Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band - Live Bullet

OK, so these days Bob Seger is to "Dad Rock" what Neil Young is to Grunge.  So the kids don't seem to think he's all that cool, but I'm here to tell you that up to and including this album, Bob Seger was hitting all the right buttons when it came to knowing what kids in the Midwest wanted.  Ya know what we wanted?  We wanted to get a little funky, but we wanted to Rock, and Rock with a capital "R."  We wanted thumping drums and we wanted a dude with balls to stand up and sing his tales of the awesomeness of The Road and just getting the hell out of here and having fun (believe it or not, Bruce Springsteen wasn't the first person that wanted to get out of town and have fun).  Now to me, living near Cleveland in 1976 when this came out, I was familiar with some of the songs, like Ramblin' Gamblin' Man and Get Out of Denver.  I honestly thought these were huge, national hit records.  I also thought all the songs on Nuggets were big hits too, but I was wrong on both counts, so I was really surprised to talk to someone not from here when I was 16 and hear him say that he really hardly knew who Bob Seger was.  I was floored.  I thought the guy had been a big deal forever!

I think I first got this from Columbia House with 13 other favorites that I never paid for (don't look at me like that - everyone did it and they eventually got me to order one or two things from them).  What I think I used to take for real depth and wisdom in Bob's lyrics has turned out to be a knack for waxing nostalgic that may be unparalleled in the Rock world.  Hey, I was 14, and two years earlier seemed like a thousand years ago to me.  I was smoking cigarettes and getting girlfriends and stealing beer and stuff.  Bob Seger seemed like he really knew the score lyrically, and I can remember staying up all night listening to Live Bullet.  I'll tell you what, we also never, ever called it Live Bullet.  We always called it Double Live Bullet, because it was too excellent (yes, that was added to everything good when I was a kid - like awesome seems to be today) to fit on one record.  I think I also thought that when Bob played a show it might be like this, but he probably played a bunch of different songs every night (like I said, I was 14).  The thing I was trying to say is that I think Bob's habit of being nostalgic was easy to take as someone passing along wisdom they had learned, when all they were really doing was thinking about old times.  Hey, I was 14.  I thought it was deep.  Oh, and here I am, half the time I'm here putting down what I remember happening around an old record I'm listening to!  Yeah, I know that whole Pot/Kettle thing.  Get off my ass.

These days I still have a copy of this album.  It looks great, but it's got a couple of spots where my old stylus had troubles, but the Nagaoka I have now seems to stay locked into the groove and just kind of pops a little.  So I was always thinking maybe I'd look for another copy of this, but they're usually pretty beat up around here so I think I'll just keep mine.  Otherwise, it sounds and looks like a brand new record.  So it's pretty obvious that it's not the one I had when I was a kid, staying up all night and thinking I was listening to the kind of records college kids listened to.  Who knows, maybe they did back then, but Bob seems to be a little more blue collar, and I tend to feel a kinship with that crowd more than most other crowds.  My dad's side of the family is definitely blue collar (mostly) and I ran big machines that made magazines for a long, long time.

I still love hearing Get Out of Denver and Ramblin' Gamblin' Man.  I think those are what Rock N' Roll is all about.  I also remember someone laughing when I told them Bob did Nutbush City Limits, and they said, "That's a Tina Turner song.  No way the guy can even come close to doing it justice."  I had no idea because I didn't know anything about Tina Turner when I was in high school, other than that she did a version of Proud Mary I didn't care for.  So I asked a friend's brother that had like 1500 albums back then (all in plastic sleeves and loaded into a room full of Peaches record crates stacked on their side) if he had Tina Turner's version.  He did, and said I could come over and check it out.  I remember really looking forward to that, and when the day finally came I was completely let down.  Bob Seger did it waay better!  Then the guy tells me that it's about the town Tina Turner came from, and I'm thinking, "I think Bob Seger seems more like he's from there than she does!"  So I learned that you never know what goodies a cover song can deliver.

I can also remember that around the time I was a senior in high school I was at a party and a friend of mine brought his brother, who had been out of school two years and was driving a truck.  Maybe it was three years, I don't know if you have to be 21 to drive a truck, but this was a long time ago.  So we're hanging out by the keg, near the stereo and as was the norm around here for something like twenty-five years, someone put on Live Bullet and that means that eventually Turn the Page comes on.  Now I think this is a pretty great song, and I can empathize with it totally, but I've certainly never been "out there in the spotlight a million miles away" from anything.  My friend's brother however, as soon as the song comes on, holds a lighter to the sky and declares loudly, "This song is my life!"  Now, riding 16 hours when you're driving the truck doesn't leave you with "nothing left to do."  I didn't bother to say anything, but to this day I think that was stupid and the next time this guy tries to convert me to Jesus I swear I'm gonna tell him to just shove it up his ass.  I think he misses the point of things all the time.

My records look great and seem to play really nicely except for a couple spots that aren't visible that click.  Which reminds me, you people that "like" clicks and pops on records are crazy.  Sure, there's some noise inherent in them.  Even the newest, best pressing can have a moment of static or a pop or two.  But these don't make things "better."  It's nicer to have a quiet record that sounds like a million bucks.  People struggled to get there until they came up with cd's, and that worked so well a lot of people are just turning to records.  When you have a beater copy of a record, you try to find a nicer one in the used bins for a good price.  Trust me, it's worth it unless that beater record you put ever extraneous sound on.  But then you still find a better copy to listen to except when it's late at night and you're drunk and thinking, "What would Bob Seger be thinking about if he were here?"