SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD Ted Nugent was on top of the world. In 1965, his band, the Lourds, had won the Michigan Battle of the Bands, beating out 60 other Detroit-area combos. To seal their win, Nugent jumped on the judges’ table to play his guitar solo. As the winning band, the Lourds got to open for the Supremes and the Beau Brummels at Detroit’s Cobo Hall on June 13, 1965. They played a medley of “High Heel Sneakers,” “Walking the Dog” and “Shake Your Tail Feather.”
“I was smokin’ in Detroit,” Nugent says today. “The Lourds were just kickin’ ass... We were getting ready to open up some shows for the Stones.”
Unbeknownst to Nugent, the Lourds were about to end abruptly.
In the fall of 1965, H.K. Porter Co. transferred Nugent’s dad to Chicago for work. “It was horrible,” Nugent says. “I didn’t want to go.” But despite young Ted’s protests, Warren and Marion Nugent and their four children — Ted, his brothers Jeffrey and John and his sister Kathy — moved from Redford Township in suburban Detroit to Hoffman Estates, a small suburb outside of Chicago.
Nugent wasted no time forming a new band, the Amboy Dukes, who began playing at The Cellar in the Chicago suburb of Arlington Heights, among other venues. The Amboy Dukes quickly became one of the hottest bands on the Chicago scene, competing with the Shadows of Knight and the Ides of March for the mantle of the city’s top band.
