Bob Seger - The Albums and the career, song by song thread

I absolutely love Bob Seger! I have been to three Seger shows and they were all wonderful. My favorite was probably my first in 1983 for The Distance Tour.

 

Thats Doug Brown. Bob was playing on the record. Keys I think and backing vocals.

 

See, I need you

 

The first time I heard Bob Seger was on TV on a sports show in the mid 1970's with the song "Someday" from Smokin' OP's. I don't know the show, maybe Wide World of Sports or an Olympics review. But I remember it very clearly. Beautiful Loser to Against The Wind were a great 6 year out put. I put Stranger In Town in the Top 50 of 10,000 of so albums I own. It's really good.

 

I was introduced to Seger by radio play in the late 70s - and by my much older late teen cousins playing a lot of both Seger and Springsteen around that time. I always thought he was huge though by the time I was buying music in the 80s his commercial peak had passed. I recall Beautiful Loser (which I have on vinyl) and all the later albums but know nothing about him before then.
My impression is that he was huge by the mid 70s in Australia.

 

Never saw that picture. God he was so young. I didn't notice. I was just breaking out of single digits.

 

Bob is one of the greats to me. I did wonder what to make of that Yellow Beret thing when I first heard it on some kind of compilation. I think East Side Sound was the real ground zero for the Seger sound. I did see a clip of him performing that, on some sort of tv show of the time, and I figure that record put him on the map a bit locally.

 

It was big in my neighborhood. Lots of kids I knew had the record. A mix of Hideout and Cameo. Those Last Heard/System singles just jumped out the gate and grabbed the ear.

 

"East Side Story"



Single by Bob Seger & The Last Heard
B-side "East Side Sound"
Released January 1966
Genre Rock
Length 2:28
Label Hideout
Cameo-Parkway
Songwriter(s) Bob Seger
Producer(s) Bob Seger
Doug Brown

"East Side Story" is an early Bob Seger single. It was Seger's first single with his group The Last Heard, marking his departure from Doug Brown and the Omens and the beginning of his own career. The song reached #3 on the Detroit charts.[1]

Seger had originally written the song for a local Detroit band called the Underdogs, managed by Edward "Punch" Andrews along with Seger. Andrews was looking for a song for the Underdogs to follow up their successful "Man in the Glass", so Doug Brown and Seger each wrote a song. Seger recalls: "They liked what I wrote, which was 'East Side Story.' But they didn't like the way the Underdogs did it. So we recorded it ourselves, and then Doug and I went our own ways. I started my own band."[2] Members of both the Omens and Seger's own Town Criers played on the studio version. The single, which cost $1,200 to make, sold 50,000 copies.[3] Seger made his television debut performing this song on the show Swingin' Time, hosted by Robin Seymour.
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This is a great song, and a really good way to introduce yourself properly to the music world.
This has an almost glam rock kind of sound to it listening in hindsight ... I guess the guitar sound and feel kind of reminds me of something T-rex or someone may have gone on to do later.

But essentially this has this cool sixties groove and sound to it. The arrangement is really good.
I think the guitar and bass work really well together, and the drums also have a slightly unusual structure that just work really well.

We move into this kind of semi-psychedelic instrumental section that again works really well. It comes to this screaming crescendo and then drops out to the drums.
When the verse comes back in with a really nice backing vocal augmentation.
It builds up to a nice organic crescendo at the end and we're done.

Beneath the bare light bulb above
She gazed into the eyes of love
Bathed in the dirty neon lights
She begged him "don't go out tonight"
If we work out somehow maybe
We could find a way out baby
And he laughed and said "I got to go"
And she cried "no"
Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
His arms were warm and strong and young
"I promise I won't hurt no one"
"Oh baby when you gonna learn
Them folks uptown got bread to burn
When they see me flash my knife
They'll be fearin' for their live
They won't give me trouble this I know"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Johnny Johnny no
The night passed like a thousand years
The tenemant room had culled her tears
Then came a knock upon the door
Two men she'd never seen before
"Did you know Johnny Brown miss?
We hate to tell you this but
Has he a relative you know?"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny why'd you go?

It is a very solid cautionary tale lyrically too.

As a real introductory single to your career, it is hard to get much better than this track. It is probably my favourite of these Last Heard recordings, and I reckon it should have been on one of those Seger best of albums to be honest.

 

Bob Seger and his first tv appearance on Swinging Time, playing his local hit.

It is really cool to me that this is even available.

 

East Side Sound

The first b-side is an instrumental version of the a-side, and it is very cool in its own right.

 

I remember when I found my copy of "East Side Story" (on Cameo, though I have since also gotten a Hideout copy). I'd heard of it but never heard it. Quite a thrill to put on his very first record and hear everything that eventually made him a star already very much in evidence. It's still one of my favorites of his early catalog, and definitely deserved more success than it got. I wonder did the subject matter keep it off the radio in some places? Tragedy songs were big a few years earlier, but those were accidental deaths and even those songs sometimes got banned.

 

I’ve got the early stuff on vinyl- ‘Back in ‘72’ is a real beauty. I’ll enjoy this thread!

 

Speaking of the Underdogs and The Man In The Glass There was a controversy and the record was pulled. It seems that the band lifted the lyrics from a copywrited Alcoholics Anonymous poem.

 

The Underdogs ended up landing on their feet being the only band of Punch's that signed to Motown(Bob was later offered a contract and turned it down)

 

I've never heard that before. Neat little track. Certainly very sixties

 

Detroit's Bob Seger and Heavy Music
Loraine Alterman, Detroit Free Press, 30 June 1967

CALIFORNIA MAY be giving the world flower music, but Detroit's Bob Seger has created heavy music which promises to spark a lot of national excitement.



detroit free press june 30, 1967 - Newspapers.com

 

Brit here, born in '65.

I remember our first introductions to Bob Seger being covers of Rosalie by Thin Lizzy and Get Out Of Denver by Eddie And The Hot Rods. Also the Old Grey Whistle Test played a live video (from distant memory it was Still The Same).

Hollywood Nights got some airplay, and the live album Nine Tonight got good reviews. But for the peak period Stranger In Town -> Against The Wind -> Nine Tonight, he didn't tour over here, so his profile never rose.

I saw Mellencamp and Petty in fairly full arenas here in the late 80's and always lamented that Seger never came over. I guess the fear of flying, which I didn't know about, explains it.

 

G'day Harry.
Are you gonna roll with us here?

 

First CD I got as a young teen was Seger Greatest Hits in '94. Had always been a 7" or cassette person up until that Xmas when I got a cd player and a handful of cd's. I believe he is one of the most underrated songwriters in the USA. Should be in the same breath as Springsteen and Dylan imo. obvs not as prolific as either of those two, but the quality of his songs I think stands up to them. One of the first songs I ever learned to play on guitar was Night Moves. Listening to him taught me how to sing in the beginning of my musical endeavors. Went from emulating his voice to developing my own raspy style. His music helped me get through some tough times, and made the good times all the better. He is deserving of all the acclaim he gets and seems like the most down to earth rock star ever. Deserving of his own Kennedy Center honor imo, not just a guest at the Eagles ceremony. JM2C

 

I'm horrible about keeping up with these threads, but I'll try to participate some. I love Seger and he doesn't get enough props.

I've seen him live at least 6 times, first in late 1975. And I was fortunate enough to do a couple sessions that Alto Reed was also on. I also met Seger a couple times, but very cursorily--a former bandmate of mine from Detroit was an acquaintance of his, where he first met Seger by running into him in the bathroom at one of Seger's early club gigs, lol.

 

This is a good recent comp of early stuff with the Last Heard that's available via streaming:

Heavy Music: The Complete Cameo Recordings 1966-1967

 

A reissue of singles from 1966/67 offer the shocking news that, before the Stooges, MC5 and Mitch Ryder, Bob Seger was the rawest and realist Motor City music maker

STRAIGHT OUTTA DETROIT: EARLY BOB SEGER'S HEAVY MUSIC (pleasekillme.com)

Although mostly unknown to listeners outside of Michigan, some of these 45s actually got a lot of action in Detroit. “East Side Story” went to #3 on regional charts and sold more than 50,000 copies locally. “Persecution Smith” went to #9 on those charts, and “Heavy Music” (actually spread over two parts of the same single) all the way to the top. Like the other singles, however, “Heavy Music” failed to gain a foothold nationally, peaking at #103—though even that bubble under the Top Hundred marked the only time these singles showed up on Billboard’s listings.

 

We'll be looking at this when we have looked at the singles. I just thought in a chronological thread it would be odd to post the most recent album first