ITEM: In the last seven years, Bob Seger has had ten top ten records in Detroit.

ITEM: Of those ten, three have sold over 50,000 copies.

ITEM: One of them, “Heavy Music,” sold 66,000 copies in Detroit alone, despite the company which issued it folding just as it was breaking into the national charts. (“Heavy Music” still is a steady seller in Detroit.)

ITEM: In November of 1969, when the largest anti-war demonstrations were held, disc jockeys all over the country began to play a (then) two year old Seger single called “2+2=?” Sales zoomed but the new record company was too slow to reissue it.

ITEM: Of all the records Seger has had, not one of them has reached any higher than 17 in the national charts.

ITEM: Never has a Seger single been played in San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York.

QUESTION: If Bob Seger is as good as everyone who’s heard him agrees he is, why haven’t you ever heard of him?

The contradiction in trying to write about an unknown quantity in rock‘n’ roll is readily apparent. Because we are basically dealing with a pop music form, albeit one with roots in certain people’s indigenous culture(s), an essential criterion for judging the importance of any rock and roll performer must be record sales, or something like it: in other words, how many people are conscious of it?

That’s not to say that all good rockers sell lots of records of course: Rod Stewart was just as brilliant before “Maggie May” as after. But it is undeniable that a singer means more to all of us when he has a hit, just because we’ve invested something in him, and because we all know about him. He’s not a private interest anymore, he’s a public passion.

It is probably radio that has made rock and roll the most resilient and vital of pop culture forms. There’s something wonderful and thrilling about hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Imagine” or “Wild Night” or “Satisfaction” boom out of an AM radio, at 4 am or noon or when school lets out at three. (That’s what “Rock Around The Clock” means.) There’s even a little excitement, when you stop to think about it, in knowing that any minute you might hear one of those things, or something' just as good. Or something worse, but that’s the chance you take.

FM changed that a little: it made a little more music a little more accessible. One wonders whether the effect will be for better or worse; there’s something comfortable in Top 40, you know they’ve gotta rock it, because it’s basically driving music, and you know you’ll have time to get used to anything that’s really worthwhile. (If you plan right, you can even only listen to the tunes you want to,but that requires either pushbuttons or the mind of an AM p.d. and no matter what, constant attention, which is sort of the game-pan of the radio industry anyhow.)

Nevertheless, radio is where we all share our music, where it becomes common property. That’s one reason why many of the most important people in rock and roll have been the most successful: Dylan, Chuck Berry, the Beatles and Stones, Who (as fine a singles group as ever existed), the Coasters, and, of course, the ultimate singles group, Creedence, who make music with pure AM in the grooves. Of course, the idea of radio as our collective unconscious means that until something has been there, it really isn’t part of us yet. Some people can break the form, like a lot of the Heavy Metal groups are doing, but not many.

When that big bad beat comes on...

Bob Seger is, then, a paradox; he has been heavily influential in Michigan, the most successful indigenous white artist aside from Mitch Ryder. He’s not a Van Dyke Parks woodwork pest, but he’s also not a John Fogerty, even though he should be, because his songs are that good and cut from the same mold.

It’s worthwhile to talk about Seger for several reasons: because his music is so exciting, because his lyrics say so much about our lives and the way we live them. And because of that remarkable track record. No one has been able to figure that out yet, and I’m not the one to do it. I can suggest some possibilities but I don’t have the answer, unless it’s to call your radio station and demand “Lookin’ Back” every time you hear Three Dog Night.

What’s even stranger, though, than the lack of record sales is the fact that no one has picked up on Bob’s songs. This is the age of songwriter worship, and Seger is a rare commodity. He’s as good, in his own genre as Fogerty or Robbie Robertson or Carole King in theirs, a mere cut below Dylan and Chuck Berry as far as his ability to push it out there and define it. But that hasn’t happened either.

There have been a few cover versions. “They were all terrible,” Bob laughs. “Mostly they were European and they were awwwwwwwful. It seems like the only people who do my stuff are these really off-the-wall cats who are lookin’ for really off the wall stuff. I always wanted to see Joe Cocker doin’ ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man’ and that, but instead I get this horrible version of ‘East Side Story’, but the St. Louis Union, produced by Tony Clarke (The Moody Blues). Homs and a big production. It’s really funny. A kitchen sink production thing, it was terrrrrrrrrrible.”

Someday one of Bob Seger’s songs is gonna bust out of the charts in Detroit, or somewhere, and then watch out! ’Cause he does know what it’s all about and given the chance he’ll set us all wobblin’. It’s just like he said in his classic “Heavy Music:”

Doncha ever listen to the radio

When that big bad beat comes on

I know you gotta dig it

I know you can’t stop

’Cause the bottom comes on too strong*

2. EAST SIDE STORY

Seger’s remarkable string of incredible singles and perverse luck began in 1964. A magic year for the Beatles and Britain and America’s sense of The Rock.

Bob had been in a few bar bands, received an invitation to Vegas but decided to stick around. He and his band, the Last Heard, went into a tiny Motor City recording studio about that time to cut a record. They chose a song Bob had written called “East Side Story.”

The record was released on Hideout Records, owned by a local teen club entrepeneur, later to become the manager of the group, named Punch Andrews.

Hideout put out records as much to hype teenclub attendance as to sell them (the clubs were called Hideouts, too,, of course). It was a not uncommon midwestem rock phenomenon. Jeep Holland, for instance, another local legend, operated A-Squarje Records in between booking groups and had local smashes with the Rationals (“I Need You,” and their legendary white boy version of “Respect”), and the SRC (“I’m So Glad”).

Unquestionably, the teenclub scene was different than the later ballroom daze. Seger, for example, could play any of half a hundred different clubs in Michigan, Ohio, Illinois and Indiana, many of them franchise joints: Hideouts, Crows Nests, Hullabaloos (from the tv show). It was a forum for unsophisticated music, rock in the raw. Teenagers dancing and drinking to bands who did the same when they weren’t on the stage: egalitarian and fun, if not musically brilliant. Great bands came out of that kind of scene: Grand Funk, the Young Rascals, J. Geils, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels and Creedence. This was peer-group rock. Star trips were out of the question when you were playing, quite often, for people you had to see in the halls; at school the next day. As a result, those bands which went through the teen club process were left with far fewer pretensions than their older brothers who played the ballrooms.

For all of that, “East Side Story” seems a remarkably progressive record for 1963-4. The fuzztone is strong and full, the wall-of-sound Seger and coproducer Doug Brown (now Fontaine Brown of Southwined) threw up behind the powerful vocal was charged with echo and energy not unlike a punk’s idea of what* Phil Spector should’ve sounded like, and the lyric was an amazing tale.

Beneath the bare light bulb above

She gazed into the eyes of love

Bathed in the dirty neon light

She begged him, “Don’t go out tonight

It’ll work out somehow baby

We can find a way out maybe.”

He got up and said, “I’ve got to go.”

And she cried “Noooooooooo Shouted, shouted No!*

Bob once told me that the story was true, but now he hedges a little: “It’s true, there was a love affair that was broken up for that reason, but there wasn’t a death involved. That just came in because I was very involved with . . . uh . . . nineteen year old emotional extravaganza.”

It wasn’t a death song in the traditional punk rock mold, however. Bob is basically a moralist, which is one of the things that makes him such a good Songwriter. Johnny Brown wasn’t a rebel in the tried-and-true rock manner. Unlike, say, “The Leader of the Pack” he wasn’t a mere dada rebel, he was a thief or a burglar. The closest sor^g you could come to it would be “Staggerlee” or “Thunder Road,” the old Robert Mitchum classic. He leaves with advice to his girl that states his motive perfectly:

His arms were warm and strong and young

“I promise I won’t hurt no one

Oh baby, when you gonna learn?

Them folks up town got bread to burn.”*

The chorus is extended in perfect punk melodrama, like ice and wind on a howling winter night. Cold and bitter and chilling, just right to lead up to the tune’s momentous conclusioh:

The night passed like a thousand years

The tenement room held all her tears

Then came a knock upon her door

Two men she’d never seen before

“Do you know Johnny Brown miss?

We hate to tell you this but Has he a relative' you know?”

And she cried “No!”

Shouted, shouted no!*

Unlike “Staggolee”, but very much like Mitchum’s “Thunder Road” protagonist, Johnny had to die. “The law they swore they’d get him/But the devil got him first,” sang Mit chum of his hillbilly bootlegger and it is much the same kind of morality that made Seger off his hero.

As a result of that moralism, Seger has spoken more explicitly than any other, songwriter of the ethics of the counter-culture, and of late, quite critically.

“Persecution Smith” was cut from the same moral mold. As good as “East Side Story” was, it had to be released three times in 1963-4 before Cameo/ Parkway picked it up and put it out. Then it zoomed into the Detroit top ten. (Cameo signed a number of Detroit/Michigan groups in the same period: Rationals, Terry Knight and the Pack, ? and the Mysterians.) The record made a little noise in what were to become the usual Seger markets, Florida, Boston, Washington D.C., but none elsewhere. “Persecution Smith” had even less out-state support.

’65 was the year for folk-rock, of course, and “Persecution Smith” was a part of that sense as well. It’s an outrageous Dylan cop, sounding much like a particularly demented outtake from Bringing It All Back Home.

It probably isn’t a good Dylan cop, no matter what. It has the joie de vivre of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” but none of its lyric or musical cohesion. It’s sloppy, in a word. Still, in ’65, it expressed very well the sense of collective alienation (later to become community) we were beginning to feel.

“Persecution Smith” himself was a figure drawn heavy-handedly, not unlike some of P.S. Sloan’s more banal works, the honk demonology then current (“I Got You Babe,” and “Eve of Destruction”) taken to a particularly humorous extreme. A parody, maybe of “every hung up honky in the whole wide universe.”

“That was the first time,” Seger says, “that I tried to write about the long-hair thing.” Seen in that light, it is an interesting artifact: rock and roll, the most self-conscious of forms, commenting with all of its energy on its audience. Sure, it’s self-righteous, but 1965 was a time when you could still safely feel self-righteous. When Seger sang, “He’s here, he’s there, he’s EVERYWHERE!/ He’s found up town and underground/ In Watts, Califom-ya, you know who he was with . . . ” we all knew what sort of common enemy he was defining.

Moreover, “Persecution Smith” is an initial attempt for Seger to develop a relatable mythology. When Bob screams, “You can’t walk down a street at night without him walking by/You can’t go to sleep at night without hearing him cry,” he’s expressing everyone’s futility in dealing with the Horrible Honk. It comes from Dylan, in a sense, as much because it is mythic as because the song is in any way “topical.”

“Star trips were out of the question when you were playing . . ."

". . . for people you had to see in the halls at school the next day.”

I know you gotta dig it, I know you can’t stop...

"Pure, simple, even primal."

“I used to know all these Dylan tunes, but I never, ever played ’em. I’d just sing ’em to myself. -Fantastic lyrics.

I never really understood any of the lyrics, and I’m not sure what a lot of them meant, but the images and the words seemed to conjure up a feeling that somehow made sense.”

That’s the way all of us felt about Dylan back then, and it was Seger’s ability to grasp what we were all feeling and then transmute it into a song that is both odd tribute to Dylan and a powerful statement of its own, that makes “Persecution Smith” an exciting and valuable record even now.

Even if it only was a local hit, “Persecution Smith” makes sense. It was another part of Seger’s dues-paying, and what came next revealed him in full bloom. Everyone was a little. taken aback. To say the least.

3. HEAVY MUSIC

We were incredulous. No one had ever put it that way before, but it suddenly seemed as if the phrase had been there all the time. And the music that punched the message home said exactly the same thing, and said it just as well.

That’s true of a lot of songs, of course, from “Like A Rolling Stone” to “Get Back” to any of a half-dozen Chuck Berry songs, or the Stones’ “Satisfaction.”

“Heavy Music,” Seger’s third single, strikes the same way. The power of the music abets the power of the lyric in a way that makes them not only interedependent but improbably strong.

This is The Rock, Fleetwood Mac insisted, in another classic instance of rock’s self-consciousness.

If “Persecution Smith” was selfconscious because it made an inherent assumption about the people it was speaking to, “Heavy Music,” like only a few of the best rock and roll records, speaks self-consciously in another way. It’s a rock and roll song that’s brave enough to talk about being a rock and roll song and what that means. Thun dering bass line and sudden chant, it rocks out of a tinny transistor speaker and proclaims itself, refusing to be ignored. The lines that open it (“Doncha ever listen to the radio/When the big, bad beatscomes on?”) are as rhetorical as anything ever written, but they also make a definite distinction between those who do and those who don’t.

...‘Cause the bottom comes on too strong

Like “Who Put the Bomp?” “Heavy Music” asks the questions that all the other songs about rock and roll tried to answer. Ask “Doncha ever listen to the radio,” and the snappy answer can be “You know her life was saved by rock and roll” (the Velvet Underground and Detroit), or “Honey if you did you would really blow your lid! Baby that is rock and roll.” (The Coasters)

Seger knows all of | this so well (“Stevie Winwood got nothin’ on me,” he sings in perfect falsetto parody of Winwood’s “Searchin’”, with the Spencer Davis Group.) that the song could still be a hit today. It hasn’t lost a drop of what it had in 1966. The throbbing bass line, the chorus chant (“Deepet, goin’ deeper, deeper, I said, deeper, DEEEEP-HA, DEEEEP-HA/ Awww, Heavy Music, Heavy Music, Mus-ic, Mu-sic.”) raving and moaning all the way through, the great guitar line, the drumming. A hit. Purve, simple, even primal.

We’ve always responded especially well to this sort of commentary on our music. Chuck Berry sang “Gotta be rock and roll music,” and the Beatles echoed across a decade, “Get back Jo Jo!” Eric Burdon told us who in “Monterey,” and Johnny Kidd and the Guess Who and the Who told us why with “Shakin’ All Over.” And in times of peril the Showmen and Danny and the Juniors assured us that “Rock and Roll Forever Will Stand” and “Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay.” Fleetwood Mac stepped to the stage two years ago and sang “This is the rock/we’ve been talkin’ about.”

This is the best thing of all, and we’ve always known it. When our music talks about itself, it’s singing in a way it never quite sang before, every time. In saying it would stand forever, it was standing just a few minutes long, and every minute it did, we stood too. We were proud of our music and it was a strange sort of pride, for it was pride in ourselves. And not just WAS either, because right this very minute Don McLean is shouting; “Bye bye Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/Them good old boys were drinkin? whiskey and rye, singin’ this’ll be the day that I die.”

So every year, or every other year, or maybe twice a year (like this year when we got the dual treat of “Rock and Roll from Lou Reed and McLean’s “American Pie.”) but certainly not infrequently, we are moved to pound our chests and remind each other that “This is the rock, we’ve been talkin’ about.”

It can be an invitation (“C’mon over baby/ Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on!”), challenge (“Get back Loretta!”) or threat (“Roll over Beethoven and tell Tschaikovsky the news.”) and sometimes just a stone-cold, stop ya dead in your tracks pronouncement that something a little bit new is upon us:

Doncha ever feel like goin’ insane

When the drums begin to pound

Ain’t there ever been a time in your life

You couldn’t believe what the band was puttin’ down*

Yeah, he was talkin’ “Heavy Music” all right, but who’d ever thought to call it that before? It may have never made it into your backyard, but by god, Bob Seger invented the phrase that sums up everything since the Zep unzipped and the Jeff Bedk Group zapped us right in the guts with a whole new sound.

It was what the Who and Yardbirds had been implicitly promising but never came out and defined. Seger did, and we responded, at least in Detroit and wherever else we got to hear it, with a frenzy. The single sold over 60,000 copies almost immediately, people went totally bananas, you couldn’t walk anywhere without hearing it, and everytime you got into the damn car you practically had to keep one foot on the dash to keep it from driving you totally insane.

And then it disappeared. It just stopped. Our friends from out of town responded with “Never heard it,” even though they whooped too when they finally did, and suddenly we had a hard time finding copies to help them spread the word.

Given the heralded and inherent Michigan chauvinism, we were almost glad that.it was our secret. Like “Kick Out the Jams!” it was our part of the rock myth, and we thrilled at the opportunity to spread the word and share it.

What happened though? Why didn’t this one take off? “A lot of people really misconstrued it,” Seger says of his magnum opus. “That was a song about the music, but a lot of people thought it was a song about music and sex, the two together. There was nothing sexual in it, it was simply read in by a lot of program directors. The part about goin’ deeper.

“We just jammed it down in this bar in Columbus, we got into this jam about “deeper” and I really dug the jam — we happened to be taping that night — and then I went home and wrote the song around it.

“It was really weird . . . it was like going in as . . . well, you know. I don’t know, there were complaints about it when it was first played on Swingin’ Time (a local tv rock show). Until, of course, it got out of hand and then they couldn’t help but play it. Even then, they said, ‘You know, you better go in and re-record that tail end, put something different on that ending because no one’s ever gonna play it.

“But it wasn’t a matter of no one playing that one — it was a matter of the product being cut off.”

“Heavy Music,” Bob continues, “that was our biggest record. 66,000 and it’s still sellin’. When you can find it. Which you can’t, hardly, any more.

“What happened was, it got into the 70s in Billboard and then died. But that was because Cameo-Parkway . . . well, Allen Klein (yes, the same one — Ed.) bought Cameo-Parkway, and the stock soared over the next two weeks. And then the federal government shut the company down. The stock went from two to 70 so the company was literally shut down; I didn’t even find out until a couple of years later what happened to that record. But that’s what happened.”

4. RAMBLIN’ GAMBLIN’ MAN

At least that got Cameo, who as Seger puts it, “weren’t exactly a major label,” out of the way. “We got a release from Cameo,” Bob says, “they never paid us a cent for any of the records or anything. So we said, ‘O.K., keep your money and give us a release.’ So we got a release.”

Meanwhile, Capitol had moved into the Motor City. They picked up all the old Cameo acts: ? and the Mysterians, Terry Knight, the Pack, (separately), the Rationals, the SRC.

Seger’s output on Capitol has been even more prolific, and just as good, as his output on Cameo: seven more top ten records, two of which have sold over 50,000, and all of it without airplay in any major market except Boston, Detroit, Miami, Washington. “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” his second Capitol single, made it 17 in Billboard without ever being played in Los Angeles, New York or ’Frisco.

Continued on page 78.

Continued from page 51.

The first Capitol release was an antiwar rocker called “2+2=?” It was a screamer, laying things out simply (thus the title) but in an unequivocal manner.

Its construction is perhaps the most complex Seger has ever used. It begins with Seger almost crooning the lyrics over a single throbbing bass note. Then drums, as Seger’s voice picks up the intensity of the tune, and finally, a zooming guitar that is somewhat reminiscent of the Stones, thundering like a herd, a warning note for everyone who heard it:

And you stand and call me upstart Ask what answer can I find I ain’t say in’ I’m a genius Two plus two is on my mind*

The song screams from there. From the first verse one would think that it was nothing more than a rehash of the punk bitterness of Dylan’s “Masters of War.” But Seger once again draws on his teenage mythology to present us with a situation that harks back to “East Side Story:”

Well I knew a guy in high school Just an average friendly guy And he had himself a girlfriend And you made them say goodbye Now he’s buried in the mud Of a foreign jungle land And his girl just sits and cries She just doesn’t understand*

The song builds and rocks, pouring out every ounce of hate we have for that war and those who make it, naive and simplistic yes, but with a real understanding of the forces involved:

I’m no statesman, I’m no general I’m no saint, I’ll never be It’s the rules not the soldiers Who are my real enemy.*

O.K., so it’s an easy statement to make. Except that no one has ever been able to address themselves to such a singlemindedly topical sentiment and make it great AM rock, too.

Detroit made it a hit, but it was 1966 and they weren’t ready for the anti-war movement in the sticks. The movement was just a fad, it was the blight on the national consciousness, not the war. When the roles were reversed in November of 1969, when a million people marched in Washington, disc jockeys by the dozen began to play the song, and Capitol agreed to release it. But they moved too slowly and Seger’s chance was blown again.

The follow up was “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” It’s much like a Creedence tune, say “Travelin’ Band.” The whole macho stud rock and roll star routine. It’s probably Seger’s best tune, commercially, but it doesn’t have the excitement of some of the others, maybe because it’s just a hair less raw.

“2+2=?” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” appeared on the first Seger album, Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man, in January of 1967. It was composed of those two plus a couple other good tunes and a few quasi-experimental, longer tracks that are mostly dreck.

One more hit came off the album too, the impossibly trendy, “Dove Needs to be Loved.” It’s cut from the same cloth as “All You Need Is Love” and “We Love You,” with a choppy edit and supremely sexist lyrics: “Women were sent from heaven above, and love needs to be loved, needs to be loved.” When they start rockin’ on that postBeatles chorus though, you can’t, help but like it. And it starts out with a further comment from Seger on the state of rock and roll:

Don’t you know it doesn’t matter

Who you are

Or what you think you’d like to be*

Sounds like a John Lennon period piece.

“Love Needs tb be Loved” didn’t actually become a hit until early ’69 though. Meantime, Seger had been going through band changes. Even the name of the band changed, when it moved from Cameo to Capitol, to the Bob Seger System.

Seger had also decided that he couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. “That was the first time I decided that. So we got this guitar player named Tom Neme. And then Neme came up with all these songs that he wanted to do. At that point, I was really tired. I wanted to quit. That was when I enrolled in college . . . no, I wasn’t going to be a criminologist, that was just a joke at the time . . . and I was goin’ to school. I was waiting for them to do this album and then I would quit.”

As a result, though the Noah album is called a Bob Seger System album and it is he alone who appears on the cover, Bob now says, “I didn’t have anything to do with that album. ‘Noah,’ the song, and one or two others, I wrote, a lot of it during that long break between albums. ‘Noah’ is about that, ‘Lay back, you’ve had your fun. Let them do it for awhile.’ That’s what the album’s about, too. How they blew it.”

Seger reconsidered. "I immediately fired Neme,” he says. Bob went back to playing guitar. “Noah” hit, not big but top ten, again. But the band was disintegrating. More personnel changes ensued.

The new band began working on an album, Mongrel. Released in the fall of 1970, it is a brilliant work. Every song on it is tough and hard and to the point. “The whole idea was the mongrel, the American of any nationality, who grows his hair long and tries to sink into a culture.”

Mongrel’s commentary on the culture is less than fawning. “Highway Child,” one of the best tunes on it, sums up: “I been so high my mind were fried,” and then “Can’t you see I’m so damned apathetic I can’t believe I’m free.”

Throughout, there is . a consistent consciousness of America as the “hardsell with a fortrel polyester inkwell hord.” In its own way, Mongrel informs us about America as much as The Band did, and with music that is surely as exciting. It is an unfound classic, perhaps, or merely a period piece. But if it is only a period piece, it is a piece from OUR era, our time, and it is about us, before it is about anything else in the land.

Here we are, in all our strength and folly. “Evil Edna” confronts the new sexual mores and walks away amazed. “That’s a song, not so much about groupies as the sexual ethic of the very young,” Seger says. “Which is very very quickly changing. Drastically changing.”

His basic moralism comes out here, too. Edna dies, even though she’s basically sounder than those who condemned her. Seger has also said that the song was conceived as a warning to one of his friends who condemned women for violating the double standard.

“Leanin’ On My Dream” makes the most pointed statement, though, about what’s wrong. It sets up a typically mythic situation, the singer being dragged toward the movement by a leftist recruiter of some sort, seeing the recruiter on TV that night, the singer receiving his draft notice and “Next day I was on the picket line/Lord ya shoulda heard me scream.”

But even that album, as good and relatable and even relevant to the current situation as it was, couldn’t break Seger out. In November of this year he hit again, with a single called “Lookin’ Back.” It’s a great song, the same comment as Mongrel essentially, reduced to a three minute single. (Mongrel contained a hit as well, “Lucifer”, which sounds like a rock demonology counter-attack: “You can call me Luch fer, if you think you should/But I KNOOOOW I’m good!”)

“Lookin’ Back” is another umgnorable single. It was cut at the Mongrel sessions, though it wasn’t released on the album, and the conception is almost identical:

Ya hit the street

Ya feel ’em starin’

Ya know they hate ya

You can feel their eyes a glarin’*

and once again all anyone does is sit around and watch the Tee-Vee. It is a statement about the apathy of all of us that many people in Detroit’s hip/rock community welcomed, because it seemed to articulate so much of what he had been feeling, about ourselves, our peers and our collective inability to get our community on the track.

But, once again, “Lookin’ Back” didn’t go. It hit in Houston, as well as the usual spots, but it never went any higher than 97 in Billboard.

5. BRAND NEW MORNING

Why haven’t you have any rpassive hits, Bob?

“It’s weird. ‘Lookin’ Back’ is one of our biggest hits in Detroit. It’s as big as ‘Gamblin’ Man,’ sold around 50,000 copies.

“You know, ‘Gamblin’ Man’ was a number one record here. It sold about 40,000 copies in Detroit, another ten thousand elsewhere. ‘Lookin’ Back’ didn’t get any higher than three there, and the reason is, they can’t take it any higher because it isn’t a national hit. It just doesn’t look right.”

Is it the record company? “ ‘Lookin’ Back’ is the eleventh single in the pa§t seven years that has hit here and failed to break into the national market. They scored with one, they scored with ‘Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man’ but even that was never played in LA, San Francisco or New York.

“I don’t really know that much abou the business side of it, and I must say in the record company’s defense that we have had notoriously rotten shows for the last couple years. Or not consistently rotten, but on and off, you know?”

At present Seger is involved in enough projects to make the head swim. He broke up the System right after Mongrel was finished, then played for six or eight weeks solo. That resulted in an acoustic album, Brand New Morning. It’s not.

Then, Seger hooked up with Teagarden and Van Winkle, who hit with “God Love and Rock and Roll” last year. They began billing themselves as STK (Van Winkle’s name is Skip Knape) and playing gigs as a three part show: Seger solo, T&V together, than all three in a rock and roll, show. Finally they dropped all but part three, added a guitarist (Mike Bruce, late of Bobby Bland’s Revue) and began to do some recording. There’s supposedly a Teagarden single, an STK single on which Seger sings lead (“If I Were A Carpenter,” with a Knape arrangement), an STK album, and maybe a new Seger album, and a new Seger single. And even maybe a new band.

“It’s a lack of direction (STK). Like if I had my way it’d be all rock and roll and my tunes, too. And if Dave had his way, it’d be all soul, and if Michael had his it’d be all blues. And if Skip had his, it would just be a two man group. So we’ve agreed to a cut-off date, at the first of the year, unless things change drastically.”

Meantime, Seger is preparing an all new group, teaching t..*.em his material, getting ready to record. “It’ll be a big band. No horns, though, I hate horns. A rock and roll band, because that’s basically all I know. That’s the' only thing Lean construct well. But maybe three guitars, bass, drums, keyboard, and a lotta singers.”

Seger is convinced that the STK experience was invaluable in one way though. “I used to hate performing. I got to the point where I wanted to have a really big album, so I could get off the road and just sit and write and create like the Beatles did when they went off the road. But since I’ve been with Skip and Dave, I’ve come to dig performing more than I ever have in my life. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been writing much, because I’ve been concentrating on the show.”

Meanwhile, there are rumors that Hideout may buy back the Cameo masters and release them as an album called Bombs Away. Seger is not overly enthusiastic (“I wouldn’t want it to be a hit, it’s old-fashioned.”) but Punch Andrews is. And what’s more, it’s the only way we’re going to get all that stuff, together. Just think, “Heavy Music,” “East Side Story,” “Persecution Smith,” “2+2=?,” “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” “Lucifer,” “Lookin’ Back” (that might not be a bad title either), “Noah‘” “Love Needs to Be Loved,” “Ivory,” “Lucy Blue,” “Highway Child,” and that immortal Christmas ditty of ’67, “Sock it To ’em Santa: you know where it’s at/Sock it to ’em Santa with a baseball bat.” If that don’t get cha, nothin’ will.

“I don’t know,” Seger said a little warily when I approached him about the idea of his songs as definitive, “I care, sure I care. But I’ve said a lot about the long hair thing. I said it all on Mongrel. ‘Lookin’ Back’ was conceived mostly as about people like Agnew you know, but in the last year, I haven’t felt quite so smart as I did then.”

Neither do any of us. It’s nice to have someone around who can articulate even our stupidity and make us dig it. I don’t know how to do it, but I sure hope everyone else gets to hear Bob Seger do that pretty soon. ’Cause he sure knows what he’s talkin’ about.

*A11 lyrics copyright Gear Publishing Company