And I knew some of the guys in his band, and they were all bitchin’ ’cause they had just done some stadium show, and he took, I think, almost a quarter million bucks outta there. Paid everybody in the band $850. Ted says, “Yeah, man. God, my guys are high. I’m having some problems with my guys.” “I wonder why, Ted.” He said, “Man, I’d really like you to sing in my band, man.” I said, “Yeah?” He goes, “Well, I’d love to pay all your expenses and everything, and I’ll pay you $250 a night.” I said, “You shouldn’t have made this phone call.” He says, “Why?” I said, “’Cause if I never talk to you again, it’ll be too soon.”
    Michael Lutz ( Brownsville Station, guitarist, vocalist, bassist ): I went for an audition to sing with Ted one time at the Fifth Dimension in Ann Arbor, where the Amboy Dukes were doing both rehearsal and auditions. I auditioned with “Sunshine of Your Love” and “Manic Depression.” They were getting ready to do what would eventually become the album Journey to the Center of the Mind . They played the song “Journey to the Center of the Mind,” and I thought, “Holy shit, man. This is cool.” I got the call from Ted and he said, “You’re it.” But John Drake owned theirPA system, and they couldn’t afford a new one. So they had to keep Drake. But for one week I was the new singer for the Amboy Dukes.
    Shaun Murphy ( Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, Stoney and Meatloaf, vocalist ): A lot of people kind of misunderstood Ted. They thought he was drunk, they thought he was high, but he never took any drugs, never took any alcohol—that was him.
    Russ Gibb: He was around a lot of people who partook of the sacrament, but I don’t know that I ever saw him indulge.
    Ted Nugent: I was hopelessly inebriated by the music.
    K. J. Knight: Back then Rusty Day and a