In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: “Against the Wind”

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

    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

  • Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band- Against the Wind 45th Anniversary

    Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band- Against the Wind 45th Anniversary

    By the time of Against the Wind‘s February 1980 release, Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band had elevated to one of America’s most popular recording and touring acts. It certainly was a long way from 1968’s “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” first toss of the rock’n’roll dice, yet Bob talked for hours mere miles from where it all started for Seger in Ann Arbor, MI. “I think of all the albums I’ve ever done, ‘Against the Wind’ is the easiest for me to listen to,” Bob says thoughtfully. “It’s probably the most fulfilled I ever was as a songwriter.”

    With the Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band release Against the Wind,  I can easily recall the moment when I first realized that, at that time, Bob Seger had become the biggest American rock star. It was just after sunrise on a chilly late winter Saturday morning in Memphis in  1980, and about a thousand people had camped out overnight at the city’s main ticket outlet to be among the first to buy Bob Seger concert tickets for his upcoming stop on the Silver Bullet Band’s  Against the Wind  tour. The album had debuted at #1, and in anticipation of this turnout for tickets, my Memphis radio station ROCK 103 was serving free hot breakfast to the first 103 people in line.
    As I gazed out over the long line of humanity as it snaked around the building across the crowded parking lot, boom boxes blaring out Bob Seger songs from his entire career including Against the Wind  to serenade the bleary-eyed throng, my mind drifted back nine years earlier to my first time seeing Seger perform. It was another Saturday about mid-afternoon in Summer 1971  in a cornfield in Northwest Ohio, where Bob was about fifth down the bill of mostly regional Detroit acts. As it turned  out, he was on sabbatical from rock’n’roll, accompanying himself with just an acoustic guitar. Many years later Bob would explain to me that it was his journeyman period for becoming a better songwriter because, unlike with a band, when you perform solo there’s no place to hide. Every phrase, every chord, every note is laid bare.Bob-Seger-Tour
    Apparently Bob Seger learned his lessons well. That Memphis concert sold out in advance, as did practically every stop on the 1980 tour. Against the Wind , released forty-five Februaries ago,  was one of his seven Top 10 multi-platinum albums in a row. And by the way, Seger didn’t forsake rock’n’roll  very long: he ended that acoustic set in 1971 by calling out his friends David Teegarden  and Skip “Vanwinkle” Knape for a rousing rendition of “ God, Love, and Rock’n’Roll “! –Redbeard

  • Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band- Night Moves 50th Anniversary

    Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band- Night Moves 50th Anniversary

    Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band’s Night Moves in October 1976 was such a major album, and not just for the “eight year overnight success” that the mainstream media discovered in the Detroit journeyman singer/songwriter, either. Along with Steve Miller’s Fly Like an Eagle, Hotel California late that year from the Eagles, and Frampton Comes Alive by Peter Frampton, Night Moves and its songs “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”,”Main Street”,”The Fire Down Below”, “Come to Poppa”, and the timeless “Night Moves” vaulted FM rock radio over the AM dial Top 40 colossus that had totally dominated American listenership for a generation. Everybody’s all-American Bob Seger is my guest here In the Studio  for the  all-important Night Moves.

    Bob told me during my classic rock interview that he did not write while on tour. “In order for me to write, I need huge chunks of time, I really do. I block it out. Really, to work up where I think I get the quality stuff, it takes about eight, nine, ten hours a day when you’re really at it. And then maybe, in a couple of weeks, I might get the first one that’s really special. I’m not as lucky as people like, say, Don Henley. I’m a good friend of his. I’ve seen Henley just scratching them out (lyrics) in the recording studio, ya know? And they’re great. John Lennon could write a song on the spot, with great lyrics.(producer) Jimmy Iovine would see him do it ! I’m not like that, it takes me a long time. My manager Punch (Andrews) will tell you that I write a ton of songs, probably a hundred a year.

    Redbeard: A hundred a year?

    Bob Seger: Yeah, and out of those I’ll probably finish about forty. And then out of those forty, there will be  about ten that are good. I like to finish everything I start, because I end up stealing from myself (laughs)! We did two hundred sixty-five shows that year 1975,” says Bob Seger with a mixture of pride and amazement, as explanation on why it was so hard to find the solitary time necessary to write well-crafted songs prior to Night Moves.  The double disc Live Bullet,  recorded in Fall 1975 and released six months later, provided that precious fallow period. Seger and his Silver Bullet Band delivered in a major way by October 1976 with Night Moves  containing “Rock and Roll Never Forgets”,”Main Street”,”The Fire Down Below”,”Come to Poppa”, and the title song which Bob calls “…a little novelette.”

    This edition of In the Studio  is dedicated to longtime Silver Bullet Band sax player and crowd-pleaser Alto Reed (born  Thomas Cartmell, 1948)  who passed away from colon cancer at the end of December 2020. He literally left me speechless in awe the first time I witnessed “Turn the Page” performed live in 1975. –Redbeard