Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band- Like a Rock 40th Anniversary

“Between 1975 and 1980 was probably, physically and emotionally, the high point of my creative life as far as having it been easy,” observes my guest Bob Seger for the fortieth annivesary of Spring 1986’s Like a Rock. “After that some of the stuff is very interesting after 1980, and in a lot of ways I like it better…It’s coming from a different place, from a person who has ‘done it all’.”

When it was released in Spring 1986, Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band’s Like a Rock was the Motown singer/songwriter’s thirteenth album! Yet no one Seger song is more recalled by Americans of all ages than “Like a Rock”, and for good reason: throughout the Nineties and into the new millennium, no song was more ubiquitous on US television than the album’s title song, albeit thirty seconds at a time. Never known as a groundbreaking innovator, nevertheless it was Bob Seger who changed the pop culture taboo in America against using  hit songs in mass media marketing.

General Motors’ Chevrolet Truck Division chose the song “Like a Rock” for its television ad campaign in the Nineties and into the 21st century, but when the ad agency pitched Bob Seger initially, it was rejected. “I just didn’t want to do a commerial,” Seger explains flatly, “but then I met this guy in a bar. And he asked me, ‘Why have you never done an endorsement for the auto industry?’ He actually said that! So I think that it was the right thing to do.”

Bob Seger is my guest here In the Studio on the fortieth anniversary of the #3-charting platinum album Like a Rock. -Redbeard