BOB SEGER CONQUERS THE WORLD (And About Time!)

By all accounts, Bob Seger is your archetypal Nice Guy—polite, friendly, low key, easy-going, self-effacing, able to laugh at himself with ease. Despite the beard and shoulder-length hair, he has the well-scrubbed look of a 30-ish Midwestern-boy-next-door.

Even so, there’s something initially disarming about that demeanor as he steps out of a Holiday Inn shower and into a dark blue bathrobe for a noon interview on the day of his first New York date as a headliner. “Went to see the Eagles last night,” he offers by way of explanation. “They were...uh...just like the Eagles. Real good.” He shrugs, grins, and takes a seat, small-talking all the while.

Of course Seger, whatever his natural disposition, has all kinds of new reasons these days for feeling so good. Cracking the Big Apple, after 13 years as a regional rock star, is no small achievement, though he takes it in stride. He’s also riding the crest of his first Top 10 single ever (“Night Moves”) this very week. And the album that song is named after is on the verge of going platinum (another first for him).

Seger, who turned 32 in May, is just coming into his own commercially (and creatively as well, some would argue) at an age when most rock stars have peaked (creatively, if not commercially) and are digging in for the slow fade. There’s irony aplenty in that, but there’s even more irony elsewhere.

Because “Night Moves,” as good a song as it is, was not the one Seger originally intended to build an album around. In fact, the song he liked best never even got recorded; his Silver Bullet Band couldn’t hear it and neither could the Muscle Shoals session players who backed him for half of Night Moves. So Seger bowed to his musicians and shelved the whole idea, because that’s the way he works with them. And then he polished up “Night

"There's only three (Detroit) acts that really kept at it... Glenn Frey (now of the Eagles), Ted Nugent...and myself. The others Just burned themselves out"

Moves,” because he figured that was a strong second contender.

“It was called ‘Suicide Streets’ and it was the one song I was positive about,” he chuckles. “It was about crime in the streets, sort of a Springsteenish thing but with real ominous lyrics. And I was gonna name the album after it, the album would have a concept about night life in general. When nobody liked that song, it sort of blew the whole thing away, and I was back to square

one. I thought ‘Night Moves’ made a better title anyway, though I still wanted ‘Suicide Streets’ on the LP.

“Then I got to thinking that maybe ‘Suicide Streets’ was a little too down. Frankly, I was afraid people might have thought I was writing about Detroit, which I wasn’t. There’s enough bad stuff said about Detroit anyhow in all the media. So I tried to build the album around ‘Night Moves,’ the song.

“That’s the way I like to do an album. Like when I wrote ‘Beautiful Loser,’ then I wrote ‘Katmandu.’ A song like ‘Night Moves’ can really justify something like ‘Fire Down Below,’ which really has nothing to it by itself. But it makes sense next to ‘Night Moves, ’ and I try to write an album the way some try to build singles, because I don’t consciously try to write singles anymore. I’ve been doing that for a while, but I guess Night Moves does have a more obvious flow to it. The night life theme is still there, but you can’t really call it a concept album; only about half the songs fit a concept.”

Both the song and the album have been neatly classified as nostalgia, yet it doesn’t really seem quite that ample. Night Moves, with its bittersweet looks back and its insistence on keeping the faith right now (“Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” most conspicuously) seems more the attempt of an aging rocker, one who’s always been on the fringes and thus plied his trade for love more than money, to come to grips with that life. Seger doesn’t wallow in nostalgia so much as he acknowledges that each of us can be defined as the sum total of our past experiences. Or that was my theory. Seger likes it to an extent, but he also readily admits to the occasional acute twinge of nostalgia.

“Yeah, sometimes I do get nostalgic for the really good times I had in high school. Ever since then, I been working for a living, supporting myself, and I’ve always had the bills and everything over my shoulder. This last six months is the first time I didn’t have to worry about money. After high school, it was work work work. For the next four and a half years I worked six nights a week, five sets a night, until I made my first record. And then when I made that record we started touring.”

“Night Moves” is more than a little autobiographical; Seger was tail and underweight, among other things, in high school. “I was shy, super shy. And I happened to fall into a faster crowd than I’d ever been in before. Because I played music, I was sort of a gimmick for those guys. And I got to meet the really ‘hot’ chicks and 1 had my first great love affair, which is really what ‘Night Moves’ is about, it’s about that girl. You know, the girl with big... breasts, that we all went kazappo for when we reached puberty.” Seger leans forward, raises his eyebrows,

"...Sometimes I do get nostalgic for the really good times I had in high school. Ever since then, I been working..."

and laughs. “It was really a mad crazy affair. She ended up marrying somebody else, of course, and I think it was partly because I didn’t have any confidence, I never did.

“So I had my fun, but I wasn’t a wheel or anything like that. I’m still not; I’m a pretty dull guy. I followed the wheels around and let them do all the wheeling and dealing and I was sorta on the fringes having a good time and ...uh...picking up what they left behind.” Another big laugh.

“As for ‘Rock and Roll Never Forgets,’ I got the idea from a reunion that I didn’t go to but a close friend of mine did. And he said I wouldn’t have believed those people. They all weighed 500 pounds and they were all straight as hell. The same guys I used to hang out with! And I started thinking, whenever we go to a concert we see mostly young people. When we headline we get a little better cross section, but lately we been playing a lot of dates with Kiss and Aerosmith, things like that. I wanted to bring back people my own age, write a song for them. In Detroit we get a crowd mixed between young and old, and I wanted to see that everywhere.”

As steady readers of this particular rag know well, Seger and Detroit go back a long ways. He has been the hometown favorite for 13 years now, thanks to songs like “East Side Story,” “Persecution Smith,” “Heavy Music,” “2 + 2 — ?” (the antiwar song written for one of his buddies from the “Night Moves” crowd), “Lookin’ Back” and “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” his only national hit until now. As recently as Beautiful Loser, which sold 100,000 in the Detroit area and 80,000 in the rest of America combined, Seger was unable to gain a national footing. Despite his correct contention that “My sound isn’t particularly regional music.”

Yet he can take solace in the fact that he’s one of the' few Motor City rockers to outlast the White Panther era of the late Sixties and early Seventies. That wild-in-the-streets political and cultural movement produced such acts as the Stooges, the MC5, Mitch Ryder and Detroit, Bob Hodge and Catfish, the Rationals, SRC, and others. Seger has never as closely identifed with the doomed Panthers as most other local acts. (“I was never a'True Believer, in that sense. I didn’t like the idea of movements swallowing up people.”) Neither, surprisingly, did he ever play the Grande, the local rock mecca of that era, even though Detroit musicians and fans alike agreed that he was easily the best in town. I suggested that his independent ways might be the reason he didn’t go down with the Panthers and all those bands when the political atmosphere changed, but he had other ideas.

“I think those bands came and went because they just didn’t have the stamina to go all the way. Either that, or, in some cases, it was drugs. There’s only three acts I can think of that really kept at it, kept pounding away. That was Glenn Frey (now of the Eagles), Ted Nugent (who then fronted the Amboy Dukes) and myself. The others just burned themselves out.

“They had attitudes, too. I see it in some young bands today, and I won’t name names, but they walk in and tear up a dressing room, and those kinds of bands, they just won’t last. You just can’t go out and piss people off and expect to be superstars. It just grinds people, and sooner or later, it’s gonna catch up to you. Like when I’d talk to the MC5, they were fine, real levelheaded and everything. But then when they went to a concert, they would just give a promoter a whole bunch of shit, and at times they’d even give the audience a whole bunch of shit. So you could just sorta see that it wouldn’t last. Whereas Nugent would go out there and sweat, and so would I. And Glenn would bust his ass writing songs.”

TURN TO PAGE 82.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 42.

Those are the words of a journeyman pro, one who’s learned to roll with the punches, and even a somewhat cautious one at that. Which is not at all a putdown; it simply offers a few clues as to the source of his perceptions on Night Moves, as well as the melancholy air around the album. Seger fits the journeyman tag to a tee, especially in his live shows, where tie and the Silver Bullet Band play an expert set that

never quite lunges out of control or goes for broke (in the sense that such fairly comparable acts as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band or Graham Parker and the Rumour might spontaneously abandon set forms and kick it higher just to see how high they actually can go). And despite all the dramatic— even melodramatic—stories that accompany a rise to prominence such as Seger’s, he is quick to agree that this attitude, besides being the basis of his ultimate strength, has a lot to do with his previous inability to score outside Detroit.

It’s only in the last few years, for example, that he’s been willing to tour outside his home base, even if it means a financial loss; he’d never allowed record companies to subsidize such tours, which is a common practice, because he felt “going into debt would be the kiss of death.” He’d always tried to conduct himself as just one of the band, despite the fact that he wrote and sang all the songs and was the focus of the show; as a result, nobody really shaped the performances.

When Live Bullet went gold last year, it was partly a result of his decision to finally reject those notions. He became a bona fide front man and worked whenever and wherever he could. And it was Live Bullet's surprising success that bought him the time, and recharged his psychological batteries, to do Night Moves.

“Touring is fun now because I’m proud of my band and our success,” he confesses. This is the first time ever that touring has been fun; the main reason I’ve stayed at it so long is so I could make records, which is how I always got my kicks. In the past, albums have always been done on the run, a track here and two tracks there, hit and miss. Now I’m really looking forward to doing this next one, because it’ll be the first one ever where I’ve had time to do nothing but sit down and write. And then go into the studio and do it all in one shot. And I can’t even get at it until mid-June!

“After I turned 25, I started thinking to myself that it’d be nice to end up like B.B. King or Albert King; you know, be 40 and still be playing something that I personally can really dig. Because I still love to see those guys. I’d rather see them than a lot of the big headliner, 18,000 seat acts.

“And that’s a funny feeling, because when I was young, when I was around 19 or 20, I said I would stop at 25, because I couldn’t imagine myself being hip after 25. Now I’m 32, and sometimes I.think to myself, geez, you can’t go past 33. You won’t even know what you’re doing. Kids’ll be coming up to me and saying it’s corny what I do. But I don’t really feel that way; when I look at the music biz these days, I think I ve got something special to offer. Because I’d say that 98% of the songs I hear are pretty corny, pretty dumb, pretty lifeless. And hopefully if I can continue to write meaningful songs to a degree, I think I’ll continue to do it...until I’m 33.”

Seger cracks up at himself once more. And why not? He’s living proof of an old maxim: he who laughs last, laughs best.