Originally published in Uncut Take 181 (June 2012 issue)…
Bob Seger has just moved house. “We needed a new house, and I went on tour for 51 days and we never moved in,” the Detroit-born singer explains. “I’m so far behind, I got boxes on boxes.” We’re pleased, then, he’s taken time out from the unpacking to talk us through his career as one of America’s most enduring blue-collar rockers. “I wanted to be as rhythmic as James Brown, as deep as Bob Dylan and as fiery as Little Richard,” Seger tells us. It’s a strategy that’s found him considerable success while also attracting plenty of famous admirers, including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and another Detroit rocker: “Jack White keeps calling my office…”
Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man
CAPITOL, 1969
The veteran of local Detroit groups including The Last Heard – whose 1967 single “Heavy Metal” featured Jim Osterberg, later known as Iggy Pop, on drums – Seger and his band turned down an offer from Motown to join the Capitol roster as The Bob Seger System. Future Eagle Glenn Frey guested on their debut’s title track.
SEGER: We changed our name from The Last Heard because if you said it too fast, it came out bad. I’d been sitting on the song “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” for a long time, but the rest of it, I wrote in five days and recorded in about five days. My manager’s done this to me down through the years, where he says, “We’ve got to have an album now.” Meanwhile I’m playing five or six nights a week. Worse, I did not know how to write songs. We recorded it in the basement of a bowling alley over Pampa Lanes over in East Detroit. We used that place a lot. I ended up buying the piano out of there. It’s a 1968 Bosendorfer. It’s still sitting in my house. Glenn Frey sang back-ups on “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”. I met him when I was 19 and he was 16. The Eagles are all over my shit. As for the song “2+2=?”, I was talking about the Vietnam War. It didn’t make sense to me. During the 1960s, I saw the protests on the University of Michigan campus. I got tear-gassed a couple of times. Most of these songs, I threw together really quick. You know who loved that stuff, is Jack White. He keeps calling my office, saying, “Tell Bob I want to remix it. I want to redo it.” He wants to play on it, too.
Brand New Morning
CAPITOL, 1971
After the failure of the System’s third album, Mongrel, Seger struck out alone on this acoustic album. It was not a success and remains out of print. Seger has said the only copy is buried in his backyard.
I hadn’t listened to Brand New Morning in 35 years until now. I knew I wasn’t a good enough songwriter and I wanted to just stop and write. The only way I could think of to do that was to just quit the band and say, “I’m going to do a solo thing.” I love some of the chords on that record. Most of it’s crap, but there’s a couple of things on it that I like. It’s me trying to become a songwriter. I was writing in weird tunings that I picked up from Tom Rush, who is one of my favourite folk guys. “Railroad Days” is my favourite song on there. I’ve always loved trains. I grew up within a mile of a set of train tracks. My brother, he’s three and a half years older than me, we used to play on the cars – when they were stationary, naturally. We’d do the old penny on the track, all that stuff, get it squashed and take it home and look at it. We could hear the trains at night. It used to make me think, ‘I’m here, but they’re going somewhere.’
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Back In ’72
PALLADIUM/REPRISE, 1973
Plans to record at Muscle Shoals were abandoned after a misunderstanding over studio fees – Seger believed he was being charged £1,500 per side of an album, not – as it turned out – per track. Instead, he recorded the bulk of the album at Leon Russell’s studio.
There’s a few songs from Muscle Shoals, but most of it was done in Paradise, Oklahoma, maybe 60 miles east of Tulsa, at Leon’s. A lot of those years, before we made it big, we were playing 300 and some nights a year, travelling 125,000 miles a year, wearing out vans, station wagons. One night I was playing in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I was with Skip and Dave from Teegarden & Van Winkle, and we stopped in some place to get something to eat after the gig. It’s like one in the morning. We all had long hair, and Skip and Dave were skinnier than hell, and I wasn’t far behind them. We got harassed. That’s where the song “Turn The Page” came from. As for the line, “You smoke the day’s last cigarette rememberin’ what she said,” that was just a general thing for a travelling musician. We met a lot of girls on the road, and spent a lot of nights out there, and after whatever happened, I’d smoke a cigarette and go to sleep. Yeah, we weren’t the most chivalrous bunch. We knew what was at stake and we knew we were moving on. Probably never see these people again. We weren’t that much in demand either. That was my life back then. You can hear it in that song.
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Live Bullet
EMI, 1976
The first album to feature Seger’s long-serving Silver Bullet Band, this was recorded over two nights at Detroit’s Cobo Hall in September, 1975. Ostensibly, a stop-gap to allow Seger to finish his Night Moves album, this became one of the best-selling live records of all time.
I had a bunch of songs for Night Moves. Enough for Punch [Seger’s manager], but not enough for me. So we did Live Bullet, and it was worth it. I found out we were recording it the night of the shows. Punch didn’t want me to know, because he didn’t want us to be nervous. But The Silver Bullet Band had been playing five, six nights a week, every week, so we knew those songs up, down, sideways, and we were tight. It was just a matter of going out there and enjoying ourselves, feeding off the energy of the crowd. I remember about four or five months earlier, we played with Dan Hicks And His Hot Licks. They were supposed to close the show. But Dan had seen us soundcheck earlier, and he said, “I’m going on before you, I’m not following you.” So I started getting a feeling that we were getting better. And at Cobo Hall, it was like, finally, we’re headlining at a proper facility in our own town. We got a couple outtakes from it, too – “Don’t Burn Down The Bridge” by Albert King, “Just Might Want To Come Home”, “Breaking Up Somebody’s Home”. So the whole show didn’t get on the album, but someday you’re going to hear those tracks, too.
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Night Moves
EMI, 1976
Seger’s ninth studio album found him turning 30, and looking back to his youth for inspiration. The title track reached No 4 on the American singles charts, transforming Seger into a national star.
This was definitely a career-making record. I have a lot of fondness for it. It was inspired by that movie, American Graffiti [1973]. It was set in ’62. That’s when I was in high school, and it was exactly the life that I lived. We wanted to be tough guys, greasers, car guys, hard-to-get with the girls. Sexuality completely out of control. I am always amazed that they play “Night Moves” on the radio. I got away with one there. I got the idea for narrative songwriting from Kris Kristofferson. A key song for me was “Me And Bobby McGee”. You could just tell that he’d lived that. I listened to that song over, and decided I wanted to write a song like that, a song that I’d lived. So everything in “Night Moves” is true. We did have those parties called grassers. A buddy of mine had an upside-down 45 record player in his glove box, and we’d all bring our records and play them on his car battery and dance by the light of the cars. The first use of “Night Moves” was about getting through the awkwardness of sex and all that stuff. The last “Night Moves” was about time passing. First it was a noun and then it was a verb. I wrote that in pieces and it took me six months to finish it. Springsteen helped me immensely, in a way. When I first heard “Jungleland” on Born To Run, I liked how he just stopped it dead, so I decided that’s what I’ll do with “Night Moves”. I had the three verses, I knew how to end it, what I didn’t know was what went in the middle. So I did a double bridge, like Bruce did in “Jungleland”. Of all the songs I’ve written, there wasn’t one that I was positive would be a hit, except this one. Did the girl I wrote it about know it was about her? Yeah, she knows. It’s funny, I hadn’t seen her for 25 years, and we played Eastern Michigan University last November and there she was in the audience. I saw her for a split second and she looked just as good as ever. When Punch wanted me to put the album out, it didn’t even have “Fire Down Below” at that point. That was one of the last songs I wrote for it, which I think is a pretty good song. Randy Newman told me that was his favorite song I ever wrote, and so did Bob Dylan.
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Stranger In Town
EMI, 1978
The follow-up to Night Moves dealt with the fallout from Seger’s recent success and his relocation to Los Angeles. The cover was shot on the lawn of his Hollywood home, which also was the inspiration for the single, “Hollywood Nights”. It gave him his first UK chart position, too.
The loneliest two years of my life, I lived in LA. Everybody was always working, and you never see anybody. I wrote “Still The Same” about a multitude of characters that I met in LA. It’s about all the Type As, whether they were record promoters or other artists or whatever. I’m not really a Type A guy. My manager is, and that’s probably why we’ve gotten along great down through the years. I like to listen to people. It’s probably my commercial reason for why it was smart to base out of Michigan. I’ve got Glenn Frey playing guitar on “Till It Shines” and Don Felder is on “Ain’t Got No Money”. So there’s my Eagle guys bailing me out again. I love the Frankie Miller song, “Ain’t Got No Money”. He was like a white Otis Redding. There was a song called “Stranger In Town”. It’s me trying to do a soundtrack to a Clint Eastwood Western. It’s pretty cool, actually. It was the 10th song and it never made it on the album. My manager, who’s superstitious about these things, said, “We’ve had good luck with nine, let’s stick with nine.”
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Against The Wind
EMI, 1980
Seger’s only US No 1 LP to date, it knocked Pink Floyd’s The Wall off the top spot. It won two Grammys and again features Seger’s lucky charm, Glenn Frey, here singing backing vocals. Includes a tribute to Jane Fonda.
Stranger In Town had been like No 2 for a couple of months, but we sold six million records. I think we were up against The Bee Gees. We couldn’t get past Saturday Night Fever, that was No 1 forever. So with Against The Wind, I said, “Whatever it takes, I’m going to have a frigging No 1 album.” Everything I wrote, I was thinking, ‘I’m going to try to make sure it can get on the radio.’ But I was experimental, too. I wrote “Her Strut” for Jane Fonda. She knows it’s about her and she loves that. She came to see us in LA. She was such a sweetheart, she came backstage, took pictures of my kids and crew and stuff. As for the title track, I almost didn’t include the line, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”, because I was a little worried about it being grammatically correct. But I thought, ‘I know what I’m trying to say and that’s the best way I can say it, so I’m just going to leave it in.’ John Fogerty told me it’s his favourite line I ever wrote. When I played “Against The Wind” for The Eagles, Don Henley had me play it again and again. Afterwards, he said, “You hurt yourself on that one, didn’t you?” I told him, “Yes, I did.”
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The Distance
EMI, 1982
Produced by Jimmy Iovine, The Distance extended Seger’s chart run and reached No 5 in the US. A Springsteen-endorsed affair, guests included E Street Band keyboard player Roy Bittan alongside Frey, Don Felder and Bonnie Raitt.
I toyed with making this a double album. When I told Springsteen that later, he just looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you?” I told him, “Tell me one double album that wouldn’t be a better single album.” Especially as producer Jimmy Iovine kept bitching at me, “All you do is work.” Imagine how much more I’d have worked if it was a double album. But I get a lot of satisfaction out of working hard. My inspiration for this was the movie, Annie Hall. That whole movie is about relationships, the power of relationships and the yin and the yang of them. “Little Victories” was the song that Springsteen loved from this record. Jimmy Iovine, Springsteen and I were up on Mullholland Drive. Bruce had just driven across the country, and what did he have in his hot little hand, but Born In The USA. He had this mega stereo inside this gigantic Ford something convertible, and I played him The Distance on it and he played me Born In The USA. After a while we had to drive around town, because we were so loud the neighbours came out on their lawns and told us to leave.
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Face The Promise
EMI, 2006
After an 11-year hiatus that he’d spent in semi-retirement with his young family, Seger returned with his 16th studio LP. Fatherhood hadn’t mellowed him: this was a passionate album, fuelled by anger at commercialism, environmental issues and war in Iraq.
Sometimes I get mad at myself, because I sound like I’m preaching. But I feel strongly about certain things. I’ve always loved Joni Mitchell’s “Dog Eat Dog”, and told myself one of these days I’m going to write a song like that. “No Matter Who You Are” is that song. No matter who you are, someone will try to convince you that you should be someone else, or do something else. You’re going to get that no matter who you are. I think that’s important for everyone to know. But I think my favourite song is “Won’t Stop”. It’s so unbelievably different, and it’s just me and this great percussionist Eric Darken from Nashville, there’s nobody else on it. It’s just so frigging unusual. Addiction is just horrible and so I put it right after “Real Mean Bottle”. The other one I’m really proud of is “No More”, which is just my flat-out, total denunciation of that three trillion dollar megafuck called the Iraq War. It killed our economy, it killed the world’s economy.