“Biohazard, huh?” barked the Nuge. “Well, that’s okay cuz I got a friend at the EPA.” His fellow musician put down, his proximity to power asserted, the Nuge grinned with wolfish satisfaction and went back to his string bending. The burly Seinfeld clenched his fists and muttered darkly about “old man rock,” and the prospect of these two alpha males — the silverback and the young challenger — going head-to-head danced briefly before us. But to take on the Nuge would have been a parricide even for a heavily inked Brooklyn hardcore brawler like Seinfeld: Nugent is a metal progenitor, the daddy of them all, and his howlings in the ’70s raised a generation. “Me playing in a band with Ted Nugent is like playing in a band with Santa Claus!” raved Baz.
And so the persona of “Uncle Ted” was established in the house: a senior presence, Patton-like in its authority, benevolent in its wisdom, with a touch of the guru. He took his boys out shooting, he held court at the dinner table. He stood mightily in the bathroom, plunger in hand, having plugged the toilet with a mega-crap. Anthrax’s Scott Ian was particularly smitten — “I can’t believe I’m friends with Ted Nugent!” — and Episode Two featured a wicked montage of Ian and the Nuge playing guitar, sharing a laugh, eating, to the soft-focus strains of Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” And when Baz hit the wine again after vowing to give it a rest in the wake of his bust-up with Seinfeld, it was Uncle Ted who intervened, with power-chord effectiveness. “I love you, kid, but I love you with a crowbar. I want the real Sebastian Bach, I want all of you!” Baz wept anew, vowed to do better, and then — amazingly — flung himself onto the carpet and began doing push-ups. Ten, 15 . . . “You are no longer a body, you are a spirit!” chanted Uncle Ted, standing over this wayward son as he heaved up and down and his hair flapped hugely in wings of streaked blond. “Your father is with you now!” (This may have been the most heavy metal moment of the entire show.)
And there was more, much more. Mid series all the women arrived, including Mrs. Evan Seinfeld, who is porn star Tera Patrick. At this point Seinfeld, who had all along exuded a certain smoothly corpulent menace, took on the definitive sleekness of a Bond villain. Bald, white-robed amid his cushions, caressing with a tattoo’d hand the wad of dirty dollars from his wife’s last club appearance, he murmured sleazy endearments: “You can do whatever you want, baby, as long as you bring the money back to daddy.” A topless photo shoot was set up for Tera Patrick and Mrs. Sebastian Bach, with predictable effects on a watching Baz: “Dude, my fucking rod is like . . . !!!!!!?” Then there was the epic back-and-forth over what name the supergroup would perform under: Fist, Godwar, the Situation, Venison . . . Baz had plenty of ideas: Celebuton was my favourite, whereas he was deeply attached (for an hour or so) to Savage Animal. (“Dude, you are a savage animal! Rock and roll is a savage animal!!”) Eventually, in a thunderbolt of inspiration, he came up with the one that stuck: Damnocracy.
