“Stranglehold” by Ted Nugent

Ted Nugent kicked off his self-titled 1975 solo debut for Epic with "Stranglehold", a slab of hard rock whose roots run back to 1968, when he climbed onstage at a church with Steve 'Muruga' Booker and John Sauter after an Amboy Dukes gig at the Grande Ballroom and switched on a cassette recorder. The riff he found that night, by his own telling a Bo Diddley lick roughed up with extra grind and swagger, became the Amboy Dukes' encore and kept stretching out.

By the time he cut it with Derek St. Holmes, Cliff Davies and Rob Grange, it was a slow, stalking groove with no chorus at all, which is exactly why Epic balked at first; Nugent argued that crowds loved the jam, and the label backed down. Holmes takes the vocal, Nugent steps in for one verse, and Nugent has since admitted that Grange co-wrote it without ever seeing a cut. It became his signature song.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.