Word: seger
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...time, Seger was Detroit's best-kept secret, a rocker who commanded a fanatic home-town following but kept missing a big national break. He had a national hit single in 1969 with his hard-driving Ramblin 'Gamblin 'Man, but trouble with his band kept him from touring to promote it properly. By the time he had finished his third album, Seger, with half a dozen local hits behind him, was back to living on $7,000 a year...
That song made Bob Seger a national star after a decade of hard traveling. Now he has a fine new record, Stranger in Town, out just a few weeks and already following an unerring trajectory to the headier regions of the charts. It should prove that this particular local boy is not only a national star but something of a vital natural resource...
There is no slick stuff about Seger, not on the records and not in concert. His brown hair flows over the collars of modified Elizabethan shirts, stage gear long out of favor. The music has no labyrinthine lyrics or arcane chord changes. Seger still opens his show with Tina Turner's good-humored, hard-rocker Nutbush City Limits, and the song sets the tone for what follows: plain good times...
...powerhouse energy, there is an underlying melancholy in some of Seger's new music, which may be one reason he is writing more ballads these days. "Writing rock is too limiting," he says. "I have ten times as much freedom writing ballads." Stranger in Town contains some exemplary rockers, but it is the ballads that set off the lasting echoes. The Famous Final Scene at first appears to be about the end of a romance ("Think in terms of bridges burned/ Think of seasons that must end"), but could also be about the closing circle of a career...
...current of sadness that runs through his music, Seger remains a modest, ebullient figure who still drives him self home from local concerts in a red BMW. A working-class kid from Ann Arbor, Seger lives with his steady girl in a modest ranch house 50 miles from Detroit. Fans have discovered the address, and "just the other night," Seger reports, "a girl tried to get into the kitchen...