Cat Scratch Fever

"Cat Scratch Fever" operates on a frequency somewhere between a power tool and a mating call. The riff — two notes, hammered with absolute conviction — is almost insultingly simple, and that simplicity is entirely the point: Ted Nugent isn't interested in subtlety, and the song makes no pretense of being anything other than a raw, amplified libidinal statement. The electric guitar tone is thick and buzzing, like something alive, and the rhythm section locks in with a locked-groove swagger that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into chaos. There's a physicality to the production that you feel before you process it — the low end sits in your chest, the guitar sits behind your eyes. Nugent's vocal is a kind of sneering brag delivered without apology, the voice of a man who considers restraint to be a personal failing. Lyrically, the song operates almost entirely in innuendo, which by the time of its 1977 release was a well-worn hard rock tradition, but Nugent plays it with such committed straight-faced audacity that it still lands with some impact. Culturally, this is the id of 1970s American rock — the moment before punk's critique and after classic rock's ambition, when a sector of the audience just wanted volume and heat. This is a song for driving too fast on a summer highway, for the moment before a party gets interesting, for anyone who needs twenty-seven words of rock music and nothing more complex than that.