Bob Seger has plugged away on his guitar for more than 50 years, but there's more to the
man than his hit songs.
From his athletic background to his retirement, there's a whole lot of untold truth about
this classic rocker.
Most people contain multitudes.
And that's certainly true of Bob Seger.
In addition to being a talented musician, he's also a lifelong athlete and competitor.
Back in high school in Michigan, he really wanted to play football, specifically the
glorious position of quarterback.
But he couldn't cut it on the gridiron, leading him to turn to track and field instead.
His years of hoofing it as fast as he could inspired one of his most beloved songs.
As he told The Mercury News in 2019,
"I always wanted to write a song about being a runner.
I don't think anybody got that, but that's where the 'Against the Wind' title came from."
"I was a long-distance runner, and I think that's where, in high school, and I think
that's where I get my tenacity."
Seger races against the wind not just on land but also out on the water.
In 2001, his sailboat Lightning won the Port Huron-to-Mackinac Race in Michigan.
And it turns out that he's quite the hands-on owner.
Lightning crew member Mike Thompson told a boating publication,
"Everybody took turns steering the boat, and he was in the rotation just like everybody
else."
When Seger was still a teenageer in high school in the early '60s, he cut his musical teeth
as a guitarist and vocalist in a number of Detroit-area bands.
His first real group was a trio called the Decibels, in which he played alongside Eddie
Andrews, who would later manage Seger's career.
After moving to Ann Arbor, Michigan, Seger joined a band called the Town Criers, then
switched teams again to play keyboard with Doug Brown and the Omens.
After a name change to the mildly humorous Beach Bums, the group released a single called
"The Ballad of the Yellow Beret," a parody of Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler's 1966 ultra-patriotic
"The Ballad of the Green Berets."
Seger's version mocked Vietnam War-era draft dodgers, and it could've been at least a local
hit had Sadler not threatened to sue, forcing the record to be pulled out of stores.
Later in 1966, Seger went solo, scoring some Michigan hits with "East Side Story" and "Heavy
Music," only for his label Cameo Records to go out of business.
After a brief sojourn to college, he returned to music in 1969 and redoubled his efforts
to make it big.
Although Seger reached the heights of his fame in the '70s, he scored his first hit
in early 1969.
"Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," officially credited to the Bob Seger System, hit #17 on the Billboard
pop chart.
But that didn't quite solidify Seger's mainstream success or national stature.
He kept releasing singles and albums in the early '70s to very little attention.
He was essentially a one-hit wonder for a while, as "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" was his
only top 40 hit until "Night Moves" landed in the top five in 1976.
From that point on, Seger was a hit machine around the country and the world, as he had
already been in some parts of the Midwest for years.
While he was a relatively obscure act for most Americans in the early '70s, he was a
superstar in his home state of Michigan.
In the same week in 1976 that he played to a small crowd of people in a random Chicago
bar, he also took the stage in front of 76,000 screaming fans at the Silverdome in Pontiac,
Michigan.
"Bob Seger has paid more dues than all the artists in the current Billboard Top 40 combined."
Perhaps the reason why Seger's songs have resonated with so many people for so long
is because of their authenticity.
Tunes like "Night Moves" feel so emotionally real because they are, as the singer-songwriter
pulled from real-life events to craft his compositions.
"Writing's so mysterious.
I do it all different kinds of ways."
During an interview on In the Studio with Redbeard, Seger revealed that he really got
to work on his "night moves" with a "dark-haired Italian girl" whom he dated when he was 19.
According to the book Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings, that woman was Rene
Andretti, Seger's first real girlfriend as a teenager.
But the romance, while monumental, ultimately proved ill-fated.
The singer told the Detroit Free Press in 1994,
"Her boyfriend was in the service, and when he came back, she married him.
My first broken heart."
Fortunately, Seger was able to get over that disappointment.
He's been married to his third wife, Juanita Dorricott, since 1993.
And the rest of the world got "Night Moves" out of the whole experience, so it ended well
for everyone.
The Eagles were one of the most popular bands of the '70s.
Their country-influenced sound was synonymous with the decade.
They were also a bit of a supergroup, as they were packed with individually successful performers
and songwriters such as Don Henley, Joe Walsh, and Glenn Frey.
Despite that rock 'n' roll braintrust, the band grew utterly stumped when working on
an out-of-character, hard-rocking stomper of a song for their 1979 album The Long Run.
According to Eagles guitarist Don Felder, when the band realized that Frey's vocals
were underrepresented on the album, Frey, Henley, and collaborator J.D. Souther forged
a nugget of a song.
It was an uptempo, hand clap-driven number.
There was one problem, though.
They couldn't come up with a chorus.
And that's when Frey decided to seek outside help in the form of Bob Seger.
Frey called him up and sang what he and the other Eagles had come up with, all the way
up to where the chorus should go.
Then from out of thin air, Seger pulled out the melody of that chorus, and subsequently,
the title of the song.
The result was "Heartache Tonight."
Seger was credited as a co-writer, and the song went on to become the fifth, and final,
number 1 hit for the Eagles.
"I actually wrote the 'Heartache Tonight' part, and Glenn wrote all the verses, and
then Don and J.D. Souther finished the song."
Seger has often presented himself as a voice of the common man: blue collar, working class
individuals who, like Seger, come from a humble Midwestern background.
That's a big reason why he allowed his song "Like a Rock" to be used for years in commercials
for American-made Chevrolet trucks.
It's also an attitude that prompted him to make a relatively bizarre request of his record
label.
The eight-track tape exploded in popularity in the late '60s and into the '70s.
It was superior to vinyl records in at least one regard.
Music was portable on the compact tapes, and automakers responded by outfitting cars and
trucks with eight-track decks.
However, the more streamlined cassette eventually overtook the eight-track as the portable musical
format of choice.
By 1982, record labels had pretty much phased it out.
But Seger thought that was a disservice to the public.
He told People Magazine in 1983,
"There are thousands of fans out there who still have old eight-tracks in their pickups
or RVs.
Times are tough.
A lot of them don't have the money to get a new system."
So, per Seger's behest, Capitol Records released his 1982 album The Distance on eight-track.
While Seger continued to pack arenas and stadiums into the '90s and most of his biggest songs
can still be heard on any classic rock radio station today, the hit singles period of his
career started to die out in the late '80s.
However, his final top ten hit just happened to be his biggest.
In 1987, he reached number 1 for the first and only time with "Shakedown," his groovy,
R&B-heavy contribution to the Beverly Hills Cop II soundtrack.
A commercial triumph for the veteran rocker, "Shakedown" also earned Seger a nomination
for Best Original Song at the Academy Awards.
But interestingly enough, the song originally wasn't his.
Beverly Hills Cop II producers had hired Glenn Frey, who'd had a big hit with "The Heat is
On" from the first Beverly Hills Cop, to record a song for the sequel.
According to The Billboard Book of Number One Hits, Frey didn't like the verse lyrics
written by composers Keith Forsey and Harold Faltermeyer.
Furthermore, he contracted laryngitis just before he was supposed to lay down vocals.
After Frey pulled out, MCA Records president Irving Azoff called Seger, asking him to write
new lyrics and record the song.
Perhaps the most recognizable song in the Bob Seger catalog is "Old Time Rock and Roll,"
thanks to its iconic opening piano riff, Seger's howling vocal delivery, and a blistering sax
solo.
It scraped into the top 30 of the Billboard Hot 100 when it was originally released as
a single in 1979.
It later became a song for the ages when it was used in that famous scene in 1983's Risky
Business in which a young Tom Cruise dances around in his underwear.
But as it turns out, "Old Time Rock and Roll" was almost an afterthought, recorded late
in production for the album Stranger in Town.
It was brought to Seger by Alabama songwriter George Jackson.
Seger liked the chorus but not the verses, so he wrote those himself.
However, he didn't think the song was ever going to be a single, let alone a hit, so
he didn't bother to list himself as a songwriter.
That means he's missed out on untold riches in royalties.
As he told a radio interviewer in 2006,
"That was the dumbest thing I ever did."
In 1994, the same year that Seger released his Greatest Hits album, he also appeared
in a music video for "Night Moves," almost 20 years after the song's original release.
The video evokes the song's wistful nostalgia.
It's shot in a dreamy soft focus and set at a drive-in movie theater sometime in the distant,
romanticized past.
Young people flirt and mill about, including a central couple played by Daphne Zuniga of
Melrose Place and Matt LeBlanc just before Friends debuted and made him a household name.
Believe it or not, Seger actually did a little acting coaching.
As LeBlanc revealed on an episode of Top Gear, Seger summoned the actor to his trailer and
told him what it was like back when he was young and would go to the drive-in and try
to pick up girls.
Then the rocker produced a bottle of tequila.
"Next thing I know, we down a whole bottle of tequila, Bob Seger and I, and then they
knock on the door, 'Ready for you on set!'
So I'm drunk in the whole video."
Even though both Seger and LeBlanc were in various states of drunkenness for the video
shoot, everything seemed to work out okay in the end.
LeBlanc has had a long and steady acting career, while Seger's Greatest Hits went on to be
certified diamond after selling over 10 million copies in the United States.
After Seger's career slowed down in the 90s, he quietly retired from the music business
with the aim of focusing on family life.
He told CBS Sunday Morning in 2007,
"I had kids at age 47, and very late in life, and I'd been doing it for 30 straight years,
writing songs, making a record and touring and starting the process right over.
Then I had the kids and, you know, it might be a good time to slow down and watch them
grow up - you're never gonna get another chance to see it."
After his 1995 album It's a Mystery, he didn't release another album until 2006's Face the
Promise.
He toured in support of it in 2007, his first set of concert dates since 1996.
Of course, Seger isn't getting any younger, and all those years of living on the road
have taken their toll on him.
In 2017, the year he turned 72 years old, he ruptured a disc just before he was supposed
to embark on a concert tour.
His doctor told him that if symptoms worsened, he'd have to cancel the tour and undergo surgery.
Well, Seger ended up awakening one morning in September 2017 with a "dragging" left leg.
A few days later, his management announced that the remaining 18 dates on his tour schedule
would be indefinitely postponed.
These health troubles prompted him to retire once again, as he announced that his "Travelin'
Man Tour" in 2018 and 2019 would be the last time he would hit the road.
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