Some forty years after Led Zeppelin played their first show, Robert Plant is still prowling the concert stage, leonine mane flowing, a little worse for wear but showing no intention whatsoever of hanging up his mic. And he's not alone. Bands like The Who, The Stones and Pink Floyd have all been subject to tour rumors this year, decades past their prime. These elder statesmen of rock, these preternatural sexagenarians who appear impervious to the physical challenges of aging, make rock 'n' roll seem like a veritable Fountain of Youth.
Not so, Bob Seger. Seger's keeping it real. Slogging through his first tour in four years, the Detroit rocker is feeling the pain. "For the first time I'm sitting when I'm playing guitar," he says. "It hurts my back [to stand]." Seger, who dropped some significant poundage in preparation for the tour, will turn 66 in early May. He and his Silver Bullet Band try and keep to three performances a week, and after every show, he hops a private jet and wings it back to Michigan. With the exception of an upcoming five-day stretch in Texas and Louisiana, Seger will sleep in his own bed every night he's on the road and wake his kids for school each morning.
His decision to hit the road this spring caught many by surprise. Seger's never been much of a tour rat to begin with, and although he's currently at work on a new album (it's been five years since his last studio effort), he's touring ahead of its release. But some things just can't wait. While sifting through a stash of archival material he discovered back in 2009 in preparation for Early Seger Volume 1, and retooling some of that unreleased music with his band, Seger suddenly realized that at his age, it's now or never. "I don’t know how many more years I've got a chance to do this," he says. "I'm getting up there."
Another motive for his decision to tour again was to set an example for his son, who is heading off to college, and his daughter, now a junior in high school. Seger took a sabbatical from the music business for over a decade between 1995 and 2006 to spend time with his wife and help raise his two young children. Now he wants to teach them a thing or two about the benefits of a solid work ethic in achieving their dreams.
Although playing a two-hour set of his monster hits several nights a week is a challenge that leaves him sore and aching, Seger doesn't hold out on his fans. He obliges them with the music they came to hear—songs like "Night Moves," "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," "Mainstreet," "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man," "Old Time Rock & Roll," "Hollywood Nights," "Against the Wind," and "Turn the Page." He even sneaks in a few rarities and has been performing the deep cut "Shinin' Brightly" from 1980s Against the Wind, the fan-favorite medley "Travelin' Man"/"Beautiful Loser," and perhaps a song or two from his work in progress, a record he hopes to finish later this year in time for a 2011 release.
As one of the most popular heartland rockers of the '70s, Bob Seger began his musical career in 1961 as a singer-songwriter, guitarist and pianist for a series of early bands before forming the Bob Seger System and scoring his first commercial hit in 1968 with "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man." After the band's follow-up, Noah, failed to live up to the success of its predecessor, The System disbanded in 1969. Seger briefly quit the music business to attend college, but a semester later, returned with a new backing band and released the album Mongrel in late 1970. Success continued to elude him in the coming years, however, as album after album failed to sell.
And then in 1974, Seger formed the Silver Bullet Band along with original members guitarist Drew Abbott, drummer Charlie Allen Martin, keyboardist Rick Mannassa, bassist Chris Campbell, and sax player Alto Reed. The group released the album Beautiful Loser in 1975, which included Seger's next big hit, "Katmandu." The band toured in support of the record and built on its success with the release of Live Bullet in 1976. The double album was recorded over two nights in Detroit's Cobo Arena in September 1975. It spent over three years on the US charts and has since gone 5X Platinum.
But however popular Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were at the time in their native Detroit, that fame wasn't quite translating to the rest of the world. The band played to nearly 80,000 fans at the Pontiac Silverdome in June 1976, but the very next night, a crowd of fewer than a thousand turned out to see them in Chicago. And then came Night Moves. Released in October 1976, the album proved to be the biggest-selling studio album of Seger's entire career. The title track was a huge hit with fans and critics alike and became a mainstay on rock radio. The album also included the hits "Mainstreet" and "Rock and Roll Never Forgets."
Seger and his band followed up with two strong releases: Stranger in Town (1978), which included the singles "Still the Same," "Hollywood Nights," the ballad "We've Got Tonight," and "Old Time Rock & Roll," famously used in the 1983 film Risky Business starring Tom Cruise; and Against the Wind (1980), which became Seger's first and only #1 album on the Billboard album chart. It also won him two Grammy Awards.
From that three-album peak, however, Bob Seger and various reconfigurations of the Silver Bullet Band saw a steady decline in their mega-Platinum sales. They released four albums over the next dozen years, and although each record met with moderate success, none made the numbers of the band's earlier releases.
Seger went on an extended hiatus from the music business in 1995. He resurfaced in 2004 when he was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and returned to the record charts in 2006 with the release of his sixteenth studio album, Face the Promise. The record sold almost a half million copies in the first 45 days of its release and has since gone Platinum. Seger's supporting tour saw many shows sell out in under five minutes.
Although he's got quite an extensive vault, Bob Seger refuses to release material as a box set, or as bonus tracks on deluxe editions of old albums. His catalog still isn't available on iTunes, and his first six studio albums have been out of print for decades, much to the frustration of fans. Besides Greatest Hits Volumes 1 and 2, his only-ever archival release was Early Seger Volume 1, which was released in 2009 and sold exclusively through the Michigan-based chain Meijer, Walmart and Amazon. Capitol Records has been pushing him to release reissues, most recently this past Christmas when they suggested packaging the two greatest hits albums together, but Seger considers that a "cheesy" move. "They're out there, and people can buy them individually. It just doesn't seem right to me."
Seger does, however, hope to have some new music out as early as the end of the year. His tour runs through May after which he plans to return to work on the as-of-yet untitled album. "It's halfway done," he says. "I have three brand new songs." He's also been listening to a lot of unreleased tunes from his early days with the Silver Bullet Band and may include or re-record some of that material. "I found that I had 45 to 55 things that no one had ever heard before," he says. "I was like, 'Why didn't I put that out before?' If the songwriting gods smile on me, the whole album will be new songs. If they don't, it'll be a mixture of new and old—whatever the best songs are."
Despite this sudden flurry of activity, and unlike those of so many of his musical peers, Bob Seger says his career is winding down. "I can’t do this much longer," he recently told Rolling Stone. "My manager is 70. We've been together for 45 years now and we need to stop pretty soon and turn it over to the Kid Rocks and Eminems. I guess we're in the final stages here." So all you Seger fans out there, take heed.
For further concert information, check out Seger's website at www.bobseger.com.
