Bob Seger - Night Moves (1976)

The opening guitar riff of "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," the kickoff track of Bob Seger's excellent 1976 album Night Moves, is cutting and forceful, with a bite that makes you sit up and take notice.   But it's the voice that really gets you; Bob Seger, more than any other American rock and roller, is a shouter who uses his voice as much as his lyrics as an instrument of defiance.  In "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," a repudiation of aging gracefully and a renewed commitment to rock and roll in middle age, Seger is unrelenting, and he makes no apologies for remaining true to rock and roll while encouraging middle-aged rock fans to do the same.

Seger had always had a tough, pop-savvy, Middle American sensibility in his music, but it took on a special meaning with Night Moves.  He had spent a decade laboring in obscurity in the Detroit rock scene since the mid-sixties, enjoying local commercial success but failing to break through nationally.  Night Moves was the culmination of his struggle, finally bringing him the mass audience he deserved and re-affirming rock's blue-collar values and origins.  In 1976, with a bourgeois mentality dominating mainstream pop, Seger, more than even Bruce Springsteen, was rock's working class hero.

Seger alternated between his live backing group, the Silver Bullet Band, and the venerable, esteemed Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section in recording this album, allowing him to present different facets of his talents.  With the Silver Bullet Band, he generates some ferocious, blunt rock in not only "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" but also in his unvarnished depiction of prostitutes and their johns in "The Fire Down Below" and his parable of the arena rocker as a Roman gladiator in "Sunburst," which includes the most chilling flute solo west of Family's Poli Palmer.  Backed by the Muscle Shoals crew, Seger puts some extra grit in the Memphis soul of "Come To Poppa," originally recorded by Ann Peebles as "Come To Mama;" while the original Peebles record assumes the role of a tender, cuddly protector, Seger's masculinization suggests a fierce, hard-nosed defender.  (An equally powerful cover of Young Jessie's 1955 song "Mary Lou," recorded with the Silver Bullet  Band, closes the album as definitively as "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" begins it.)  Paradoxically, the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section encourages in lighter arrangements warm, wistful performances from Seger, both in "Mainstreet," a remembrance of an exotic dancer and the narrator's fascination with the person behind the persona, and "Ship of Fools," an allegorical tale of introverted crewmen of a ship that ends up sinking and leaving the only socially aware crew member as its sole survivor.  

The biggest revelation, undoubtedly, is the title song. "Night Moves" finds Seger's narrator looking back to his first sexual relationship and the awkwardness he sought to leave behind, left with only his memories and his loneliness as he enters middle age - "autumn closing in."  The song encapsulates Dave Marsh's summation of the album as a "wonderful chronicle of the moments where age becomes irrelevant and innocence gains experience."  This album is full of youthful energy tempered by adult reality, in which rock and roll is rediscovered and the exuberance of adolescence assumes hard-earned wisdom.  Night Moves offered a new appreciation of rock, and it seems appropriate that it gave an America in 1976 recovering from a sobering decade a new rock hero to embrace.