Bob Seger was thirty and practically a geriatric (thirty is sixty in rock years!) when 1976’s Night Moves finally took him nationwide, big time. It came as a surprise. Seger seemed destined to spend his career as a journeyman—a big fish (although hardly as hip a fish as The Stooges, the MC5 and Alice Cooper) in the Detroit area, just another band everywhere else. He was a second-tier rocker who put on high-energy rock shows and had written some great songs including the 1968 classic “2 +2 = ?”and 1975’s “Beautiful Loser,” none of which—with the exception of 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”—broke into the American Top Forty.
He began his recording career with the Bob Seger System before going solo and then forming the crack Detroit unit Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band, but fame eluded him until Night Moves (with its title track, which may well be the greatest and most poignant song ever written about growing old and looking back) went to No. four on the charts. It says everything you need to know about Seger’s genius that “Night Moves” sounds like the work of a much older man—thirty is a bit early to be singing about autumn closing in. But Seger pulled it off with ease, perhaps because all that touring left him wise beyond his years.
Night Moves broke Seger, but he made his first inroad towards national attention with the previous year’s two-fer Live Bullet with The Silver Bullet Band. Recorded at Detroit’s Cobo Hall before a vocal and partisan crowd, Live Bullet is a galvanizing non-stop hard rock party and call to arms. Live Bullet demonstrates that Seger was a no-frills roots rocker with a voice that was all road grit who put on an electrifying live show, heavy on irresistible, high-octane, old-school scorchers that should have made him a star but didn’t. And the covers (of songs by Tina Turner, Van Morrison, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry) are barnstormers as well. When the announcer at album’s open shouts, “You are here because you want the real thing!” he isn’t fooling.
Seger projects almost as well as John Fogarty—he may have been in Cobo Hall, but I’ll bet you the kids could hear him giving it his all in North Dakota’s Iron Range. And Seger and band seemed to have a constitutional aversion to going the ballad/love song route or even going the speed limit; aside from “Turn the Page” and “Jody Girl,” the adrenaline never flags. Simple, loud and fast: it’s the oldest formula there is, but there’s a reason Seger would go on to sing about loving that old time rock and roll—he loved that old time rock and roll. It’s an awful song, granted, and a real blot on his permanent record, but a true reflection of his Chuck Berry-loving self.
Live Bullet opens with a kick-ass cover of Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits.” Seger’s version does Turner’s shout-out to Nutbush, Tennessee proud; it’s amp-blowing loud and bootlegger stock car fast, and The Silver Bullet Band adds some Chuck Berry into the fuel mix. Seger takes a moment in the middle to tell the folks that Detroit audiences are the best audiences in the world (says so right in Rolling Stone magazine, he tells ‘em!) but otherwise the song’s no nonsense and muscle car fast.
Like the opener the next three songs were culled from the band’s previous LP, 1975’s Beautiful Loser, and they’re all winners. “Travelin’ Man” is a song about life on the road by one of rock’s biggest road warriors—The Silver Bullet Band was playing “five nights a week, sometimes six” in Seger’s words. But unlike the weary pessimism of “Turn the Page” this number about the endless highway has swagger—it opens quietly enough, but by the end it’s a battering ram and Drew Abbott is doing mad things on guitar. The sax work of the appropriately named Alto Reed puts the boot in as well.
“Travelin’ Band” segues into the catchy, should-have-been-a-hit “Beautiful Loser,” which offers a foretaste of the somewhat more melodic (and even elegiac) music on Night Moves. The song has this early Eagles vibe to it but the bottom has more kick, and Seger goes from laid-back to impassioned as the song goes on. Robyn Robins shows off on organ, and the song goes out in a shower of cymbals. “Jody Girl” is a real pretty but bittersweet ode to a woman whose life has been reduced to her kids and watching (alternately) soap operas and the clock, but who can’t help but think back to the days when she had to beat the beaus off with a lug wrench. Think “Glory Days,” and come to think of it I can hear the Boss in there too.
Seger then announces “I want to do a funky thing here,” after which the band breaks into a funky-indeed cover of Van Morrison’s “I’ve Been Working.” It’s going out (although he doesn’t say so) to the working class kids in one of the most working class cities out there, and the kids know it. Reed’s sax blurt is great, and Seger’s brand of funk is all Motor City muscle, sheer Detroit rolling iron.
The powerful but down-in-the mouth “Turn the Page” is a classic in the road-weary road warrior genre; the chorus captures the robotic nature of doing endless one-night stands (“Say, here I am/On the road again/There I am/Up on the stage/Here I go/Playin’ star again/There I go/Turn the page”) and the line “You just wish the trip was through” says it all. And the lines about hearing the mutters of hippy-hating rednecks in restaurants (“Is that a woman or a man?”) and not daring to do a goddamn thing about it because you’re more outnumbered than the guys at the Alamo take on real resonance when you consider that wearing your hair long back could be a lethal proposition—Bobby Ramirez, one-time drummer for Edgar Winter’s White Trash, was actually murdered because of his long hair in an altercation in Chicago in 1972—the same year “Turn the Page” came out.
“U.M.C. (Upper Middle Class)” is a bluesy “shuffle” (Seger’s word) about upward mobility, which a sarcastic Bob makes clear is a soul-deadening proposition. Guitar solo, organ solo, more guitar, Seger wants to drive a Lincoln, it’s all nice but it’s not very memorable. Working class meat and potatoes rock is what it, and the song goes heavy on the potatoes. And that goes double for the bass-heavy “Heavy Music,” which aspires to Grand Funk Railroad status (which means it’s all potatoes) and doesn’t make it. Seger’s slumming on this one, and the mid-section where he tells the audience to put their hands together is live album superfluity at its most superfluous. But boy does the audience come alive when he tells them they might just end up on an album, this one in fact!
The Silver Bullet Band’s cover of “Bo Diddley” (which segues into “Who Do You Love?”) doesn’t rock my world either. It opens on a driving note—love the chukka-chukka guitar and the huge organ sound—but things go south after that because I hate the lyrics about mockingbirds and diamond rings. And things take a dramatic turn for the worse when the band commences to “jam”—Reed plays a squealing sax solo that’s nice, but he’s followed in short order by (horror of horrors) brief (but not brief enough) drum and organ solos.
Fortunately the band ends their shenanigans and Seger goes into “Who Do You Love?”. Nails it too, but if you’re like me you’re still traumatized by what came before to enjoy it. Fortunately Bob and the boys follow it up with the punch-to-the-solar-plexus that is “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” Seger has the biggest pipes in the Midwest, the guitarist wails, and the song is such a straightforward driving wheel of born-to-be-badassery you’ll want to dive for cover because it comes at you like a fuel-injected V8-powered monster machine and you can be damn sure nobody thought to put in brakes.
“Katmandu” is this frenetic old school rocker with sizzling post-Chuck Berry guitar and a Clarence Clemons-school sax solo that has Seger singing about how he doesn’t have anything against the East Coast or the West Coast (“Warner Brothers are such good hosts”) or all points in between but all things considered he wants OUT because he’s tired of looking at TV sets and has decided Katmandu is the place he wants to be, not because he has spiritual yearnings (he ain’t no hippie) but probably because he dropped his finger randomly on a globe and decided Katmandu was as close as you could come to leaving the planet altogether.
Then come the encores and the heavy-duty “Looking Back.” It’s anti-war, and anti-people who turn off the TV because they don’t want to hear about how kids are dying in said war, and Bob sounds angry about it. Too many people are looking back, that’s the problem, presumably to some mythical and idealized past that never existed in the first place. The song isn’t one of Seger’s best but he performs it with grit and passion, and lucky for us it’s followed by the high-tailin’-it fast “Get Out of Denver,” which is basically Chuck Berry played at triple time. It’s musical methamphetamine, this one, and an album highlight for sure, and it doesn’t hurt that Seger sings it like his tonsils are on fire.
In the second encore Seger goes back to the source with the Chuck Berry medley “Let It Rock/Little Queenie.” Seger goes at it like Mr. Excitement, the rhythm section digs a groove deeper than Chuck might have liked, and the arrangement might not have received his seal of approval either (too busy). But you can’t fault the energy levels or the volume knobs or the sheer love for the music that comes through straight, it seems, from good old Memphis, Tennessee. Problem is all the live album jive, the slowdowns during which Seger delivers your average concert spiel and introduces the band, all of which kills a killer “Little Queenie” dead in its tracks. And then comes the audience call and response, simply odious, as is the stop-start ending that you begin to think will never end. Should have shut things down with “Get Out of Denver” is what they should have done.
Bob Seger had to turn a lot of pages and sweat beneath a whole lot of stage lights in places like Peoria to reach the promised land, and there must have been times when he doubted he’d ever make it past a truck stop outside of Lincoln, Nebraska. When I think of Seger I see an endless succession of bad meals in bad restaurants and a map of the United States covered with so many tour itineraries laid out in black ink there’s no telling it was a map in the first place. But Seger persevered, paid his dues and then some, and as Live Bullet demonstrates he always gave it his all because he didn’t know any other way to do it because that’s the way it’s done in Detroit. Rarely has a guy, a real working class hero, given so much to get what he had coming. And he did it against the wind the whole damn way.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
