The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 70

'Ml with the same woman for several years but is delivered straight from the heart. Those who've heard it already consider it one of the highlights of 1 978. Bob Seger began it rougher than most. He grew up in Ann Arbor. It was tough enough to be a townie in a college town, but it was far worse if your father went off when you were ten, leaving your mother, you and your brother to tiny apartments, cooking on hot plates.

Still, Seger owes a great deal to his mother's conservative Midwestern upbringing, most explicitly the cutting edge of moral force that helped make a song like "22?" the best hard-rock antiwar record, and helped Seger to maintain during his decade-plus struggle to break out. "Whew!" he says of her teaching. "It was the golden rule, really right on down the line. Never steal, never lie. And always pay those bills.

Never miss a bill and always watch your money Always be good to people, and you'll get it back, and always look for the good in people, and ignore the bad if you can. You know, that's just the way she brought me up." So, Seger says, rock was not a form of rebellion for him but a way of gaining recognition, as sports might have been "I found my recognition in music But more than that, I just really enjoyed it. I started doing it when I was a junior in high school (1962) and I obviously must enjoy it to do it for ten years and get nowhere." Seger's bands were all "democratic," he says. To this day, they share concert money equally. "I was making as much money as the drummer and the background singer, we were all in it together.

I've always felt that way( on principle. The only thing I've made more money on is writing songs. I just think everybody goes through the same amount of road torture." But until 1975, Seger's bands also decided what and how to play democratically, which was frequently nothing less than catastrophic. "I just wanted to play and make records," Seger says. "And I would put up with incredible stunts that my band would pull on me.

'Okay, we're gonna play this show. We got seven hits we can play. Yeah, but let's do two Beatles and one Yardbirds and one Animals and two of yours, "I was afraid the band would break up Because I was so desperate for it just to keep playing. I was anything but at the zenith of confidence." Although the Silver Bullet Band is the best group Seger's worked with by far the most sympathetic to his needs he gave the players less latitude than ever before. He describes Seven, his first album with the group, as the "first album where I took charge and said it gonna be my way from now on." Today, Seger says, "I tell everybody in my band, and this is gonna sound really bad, I tell 'em.

'Don't bring me your songs, man, cause I got too many of my own. I can dig you tryin' to do your own songs, I'll even help you do it, but don't expect 'em to be on our albums, because that's what I busted my tail for fifteen years to get. To write all the songs on the That may sound bad, but that's the way it is. I mean, Springsteen's not gonna record his roadie's songs just to make his roadie happy." Seger and I have been sitting in his living room all afternoon, trying to find an answer to the question that mystified both of us: What took you so long? As the light went down outside, darkening through the trees, Bob turned on a lamp over his shoulder. Back-lit, he looked ancient and very German, a wise man from another world.

"It's like, after ten years of beating your head against the wall, it all fell into place. And to this day, I'm frightened by it. Because I had obviously gotten into a groove where I was sayin', "Well, I'm makin' good records, damnit, and I'm gonna keep on makin' em even if they don't sell. And suddenly they were selling. And I didn't know why." Glenn Frey offered an explanation when we spoke a few days later.

"It's like woodshop in high school: he's gotten better at sanding and polishing. Part of it would always be. he'd go on the road for eleven months, take a week off and then do an LP in two Might moves Boi? Seger's no longer a stranger in By DAVE MARSH Bob Seger lives in the woods near a highway that once flooded with traffic from Michigan straight through to Florida. The Interstate changed that, leaving the area cheap, bleak and dreary, franchised and subdivided, without glamour or beauty. I grew up in that neighborhood, a couple of miles down the road from Seger.

For my friends and me, the highway was a giant cruising lane. In 1966, when we all turned sixteen, we got jobs across the street from our subdivision at a complex of small businesses: an off-brand motel and a nameless gas station, a Howard Johnson's restaurant and a putt-putt golf course. We worked there, but mostly we hung out, sipping warm beer and cherry vodka, waiting to see who else showed up. One night, at an hour when the traffic was still thick enough to make it worthwhile, my friend Doug decided to take a dare. Across the highway, up a steep embankment were railway tracks; through freights rushed past a couple of times every evening.

The proposition was for Doug to race across the traffic, up the hill and leap across the tracks in front of the tram it was a game of double indemnity chicken. Doug took off just as the lights at the intersection were beginning to flash and clang, bobbing and weaving through the cars but maintaining enough speed, to make it up the hill in time. He arrived at just the right second and took off, a human javelin, arms straight in front like a racing swimmer's dive. For a moment, we could see him suspended in the engine lights. Then we lost sight of him as the train rocketed by.

It was that kind of summer, in that kind of town. To kids in and around Detroit, in those years and ever since, Bob Seger reigned. He was a rocker whose records made sense; elsewhere he might have remained unknown, but to us he was a particular source of the magic in which one couldn't help but believe. For ten years, he told stories a lot like ours, played the music that helped define what we meant by high energy. The Stooges and the MC5 got the attention and the ink and the big-time record deals, but when the dust cleared for even an instant, there would be Bob Seger, standing tall as ever, still pounding out that "Heavy Music." We understood.

To us, he was always a star. These days, an interest in Bob Seger seems much less exclusive. "Night Moves," the 1977 single that was Rolling Stone's choice as best of the year, has made him a star, potentially a hero, a performer who's talked about in the same breath with the very best of his contemporaries. Yet somehow, he's still the same guy who struggled for fifteen years to get any kind of break out of Detroit at all. His house says a lot about him.

Although it's a couple of miles off the main roads, the place isn't really secluded. There is no fence, nor even many trees, and his nearest neighbor is within 100 yards. It's just a modest aluminum-sided ranch house that could belong to any white-collar General Motors employee. Outside, the only visible possessions are a pair of Jeeps, one black and one white. Hardly conspicuous consumption.

Inside, the place is similarly without ostentation. The basement has a piano, a pinball machine and a ping-pong table. In the living room simple shelves hold expensive but uncomplicated stereo equipment. It fits the man. Seger's medium-brown hair falls in.

cascades down his back, a foot or more of it swooping down, like rock stars' hair used to do; he also has a fearsome-looking beard. People who've met Seger recently sometimes feel he's conceited because he rarely says much, responds diffidently to even the most effusive praise. But Seger has always been this way: a little shy, modest about his achievements, a private man who makes his living in public. Given Rolling SImw maeailnc, 17I Km (onmrStntliwI Star Bob Seger headlines Rock Superbowl IV His heavy music will rock the T-Bowl Sunday some time, he opens up and speaks more frankly than most about what might be the strangest career in the history of rock roll. It's early April when I arrive.

There are few signs of significant change from the presuccess Seger, and those that can be easily perceived are humorous. One is a vicious German shepherd, kept for the protection of Seger's girlfriend, Jan. Another is a sense of sly triumph, for Seger has just finished his eleventh album, Stranger in Town, the successor to Night Moves. It is his most difficult and expensive record, eight months in the making, about six months longer than he took for any of the others, but it Is finally done well, almost. Tomorrow, he flies to California to remix a couple of songs.

Then, he swears it's done for sure. It's an ironic situation for Seger. For a dozen years, he made records, always good ones, sometimes great ones, in an almost completely unpressured atmosphere. And yet he can say, without a trace of irony, that in making Night Moves he'd learned a lot. "We were in the studio probably more than the last five albums combined.

And we just learned so much about the way people play, about how to work with other people. And those things weren't available to us, because we didn't have the money to fly back and forth (to Los Angeles) until 'Night Moves' hit." Stranger in Town was more than worth the effort. It doesn't have the sense of breakthrough that possessed Night Moves, but is a virtual catalog of Seger's excellence as a writer and singer. Produced by Seger with help from manager Punch Andrews and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, and featuring MSRS, his own Silver Bullet Band plus guest appearances by Eagles Glenn Frey and Don Felder and Little Feat's Bill Payne, the album is a perfect balance of high energy rock and moving, personal ballads. Seger's melodic sense has never been better than on "We've Got Tonite," a grand seduction song in the tradition of Rod Stewart's "Tonight's the Night," and in "Feel like a Number" he's come up with the kind of working-class anthem that one expects from tough rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

"Hollywood Nights" is a narrative that some may take for an allegory about a Midwestern boy traduced in L.A., while "The Famous Final Scene" is a fitting clincher to the work, a breakup item that must be fictitious Seger has lived 6-E Sentinel Star After Hours.