At any time of the day or night, Bob Seger is playing on a radio station somewhere in the continental United States. In Chicago, I once heard “Night Moves” three times in the span of one hour. Whether it’s on the airwaves—where you’re almost as likely to find “The Fire Down Below,” “Hollywood Nights,” or “Against the Wind“—or in more than a decade’s worth of Chevy commercials (“Like a Rock“) or, thanks to Risky Business, in pretty much every scene anywhere that involves somebody dancing around a living room in his underwear (“Old Time Rock and Roll“), Bob Seger is an inescapable part of the pop cultural landscape.
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This is all many listeners know of Seger’s career. But in the decade or so before his first national commercial success, Night Moves, he released eight studio albums and two dozen singles, almost all of them with his own bands. Some of these songs—”Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Rosalie,” “Turn the Page“—were already popular in 1976, when Night Moves came out, or have since become so. (Thin Lizzy did “Rosalie” a big favor with a cover version on 1975’s Fighting.) Most of the music from this period, though, is long out of print—the majority of the songs aren’t even available on compilations. And the earliest Seger album reissued within the past decade is 1972’s Smokin’ O.P.’s.
With the notable exceptions of “Lucifer,” a glitterless glam stomp from the 1970 album Mongrel, and “Get Out of Denver,” a Chuck Berry rip that kicks off 1974’s Seven (quite possibly his masterpiece, and still out of print), Seger’s music mellowed with each successive LP. He kept the chugging tempos and the muffled, hissy sound quality, but bashes turned into shuffles, acoustic guitars replaced electrics, and rollicking hysteria softened into reflection and resignation. By 1975’s Beautiful Loser, Seger’s polished, intimate, well-worn weariness had taken center stage.
The midwest is supposed to be the flat, beige, old-fashioned, blue-collar, conservative, cultureless netherworld conjoining the coasts, from which everyone pursuing a big dream eventually flees. Of course, once you make your way to New York or Hollywood or some other fancypants metropolis in search of fame and fortune, you just find that different, more expensive problems have replaced the old ones—problems that make it easy to look down on all the people back home who didn’t have the guts to step onto a bigger stage.
Sat 5/14, 8 PM, Allstate Arena, $75, all-ages.
