BOB SEGER VS. THE PLATINUM PARANOIA

BOB SEGER VS. THE PLATINUM PARANOIA

(Will Nothing Stop It?)

by Patrick Goldstein

The night was clear and the moon was yellow and the leaves came tumbling down.—"Stagolee"

It's practically impossible to write about Bob Seger and not begin with his unflinching vision of the American night—a time when the ground is cool, the maiden moon is full and weary rock 'n rollers "want to dream like a young man with the wisdom of an old man." Consider yourself forewarned.

Seger, never a guy to offer a complex reason when a simple one will do, says he was first bewitched by rock because "you get to set your own hours."

The Motor City's most enduring hero since Ty Cobb is sitting, head thrown back, in the rear of a consumptive old Cadillac limousine. We're headed for Indianapolis, where Seger (who is just as conversant in Midwestern plane schedules as he is about the Tigers' pennant hopes) assures us there's a 2 a.m. flight to Detroit.

The midnight Hoosier landscape rushes by: clumps of stunted trees and rounded hills recurring with the monotonous regularity of a faded Western movie backdrop. It's still winter back home in Indiana and the brooding terrain seems curiously smaller than life, as if we were not hardnosing the highway but circling some barren minature golf course, the sloping sand traps and rusty windmills still draped with a light tarpaulin of snow.

Before Night Moves catapulted Seger into what he hopes will be a permanent niche as a celebrated headliner, the Ann Arbor-born rocker didn't enjoy the luxury of a chauffeured limousine. He did the driving himself. (And tonight, with a hoppedup motorcycle racer at the helm, weaving across the yellow line, I am tempted to suggest that Bob take the wheel again.)

Platinum paranoia... It's your first big record and there's so much riding on the next one.

When his band criss-crossed America, working the mid-American chitlin circuit, Seger always commandeered the night shift. "It was the best time," he said. "The other guys weren't gabbing and you could sit and think. By 6 a.m. I'd be so tired I could sleep through anything—'cause we'd literally get off stage and start driving. Once we had two days to make Buffalo from Corpus Christi, Texas." Seger slapped the seat. "Now that's tough!"

Seger doesn't merely love the night; he lives by it. "Even before I was a musician I was a night person," he said, lighting a cigarette. "Even in high school we'd stay up all night. In the winter we'd just cruise down dirt roads and get drunk. But during the summer —two, maybe three times a week— we'd have what was called a ‘grasser.'

"We'd go into some farmer's field with 20 or 30 cars and park 'em near some trees, so the cops couldn't find us. We kept the headlights on and the radios blaring while we'd drink beer and make time with the girls."

One of Seger's buddies had a record player in his car, made by Crazy Jack's in Detroit. "It was an upsidedown job that fitted into your dashboard," Seger explained. "So we'd all bring our 45's and play 'em in the car. The damn thing must've really been heavy, 'cause it never skipped, even on dirt roads."

The night time was the right time for celebration—and sometimes for spontaneous combustion, especially when Seger's horde of long-haired musicians, still sky-high from an arduous night on the bandstand, would cruise into a crowded truckstop. "It was tough to look different in those days," Seger said. "We'd just put our heads down and hope for the best. Sometimes we'd get into a fight and sometimes not. But we had to take it. No one wanted to end up in a garbage can out back 'cause we were outnumbered."

The lanky singer shut his eyes and slid down in his seat, the smoke from his cigarette curling around his head like a halo. "You know it's funny, but it's that way again. Now long hair is out. So instead of thinking I'm in the SDS, people think I'm a drug dealer." He falls silent, leaning over toward the window. It's time to watch the highway unwind.

For Bob Seger, America is a livewire rock 'n roll road map, dotted with beautiful losers, brave strangers and other veterans of American music's long-distance love affair with its homeland. Seger's incandescent stage show sketches these often perilous night moves with affectionate detail.

Exploding with a searing version of Tina Turner's "Nutbush City Limits," Seger and the Silver Bullet Band proceed to light out for the territories, shifting gears into the pensive "Traveling Man." Later the band puts the accelerator to the floor, roaring back through Detroit's gloomy urban blight [Ah come on...—Ed.] for a celebration of "Heavy Music." Seger, eyes defiant and legs a straddle like a rodeo rider hanging onto a bucking bronco for dear life, accelerates eastward to "Katmandu." Then, spinning in a 360degree, rubber-burning turn, he hurtles west again for a tumultuous finale, titled somewhat mischievously "Get Out Of Denver," as if to remind us that no place is safe for very long.

"This is a band of survivors," boasted Silver Bullet vet Drew Abbott, a slashing, Chuck Berry-style guitarist whose growing legion of admirers include Jimmy Page and Ronnie Wood. "We've all been in groups where guys died, quit, became junkies or found God. But this bunch stuck it out."

The Silver Bullet Band provide all the heavy artillery a rock 'n' roll general needs. Seger doesn't have to introduce "Fire Down Below"—you can see the stage sizzling under his feet. This crew of impeccable musical craftsmen, including the onomatopoetic Alto Reed on saxophone (who often solos suspended from stadium ceilings), bassist Chris Campbell and drummer David Teegarden—are the premier hitmen in a town that has turned out great rock bands with the regularity of a Vega assembly line.

Detroit bands don't just jab or punch—they slug it out, burying the competition with a flurry of rock 'n' roll right hooks. From the early glory days of Mitch Ryder's thunderous Detroit Wheels to the reptilian frenzy of Iggy and the Stooges, they have been a rock murderer's row, assaulting audiences like Smokin Joe Frazier in his prime—hard, fast and all the time. Listen to the Silver Bullet Band pound out "Come To Poppa'"s menacing rhythms like Sonny Liston giving a Vegas bouncer a belt in the mouth, and you know that rock 'n' roll never forgets—and it never stops either.

Detroit: right up to the sky itself, the heavy many-sided roar of a cataract of machines, shaping, revolving, groaning, always about to break down and never breaking down. —Louis-Ferdinand Celine

If there was ever a decade custommade for the survival of the fittest, it is the 70's. It's not a time for heros, but for mood jewelry and digital watches. The most inspiring rock albums of the decade, Seger's Night Moves, Springsteen's Born To Run and Graham Parker's Howlin Wind', sensing this bleak state of affairs, have turned their backs on the present, preferring to explore remembrances of things past.

This has always been the most satisfying rock dream, to glorify the passions and pratfalls of adolescence, be it Parker's yearning to go back to schooldays, Springsteen's boys on the backstreets who "try to look so hard" or Seger's bittersweet tributes to "the memories that made me a wealthy soul."

Sometimes I really lose It, you know.

This isn't cheap nostalgia. It's a way of facing up to all of our missed opportunities and unfulfilled fantasies. Night Moves is a loving evocation of the wild and furious innocence of youth, jammed like a rush-hour freeway with proud, haunting reminiscences of "awkward teenage blues." Obviously this stark and daringly sentimental imagery hit a raw nerve. Night Moves quickly slipped into the poplexicon, lending its name to a New York City sex club as well as at least one newspaper rock column (and Springsteen fanatics might re-examine the lyrics to "Jungleland" for the Boss's own melodramatic turn of the phrase).

Seger first practiced his night moves with the Decibels, a rowdy Ann Arbor frat party band. The star of their show was often a huge, tanked-up football player who would stagger up on stage, grab the mike and belt out a deliriously inebriated version of "Louie, Louie." They continually hammered away at strip joints and bowling alleys—anything to avoid the bone-crunching fatigue and numbing monotony of the city's infamous assembly lines.

"I was dreadfully poor," Seger admitted one afternoon after a onesided game of pool at his home in exurban Detroit. "We vlived in some pretty run-down mostly black neighborhoods. My dad left when I was 10 and I was on my own a lot after that. My mother worked as a housekeeper and my brother supported the family from the time he was 14. The low point was when we lived in a one-room place, with just a hot plate and bunk beds. My ma slept in the upper one, my brother and me underneath."

Of course Seger fell in love with black music. His early bands played the kind of Southern grits-and-groceries dance tunes you'd hear in any Dixie roadhouse or Georgia Tech SEA house. The heart of the batting order included Wilson Pickett and the Falcons (second lead singer: Eddie Floyd), Solomon Burke and the entire Stax/Volt dictionary of soul.

Seger's first gig, the junior high prom, was not exactly an auspicious start. "I was out front, but then I took the bass. Only I couldn't play and sing at the same time, so I just held it, pretending that I knew what I was doing."

Another early Seger ensemble served a nine-month apprenticeship at a Jackson strip joint. "The weekends were great, 'cause the place was filled with kids," Seger said, racking up another game of pool. "But the middle of the week—UGH! Just salesmen drooling over these horrible looking strippers who all must've weighed 200 pounds apiece—really the end of the trail."

Soon afterwards Seger met Punch Andrews, his current manager, while playing the Huron bowling alley. Punch asked for some original songs, Bob gave him "East Side Story," and the rest—at least in Detroit—is history.

It took the rest of the country more than a decade to catch up, despite legendary local hits like "Heavy Music," "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," and "UMC." When we went out on the road in April the question was no longer "Who's Bob Seger," but "When is his new album coming out?" A year overdue, the record was delayed by a constant crisis atmosphere that rivaled the Cuban blockade.

"Brave Strangers," originally the title cut, was recorded "something like 500 times" according to Seger, who ended up using the second take. The term ‘title cut' js good for a groan at Capitol since "Stranger in Town," the supposed title song isn't even on the album. (Seger, after much urging from those who've heard the tune, including me, may release it on a B-side of a future single.)

The Silver Bullet Band only appear on scattered cuts, even though they recorded most of the songs originally, more than a year ago. "They just couldn't handle the ballads," Seger confessed, hastening to add that the boys concurred with this assessment. "The album was actually finished last November, but then, at the last minute, we scrapped it 'cause it just didn't feel right."

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This queasy sense of impending commercial doom comes from what Seger calls "platinum paranoia." (Even after the album was out, Punch went around, mumbling distractedly "I'm worried about this album.") "Boz got it, Bruce got it, Boston got it," Seger said, staring out the window. "It's your first big record and there's so much riding on the next one. You want it so right that you overdo it. We cut "We've Got Tonight" in three different studios. But you gotta trust your instincts. We always ended up going back to one of the first takes."

Seger, depressed and dispirited, ended up writing a new batch of songs and flew down to Muscle Shoals, where the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section re-cut the old tunes and added the new entries, including sound-a like Frankie Miller's "Ain't Got No Money." Earlier this year, while mixing the record in California and hanging out with longtime crony (and former backup singer) Glenn Frey, Seger penned yet another new tune "Hollywood Nights," the saga of a compulsive love affair which now leads off the album. "The late entries always seem to do better," Seger admitted. "Everybody gets more excited."

A controversy of more recent vintage concerned the record's first single—an all-important mood-setter for the entire album. The choice, "Still The Same," a touching, moderatetempo ballad that Seger described as "a good song, but so medium," has been disowned by both parties. Seger says Capitol picked it, while the record label claims it was Punch and Bob's choice. Its major distinction is Seger's first piano solo on record in a decade ("What keyboards, huh!" he bragged) and a brilliant B-side, the fiery "Blue Collar" homage, "I Feel Like A Number."

Otherwise the album is a monumental achievement, lacing a hefty dose of Seger's Silver Bullet punch with some Motor City gospel ("Brave Stranger") and moving ballads like "We've Got Tonight" and "The Famous Final Scene." The latter boasting the soon-to-be immortal line "deal me a new future from a different deck of cards."

The phenomenal success of "Night Moves" seems to have dealt Seger a full-house future. His lingering fears of poverty seem to be safely behind him. Now, like so many other rock idols, he craves privacy as much as recognition.

"It's tough to go out at all anymore," he conceded. "In Detroit, it's impossible. Onstage you want to be the center of attention. Offstage you want to be just another normal human being. But people always expect more. There's always a couple of jerks at a party who have to hammer you against the wall in front of their girlfriends. Everyone wants you to be special all the time and if you're normal, they act disappointed."

Seger fell silent for a moment. "Sometimes I really lose it, you know. Once in Cleveland these kids drove round our hotel all night, honking their horms and screaming. I didn't get a lick of sleep, missed the plane—finally I went out to catch a cab and they were still there. I was really a bastard. I screamed at them to get away from me. I just let it get to me."

Late one night we arrive back in Detroit. Seger, after gleefully signing an autograph at the airport toll-booth, guns his car for home. We follow his trail down the Ford Freeway, past a host of familiar Detroit totems: the Goodyear car production sign, even at 3 a.m., is still clicking away, adding up more gleaming steel monsters as they roll off the lines. We whip by a trio of radio antennaes twisting gently in the wind, like giant War of the Worlds martians roaming the english countryside.

For a brief moment we pull abreast of Seger. Then, gunning his car through a tight series of curves, he slowly disappears into the distance, enveloped in Detroit's murky early morning darkness. This is when Seger knows it's time to head for Katmandu or Nutbush City, trusting his rock road map to guide the way. For when the night moves, Bob Seger moves with it.