The Fire This Time

Take almost any photograph of a smiling Bob Seger, place your hand over the toothy grin, and you’re apt to discover how very sad the top half of his visage appears — most particularly the eyes. Dark brown and deeply set, they are invariably caught in a melancholy gaze. And even when Bob isn’t flashing that winning expression, it seems that the moods of the two halves of his face are not quite in sync. For fifteen years, Seger has been trying to capture the country’s attention with his rowdy, no-frills brand of Southern Michigan rock & roll, beating his head against the highway (he once did 265 one-nighters — by car — in a single year) in order to escape his seemingly permanent status as a regional curiosity.

Now, Seger’s new Against the Wind is one of the top-selling albums in the nation after only four weeks, and Bob and his Silver Bullet Band have embarked on their most promising world tour ever. But this doesn’t alter the look in Seger’s eyes.

“It’s great that things worked out,” says Seger pensively, “but it doesn’t mean as much as the little victories you really savor, like the time in 1976, several days after I’d played to only 500 people in a Chicago club, when I walked into Pontiac Stadium [in Pontiac, Michigan] the night before a concert, saw how big it was [capacity 75,000] and knew it was sold out. I said to myself, ‘They’ll never be able to take this away from me.’

“I do this a lot, because I was conditioned throughout my first ten years in this business never to expect anything. And my mom hammered into me, ‘If you’re a pessimist when the good things happen, you’ll be that much happier and won’t be disappointed when they don’t.’ I’ve wanted all along to be successful nationally, but on my terms.”

But let’s not presume to understand Seger’s uncompromising outlook too quickly, for his current preeminence in the rock world would seem to be paradoxical. In a music marketplace where taut, youthful dance calculations seem to carry the greatest currency, he scores hit singles with whiskey-voiced rock ballads about the wages of aging. It’s an era of cool American gigolos, reconstituted mods and natty skinheads, but the thirty-five-year-old Seger sports hippie hair and the wardrobe of a jock buccaneer.

Seger first came to the attention of his Michigan loyalists in 1965 with the release of “East Side Story,” a “Gloria”-like saga of the back streets. Issued on the tiny Detroit-based Hideout label, the single was picked up for national distribution by Cameo-Parkway Records. Several other Cameo singles followed, notably the explosive “Heavy Music,” whose appearance on the Billboard charts in the summer of 1967 unfortunately coincided with the demise of Cameo. The record promptly expired, and Seger jumped to Capitol in 1968, where he made four forgettable albums, and then moved to Warner-Reprise for a three-year, three-LP stint before returning to Capitol.

Along the way, Seger cut a host of other singles that were well-conceived three-minute slices of compressed fury — like “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man.” The problem was that Seger’s early product was almost always too poorly recorded to replicate the stunning power of his stage shows. One need only compare the hollow, distant reworking of “Heavy Music” on Warners’ 1972 Smokin’ OP’S LP with the scorching version that leaps off Live Bullet. Small wonder that Bullet, which contains live renditions of many of the old singles, was Seger’s first gold LP. Maybe people had been waiting all those years just to hear the damn songs.

If Beautiful Loser (1975) was the belated beachhead, Night Moves, in 1976, was the resounding breakthrough, a brilliant, totally original work in which Seger confronted many of his worst fears. A poor greaser from the tough West Side of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he had come too far and invested too much in his musical ambitions to change direction, but he was uncertain as to what his accumulated experience was worth. Among the outside stimuli that turned his head was the film American Graffiti.

“Whoa!” Seger recalls. “All the memories it brought back!” Memories of cruising around Ann Arbor in friends’ jalopies, sipping Hamm’s beer and staring down girls who were doing the same thing; his first drunk, sharing eight bottles of sloe gin; his first fight (“He insulted my girlfriend at a drive-in. I got beat, but I knocked out his two front teeth with the only punch I landed”); the summer evening “grassers,” held in farmers’ fields, where he and his friends danced to Top Forty music pouring from their synchronized dashboard radios. Not to mention the nights he began working on his own lustful night moves (“I was a senior in high school, a late bloomer. The first time I ever made love to a girl, we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, which was the main line — ‘Working on mysteries without any clues’ — I threw into ‘Night Moves’ “).