While my dear wife, Carrie, and I have seen Bob Seger and The Silver Bullet Band sing three times, he is elusive when it comes to getting good pictures.  A Bob Seger show is not about lights.  A Bob Seger show is not about what images are flashed on a screen.  A Bob Seger show is not about filling a hall with synthesizers.   A Bob Seger show is about Rock and Roll.  Pure songs.  Pure sound…clunky at a rare moment…solid as a, well, rock the rest of the time.  It is a lover of American FM Rock’s dream.  Background music floods you and reminds you of where you were and whom you were with as Seger sings about “Mainstreet”, “Night Moves”, and “Katmandu”.  Wow.  I can get there with ease.

What follows is as a piece of writing I want to share with you that was published in 2006 when Bob Seger turned out a new album for the first time in many years.  The record was called Face the Promise.  I hope you enjoy it.  I sure did.

I Waited for You, Bob Seger  (2006)

The first time I heard it, I got goose bumps.  Could it be?  Am I the victim of a cruel joke?  Did the air stop moving? Am I really supposed to trust my auditory canal here?  Is this really on the radio?

When it was over, I was still here.  The hands on the clock were still moving.  I was not dreaming.  I was listening to Bob Seger.  The song is called “Wait for Me”.  Bob, you’re not the only one who has been waiting.  Even though, like a rock, you’ve never gone away, I have been waiting.  I’ve been waiting for this song.  I have been waiting for Bob Seger’s new album, the recently released Face the Promise.

A promise was not delivered here.  It was a gift.  Simply put, I never thought I would hear anything like this from Bob Seger again.  Suddenly I was back in a high school locker room in the seventies when my Dad was the head football coach at Brownstown and I was hurtling toward age ten. In those days I was schooled on Aerosmith, Led Zepplin, Ted Nugent, Boz Scaggs, and the perennial favorite, Bob Seger.  In 1976 he released the classic album Night Moves.  In 1978 we heard from Bob in the form of Still the Same.  Hits off those albums included Night Moves, Mainstreet, We’ve Got Tonight, Still the Same, Old Time Rock and Roll, and Rock and Roll Never Forgets.

I never forgot either.  While the only two I did any homework on later in life were Bob Seger and Boz Scaggs, the last whispered wish of age (to live it all again) brushed across my face and blew my hair as I listened to the new Bob Seger song.  Though we’ve heard from Bob Seger as the years have gone by, thanks in part to radio friendliness and a Chevy ad campaign that has taken Seger’s classic music and turn it into a fixture like a comfortable couch because we’ve heard it so much thus somewhat devaluing his special talent, his last album was release in 1995, and it was not a memorable effort.  I have it sitting on the shelf and couldn’t name two consecutive songs off of it to save my butt.

Facing facts isn’t always a joyous thing to do.  I don’t recognize hit radio today.  I look at the Billboard Hot 100 and ask, do what?  I see names like Kid Rock and can’t help but think about Fred Flintstone.  I expected the group Green Day to be comprised of a few horns and a drum or two from the Notre Dame Marching Band. And what about the group called The Barenaked Ladies.  That shouldn’t be printed in mixed company, let alone the focus of any singing.

I guess that’s why this is so special to me.  Superman took his cape out of the closet and he ironed that sucker.  He blew the dust off his microphone and delivered.

My music heroes will be going away soon.  The Moody Blues are all between sixty and sixty-five.  While I saw them live again this year, I also remind myself I saw them live twenty years ago.  And some in the audience this year saw them nearly forty years ago.  But The Moodies hit the road year after year unlike any other British Invasion contemporaries.  They still love playing live and their devoted fans respond in kind.  I’m on twenty-nine Moodies concerts and counting, myself.  The Moody Blues and so many of our other favorites are like the rest of us…not getting any younger.

My lovely wife, Carrie, and I have never seen Bob Seger. With any luck that will change, I’d like to believe Seger plans to go out on the road to support the new album.  How could he not?  He’s Bob Seger…Travelin” Man.

Speaking the Rights…with more Seger Speaks to come

Danny Johnson