Bob Seger: Not a Stranger Anymore
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 train — 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.
Bob Seger: Not a Stranger Anymore, Page 1 of 5