The singer wakes up in the middle of the night, hums a song from 1962, and thinks about his past, ending on “Ain’t it funny how you remember?” Indeed, it’s funny, not to mention tragic, to hold onto the memory of desperate teenage fucking as a high point in your life. Then comes a bridge that, despite being ridiculously cut from the radio edit, gives the song its meaning. “I used her, she used me/But neither one cared/We were getting our share,” he sings, making the relationship sound painful. It details Seger’s fling with a girl in his teenage years. “Night Moves” remains the best song Seger has ever written, demonstrating tremendous self-awareness about the same nostalgia that made “Old Time Rock and Roll” so unbearable. “ The Fire Down Below” initially seems like a same-old take on prostitution, but by giving the women names while keeping the men nameless, he manages to craft a song about exploitation and abuse that’s unique in its empathy. It’s no less traditional than the records Seger would release later, but it handles its subjects well. The same girl whose life was saved by rock and roll is now “a little bit older, a lot less bolder than you used to be.” But, as the title says, the music never forgets. It shifts the perspective to third-person, seemingly bringing The Velvet Underground’s “Rock and Roll” a few decades into the future. Night Moves came two years before Stranger in Town, which featured Seger’s signature song “ Old Time Rock and Roll.” For years, I avoided acknowledging Seger as a great artist because of that song, along with the Chevrolet-ad favorite “ Like a Rock.” “Old Time Rock and Roll” is a smug, conservative love letter to an earlier time that manages to weave anti-disco sentiments and “American Pie”-esque hypocrisy into the mix.Įven worse, the song is irrelevant, since Night Moves opened with “ Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” a song that essentially has the same message, but delivered in a better, less self-important tone. But today is the 40th anniversary of Seger’s 1976 release Night Moves, an album that was somehow both his best album and the beginning of his artistic downfall. Indeed, Seger’s early work is essential, and if you haven’t heard songs like the top 20 hit “ Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and the anti-war masterpiece “ 2 + 2 = ?” (the latter an influence on Seger fan Jack White’s “Seven Nation Army” riff), you should get on that. On his 2010 Pazz & Jop ballot, music critic Chuck Eddy named the fan-made compilation Never Mind the Bullets, Here’s Early Bob Seger as his favorite album of the year. To this day, critics continue to hold Seger’s early work in high regard. Seger’s early work was a critical success, largely due to the Detroit-based Creem Magazine. And beyond the obvious stuff, Michigan also gave us smaller local hits like Gino Washington’s “ Gino is a Coward,” one of the best and most underrated songs of the 1960s.īob Seger is a difficult artist to define, at least if you know the full story, but he falls somewhere in between all of those artists: a local success in Detroit who slowly built a national audience over the course a decade before blowing up, and who ultimately became defined by his weakest hits. Obviously, there’s Motown, but also Funkadelic, early punk acts MC5 and The Stooges, and major modern artists like Eminem and The White Stripes. Once my interest in music got to the point where I began researching heavily, I began to discover Michigan’s importance in musical history. Personally, I lived in the Upper Peninsula for 11 years, rarely seeing concerts and feeling isolated from music and art. Growing up a small area of Michigan, it’s easy to feel like you’re cut off from culture.
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