Bob Seger Overnight Success...Finally!

"There it is," says Bob Seger, pointing his long arm to the west. "There's the hill I was telling you about."

It's a tiring incline, a quarter mile of road that winds upwards and disappears into the greenery of Michigan s Holly State Park. CREEM photographer Michael Marks is shuffling his feet, chuckling at the two figures in the sleek running sweats. Seger and I. Marks had watched us inhale a halfdozen cigarettes before breakfast. He thinks we're cracked. Maybe we are. But the 31-year-old singer/songwriter likes to run — not jog, really but run — preferably five days a week. So we take off up the hill on the first leg of a threemile run on a muggy Sunday afternoon.

"When you're singing 'Get Out of , Denver' as the last song of the show, it can get rough," Bob says as we pace upwards. "Lot of words in the song, and not too much time to breathe. A smokey hall. Hot stage lights. Walkin' around on your toes in high-heeled shoes. I've been thinkin' about putting oxygen backstage. But running, it really helps. I've really noticed the difference since I started doing this a couple of years ago."

"Second wind," I say.

"What?" Seger says, his breath rate increasing.

"Second wind," I repeat, drawing on distance-running technique learned in high school. "You breathe heavy at first, almost like you're going to kick off.

Then your metabolism finds a new equilibrium, and you're like new again. Only comes with lots of training."

"Yeah, I can dig it," Seger says, and we settle into a relaxing pace as we arc the top of the hill.

God knows, Bob Seger understands the meaning of second wind.

Like earlier this same week, as Seger was sitting in the living room of his home north of Detroit, examining a newspaper clipping by an area columnist: "SEGER, HAS HE COME A LONG WAY? - Detroit Pop Star Still 'Aspiring' at 31." Though written recently, it was an old story. I've got dozens like it in a four-inch thick file: "Dynamic^ singer...distinctive songwriter. . regional following.. .can'tbreak out of the Mid west... always on the edge of success." It's called the stereotype, I believe, and it's been known to make basket cases.

But Seger was laughing.

"That article may have been true two weeks ago, but it's horseshit now," he beamed. "It's happening man. Live Bullet [his Capitol release} is breaking nationally. East and West Coast breakouts , two weeks in a row. I can't believe it. We've sold 250,000 copies in four weeks. It's fucking incredible."

Peter Frampton, Kiss, Stephen Stills, Johnny Winter, Jessie Colin Young, Robin Trower; all are fueling the current live LP craze' But other than Kiss and Frampton, none of those albums are as personally significant as Live Bullet. Cut from two 14,000-seat sell-outs at Detroit's Cobo Hall last year, the album, in the wake of heavy touring, is putting Seger in the national league. It's only been 14 years coming, since the days when the raspy singer gigged at the Firebird Lounge in Pontiac, Michigan — just a few miles from the 80,000-seat domed stadium he was booked to headline in late June.

I didn't want to release a live album because I thought it was getting to be a camp thing...

Anybody familiar with Seger's music and having an analytical ear knows it hasn't been the tunes that have held the singer back through most of those years. The distinctive Seger style; the raspy growling vocals are some of the best in rock, midwestemers and critics have long claimed. The Seger-perjned rockers themselves are infectious, beatheavy and urban, with one stomper, "Ramblin Gamblin Man" flashing briefly as a national hit in 1967. Apd in recent works, the songwriter has added the melodic ballad to his repertoire.

But a hopscotch act through four record labels, poor timing and some bad decisions in the "business" have denied Seger the promotional machine generally needed to stamp out the gold. The irony now — besides the fact that most of the tunes on Live Bullet weren't accepted nationally on eight prior LPs — is that Seger almost didn't release the live album.

BOBSEGER DISCOGRAPHY

Albums

^Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (C apitol) Jan. 1968

BNoah (Capitol) June 1969

Mongrel (Capitol) Jan. 1970

Brand New Morning (Capitol) Sept. 1071

VSmokin'O.P. 's (Palladium) March 1972

v flack In '72 (Warner Bros.) March 1973

VSeven (Warner Bros.) March 1973

Beautiful Loser (Capitol) March 1975

Live Bullet (Capitol) April 1976

Singles

"East Sic{e Story''(Cameo-Parkway) Jan. 1966

"Persecution Smith" (Cameo-Parkway) Sept. 1966

"Vagrant Winner" (Cameo-Parkway) April 1967

"Heavy Music (Cameo-Parkway) June 1967

"SockIt To Me"iCameo-Parkway) Dec. 1967

2 + 2 — " (Capitol) Jan. 1968

"Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" (Capitol) Feb. 1968

"Ivory" (Capitol) Feb. 1969

"Noah' (Capitol) June 1969

"Innervenue Eyes" (Capitol) Nov. 1969

"Lucifer" b/s "Big River" (Capitol) March 1970

"Looking Back"b/s "Highway Child"(Capitol) Sept. 1971

"If I Was A Carpenter" (Palladium) April 1972

"BoDiddley"b/s "Turn On Your Love Light" (Palladium] April 1972

"Rosalie" (Warner Bros) March 1973

"Midnight Rider" (Warner Bros.) July 1973

"Needya" (Warner Bros.) Jan. 1974

"Get Outof Denver" (Warner Bros.) May 1974

"UMC" (Warner Bros.) Nov. 1974

"BeautifulLoser" (Capitol) March 1975

"Katmandu" (Capitol) June 1975

"Nutbush City Limits" (Capitol) May 1976

"I didn't want to release a live album because I thought it was getting to be a camp thing," he explained: The performances were above-average nights, but not the peak of what the band can do. Technically., it's far from perfect. But the next studio album wasn't finished, and I decided we had to get something out. The funny thing is, Punch (Andrews, his manager) had called me last January and said, 'I'll buy you a new Cadillac Seville if you let me put this out right now." I said ho. I said no, like an asshole."

Silver Bullet Band bassist Chris Campbell and lead guitarist Drew Abbott are sipping cokes, relaxing in Drew's modest suburban Detroit home. Between them, they've been playing with Seger for 10 years. Organist Robyn Robbins and drummer Charlie Martin have been with him for three years, and sax player Alto Reed joined the band last fall.

always considered myself an anti-star.

"In the past Bob hasn't made it because of some bad decisions on his part, and some bad decisions on the manager's part," the balding Abbott says after Seger departs to window shop in nearby Birmingham. "I'm not saying we could have made them better. But Bob certainly had the vocal ability and writing talent to do it. For example, though, he played lead guitar for a long time. He's good, but certainly not a blockbuster. So he had to get it in his own head: 'If I'm going to go somewhere, I'm going to have to let somebody else play guitar.' Besides, he sings, he sings so much better, and he can get out front and work an audience."

Campbell nods in agreement.

"He's a Taurus, and you can't move him with a crane, is the old saying," Abbott adds. "It'staken him a long time to realize a lot of things, and change a little bit."

"If I could do it over again, I would have been a front man right away and never tried to play lead," Seger says as we drive away from Abbott's. "My biggest mistake was going to see Eric Clapton.. .Jeff Beck."

"He wants to dream like a young man, with the wisdom of an old man..."

©1975 Gear Publishing Co. ASCAP

A 13-year-old baby sitter working in the flat below mine has a copy of Live Bullet and is playing the "Beautiful Loser" cut into the ground. More accurately, through the ceiling. I journey downstairs, requesting a little less volume. Her eyes light up as I hand her a peace offering, some clippings on the singer.

A few nights later, I'm sipping a Stroh's in friend Kent Eckhart's livingroom. He's a native Detroiter, and he shingles roofs for a living. Kent, 28, is also a Seger fan who planned to attend the Pontiac Stadium concert until he heard Aerosmith was also on the bill. I assure him he heard wrong.

TURN TO PAGE 74

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 30

"You know what I like about Seger?" the roofer says, relieved. "There's no bullshit."

Seger and I are riding in a crusty Volkswagen down the Dixie Highway, a typically drab Detroit-area street littered with carry-outs, used car lots and other assorted forms of hodgepodge commercial development. Though he grew up in nearbyx Ann Arbor, this is Seger's home pavement. The working-class ambience. Not too far from here, his old man punched a time clock for 22 years at the Ford Rouge Plant, the Motor City's largest auto-producing complex. At night and on plant holidays, Stewart Seger led a 13-piece dance orchestra.

"Certain writers, I guess, don't feel you're successful unless you're driving a Ferrari and livin' on top of a mountain in L.A.," he said. "You know, or on the French Riviera hanging out with Susan Ford or something." He threw his head back and laughed from the diaphragm.

"I don't know why people equate success with money anyway," he continued. "That's what really gets old. Chick Corea, for example, probably makes the same amount of money Ido. But nobody says he's 'aspiring.' What's the difference? The difference is, most of the time people don't want to hear about it unless you're making a million bucks."

"Do you feel successful?"

"Yeah. I've always felt successful. I really have. Successful to me is going off stage and an audience wanting you back. Successful to me is walking into a radio station, and they know who you are, what you've been doing. And1 maybe they liked one or two of your songs. That's successful to me. But nobody will give it to you without the money thing. AAAHHHhhh! Now, he's finally made it!"

We pull into the driveway of Seger's home. It's a 50-year-old two story structure. He used to like it. Doesn't anymore. A while back, a newspaper published his address and since then he's faced late-night well wishers bearing everything from song lyrics, to dope offerings. He's not comfortable with crowds, he says, even the obsequious lot found too often at postperformance gatherings.

"I've always considered myself an anti-star," he says. "I don't move well in a crowd, at cocktail parties and such. I'm sure the Mick Jaggers, the extroverted rock stars do very well in that scene. But I'm an introverted person, basically. It's very tough for me to do it. And I try to stay out of it as much as I can."

"It has nothing to do with developing a mystique or anything like that," he adds lightly. "That's not the way I am.' I just don't deal very well with people I don't know.";

You wouldn't know it, though there is a kind of shy amiability about Seger. But there's also another presence you can sense, something explosive chained down deep. No ddubt it provides the energy in his singing style, and occasionally it manifests itself in other ways.

"When he blows his top, he can make you turn ten shades of purple," says one band member. "One night in Kansas City, we were doing this promotional gig for a radio station, and we'd been having a lot of trouble with the monitors over a period of a month. Monitors kept feeding back. Feeding back. He did 20 minutes, and that was the gig. No one could find him. He broke his guitar, kicked over the amp and just ran out of the building. The promoters were yelling at us. We didn't even know where he was. He was gone. We were mud in Kansas City for a long time."

"He's under a lot of pressure," Campbell offers. "That has a lot to do with it. You've got your name out on the chopping block."

"I was a one-shot artist, with a bad, name," Seger says, speaking in general terms. "I had to live that down.

I had to live down the fact that I did "Gamblin Man," the big hit that everybody still likes, and then never had anything. Never could follow it up for so many years. Never could come back..."

Running, we round a post that marks the mile-and-a-half point on Seger's predetermined course. He's sweating heavily. Not a particularly gruesome run, though, like the cross-country runs we remember in high school. Just kind of annoying at this point. There's little conversation on the way back.

In the last half mile, on the up slope of the last hill, Seger nearly peters out, but ends up jogging in.

The photographer, Marks, is waiting at a picnic table near the finish. He looks at Seger. >

"You guys didn't really run three miles?" he asks seriously.

"Yeah," the singer/songwriter wheezes.

"Incredible.