Bob Seger: Stranger In Town : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Bob Seger's no longer a stranger in town. Since Night Moves, he's been expected eagerly, and he's almost six months overdue. Live Bullet put Seger on the national map after nine or ten years of riding the secondary roads, and Night Moves, coming hard on its heels, proved that the Midwest's great journeyman rock & roller could cut it in studios and on singles charts as well as onstage. Seger's success was an affirmation of rock & roll's essential durability, because his homegrown, audience-honed music was derivative in the best sense. He was, after all, practically a rock & roll archetype: an authentic hardworking, hard-traveling man, a gambler whose best-selling album was the one on which he reviewed his life, adding up the score and deciding whether or not he was too old to play anymore.

Seger's success was some kind of sweet vindication, too. It was a populist's victory over the music-biz elite, a decade of sweat and hard-won loyalty paying off. But that was a year and a half ago, and what does Horatio Alger do for an encore? There's a lot riding on Stranger in Town. It's not that Bob Seger has to live up to his legend; he has to outgrow it.

Night Moves was the kind of gamble you only get away with once. On it, Seger acknowledged his limitations and in the process, made them seem like virtues. But Night Moves' success prohibits the artist from still playing the honorable failure. There are other kinds of outsiders, though, and on Stranger in Town, Seger chooses the image of the perpetual traveler, exiled by the winds of his own going. Like the beautiful loser, it's a role he knows well. He's even played it before in some of his best songs ("Turn the Page," "Travelin' Man"). Characteristically, he reads the part with more self-doubt than swagger, more regret than romance. Still, Seger's not resting on his legends. "We were players, not arrangers," he boasts (in "Brave Strangers"), but at the same time, Stranger in Town is his most thoughtful and promising attempt at reconciling spontaneity and calculation.

In the past, even on his best studio work, Seger's been a bull in a technological china shop, his extravagant delivery sounding more desperate than anything, like a man trying too hard. And in a way, he was. His voice–hoarse enough to carry across Fender feedback–the abrupt starts and stops, the high-contrast dynamics, even the grandiose characters he played (the gladiator of "Sunburst," Ishmael to the Ahab of "Ship of Fools") were all part of the equipment he'd developed for the stage: the big gesture and the obvious drama that are pitched to the balcony. But in the studio, they seemed unnecessarily crude, particularly beside the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.

Seger hasn't abandoned the Muscle Shoals band, and on a faultlessly constructed ballad like "The Famous Final Scene," they're the perfect scenarists. They line up fills as carefully as camera angles, appropriate down to the final piano fade. But on straight-ahead rockers like "Ain't Got No Money" and "Old Time Rock & Roll" (neither of which Seger wrote, though he could have), the MSRS still succeeds in making the singer sound shabby. The deliberation and pulled punch this group favors demand a similarly knowing, almost playful delivery, and Bob Seger's nothing if not in earnest. He's a singer spoiling for a fight, and it's the Silver Bullet Band that challenges him best with the vast, fuzzy guitar and bass lines of "Feel like a Number," the crashing entrances on "Brave Strangers"–each as seemingly spontaneous as a touring outfit's response to the slightest signal. Seger no longer seems intimidated by the studio–he's turned the Bullets loose on the ambitious material he used to take to Muscle Shoals. Gospel singers and honky-tonk piano are laid on with a craftsman's care before the roof blows off in ecstatic codas and frenzied jousts between Seger and the band that re-create the intuitive climax and release of his live performances.

In spite of the lapses, Stranger in Town is Bob Seger's most consistent record. Without heeling to a concept, most of the songs touch on one form of isolation or another, but Seger's loners aren't exactly heroes. The loser in "Hollywood Nights" finds himself dazzled and betrayed–and taken for a rube. The gambler of "Still the Same" is a system player who takes no risks. The suitor in "We've Got Tonite" piles on every cliché in the book, then repeats them all, while the departing lover in "The Famous Final Scene" mocks himself with his own theatricality. Night Moves threatened defeat and countered with endurance, Stranger in Town, a more polished and modest LP, is likelier to scuffle and retreat. Without heroes, without tragedy, it avoids the melodrama that sometimes made Night Moves pretentious, but neither does it achieve–or only rarely–the earlier album's awkward, naked individualism.

Instead of himself, Seger's offering rock & roll–and that's a generous offer. His melodies are familiar on first meeting and swell to inevitable, satisfying resolutions. His backbeat can't be lost. His music's a utility model, solid and built to last, but less interesting in itself than for the passion with which he delivers it: he'll rock you with the sheer force of his desire to. This artist is used to being a stranger in town, used to trading on his abilities instead of his reputation–and now that he's got one, he seems more fearful of presuming on it.

Last time out, Seger risked failure by acknowledging it. On Stranger in Town, he risks anonymity in much the same manner, then hides behind his music. Bob Seger keeps hanging by a thread, but that's part of his charm. He records rather than romanticizes experience, and so leaves himself at its mercy–and at ours.