JEFFREY MORGAN’S MEDIA BLACKOUT #540.171!

Ted Nugent – Sweden Rocks (Eagle) :: This pre-Love Grenade live offering from 2006 sure ain’t no Double Live Gonzo, but it’s still a fun enough drool-cup listen. Even so, the perennial problem with Ted isn’t his still-strident politics or his still-sharp playing, it’s his still-selfish persistence in singing all of his songs by himself. With any luck, Derek St. Holmes will be back the next time around to keep Nugent’s ego in check and provide a balancing Ying to Ted’s rampant Yango Tango shtick.

Ted Nugent & The Amboy Dukes – Survival Of The Fittest (Polydor) :: It’s got everything you could possibly want; it’s got more than you could possibly need.

Jethro Tull – Jack In The Green: Live In Germany (Eagle Vision) :: Featuring 18 high-quality video excerpts from some of Tull’s numerous Deutschland appearances over the decades covering the gamut from 1970 to 1993. Definitely worth the price of admission alone is the empty television studio version of “Nothing Is Easy” from 1970, which contains several false starts before Ian Anderson finally calls it quits and walks off mid-song due to a stomach ailment. Unlike Kurt Cobain, however, Ian didn’t take a double-barreled dose of Terminalin to relieve the pain.

SNEERING PUTDOWN OF THE WEEK: Frank Miller & Jim Lee – All Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder (DC Comics) :: You all know Frank Miller as the creative meistermind behind Sin City and 300 who birthed an entire gloomy batgenre with The Dark Knight Returns before he tried to kill it dead with DK2 and DK3. This prematurely aborted brilliant iconoclastic deconstruction features an even grizzlier Batman infused with a decidedly unhealthy dose of Sin City Marv attitude. How unhealthy? Look, pal, any comic book that has Batman calling Wonder Woman “the Wicked Witch of Lesbos Island” deserves to be in your collection, alright?

Be seeing you!