Music

You Need to Listen to This Song Right Now #45

Heavy Rotation — Mainstreet, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (Night Moves, 1976)

Heavy Rotation was a music industry term for songs that, one way or another, got incessant airplay. It referred to the large amount of rotations that a particular record was given on turntables at radio stations. Since, until the 1980s, this was the only way to get new music into the ears and brains of listeners, heavy rotation meant increased sales. These were good for record companies and artists alike.

Today, some of us still put records on at home and give them a spin. Most of us don’t. However, the term still applies, just in a different way. Streaming services like Spotify sell subscriptions to listeners and then pay artists based on listens. At least, that’s the way we think it works.

For me, heavy rotation means a song that is in my head for some reason. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a day, maybe for longer. It’s a song you come back to occasionally and still feels just as good.

This series of articles is dedicated to these songs.

Here, I aim to highlight a particular song by a particular band or singer. We should know a bit about the band, where the song fits into its history, and where it fits into what was happening in music at that time. Then there’s the song itself. Who’s playing on it, what are the lyrics getting at, and why is it so good? How does it still occupy sonic space in our lives?

I’ll (try to) keep it short. It shouldn’t take you any longer to read this than the song itself. To that end, I’ll put a Youtube clip of the original recording at the top of the article so you can listen as you read. Or not. And because a song is often much different live than in the recording studio, I’ll stick a live clip on at the end.

What song is in your head right now? Here’s the one that won’t leave mine today:

#45 — Mainstreet, Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band (Night Moves, 1976)

On the weekend, I was engaged in one of my favourite activities of late — flipping through the used bins at one of my regular record stores — when I found my way to “Night Moves,” the 1976 classic by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. It was a snip at $5.98, and I knew I couldn’t go wrong. It would have been a bargain at twice the price.

I have been a fan for a long time. His mix of blue-eyed Midwestern white boy soul and greasy southern fried rock n’ roll, combined with his ability to create vivid scenes through crisp and authentic storytelling in his songs, make him one of the true greats of American rock and roll music.

When I was thinking about which song of his to write about, I originally settled on “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man”, from his 1969 debut of the same name. This song is an honest to god late 60s I-don’t-give-a-fuck joyride clocking in at just over two minutes that gifted us with the line, “I ain’t good looking / but you know I ain’t shy / ain’t afraid to look a girl / in the eye.”

How do you top it when your career comes out of the blocks with that kind of raw and unabashed attitude in full swing? As it turns out, in many ways and many times over.

By the time “Night Moves” — his first with the Silver Bullet Band — came out, Seger had made three records with the Bob Seger System and then five more as a solo artist. He was a known quantity by the middle of the decade, but this album really put him over the top as an immensely popular singer-songwriter-performer at a time when the field was already strewn with them.

When I got the record home, I skipped past the well-worn grooves of the title track, as well as the opener, “Rock and Roll Never Forgets,” and started with side 2, which features Mainstreet as the second track sandwiched by “Sunspot” and then “Come to Poppa,” both of which are far less introspective and more in your face songs to the one in question here.

Mainstreet gets right to the point, with the lone plaintive guitar layered on top of rambling piano chords. The riff is iconic and evokes the melancholy of a late night when you are still out but heading home, maybe stopping on the street for a last cigarette while you close your eyes, contemplating the lonely place that is your life.

I’ll add here that the guitar, played by Pete Carr, is replaced in live shows by either a saxophone or a clarinet. It’s neither here nor there to me since they all give me shivers when I hear these notes.

The lyrics are a sweet but sad memory of Seger in his young life, growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He’s just discovering things as a quiet kid there. “Night Moves” — the song — goes into further depth on his own awakening in those early years.

He finds himself no longer a boy, but not yet a man, hanging around on a corner with a club or pool hall. The best he could do at that point was stand outside and look in and listen to the music coming from it, thinking that would be pretty cool to be a part of. The confidence to actually go in, never mind speaking to a dancer that he admired from afar, would come later.

“I remember standin’ on the corner at midnight

Tryin’ to get my courage up

There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown

Loved to watch her do her stuff”

A frequent character in Seger’s lyrics was the guy who couldn’t quite get it together or figure it out. He had all the tools but no toolbox. And sometimes that guy cared about that, sometimes he let it worry him, but most times he was just lost in his own thoughts. He was a beautiful loser — not by accident, the title of his 1975 album right before “Night Moves.”

“Unlike all the other ladies

She looked so young and sweet

As she made her alone down that empty street

Down on mainstreet”

What is this woman doing in this place? She was different from the rest of them, far too good for this fate. She was also a beautiful loser. If only they could find each other. If only she’d ever notice him. Then everything would make sense.

Whatever happened to her? Did she ever get out of that bar? Did she ever get out of Ann Arbor? He did, but later in life, he can’t help but think back to the feeling of it all. There was a sadness then, but now the memory is a way for him to reconnect with the life he left behind there.

“Sometimes even now

When I’m feelin’ lonely and beat

I drift back in time and I find my feet

Down on mainstreet”

The song moves towards the climax through the guitar solo from 2:06 to 2:32 through the organ-backed last verse, and this leads to the dramatic finish at 2:58 as Seger takes his voice up an octave to soulfully get across the yearning and longing he felt in those days.

The finish lets us down easily in a way that the dancer probably wouldn’t have. If he’d ever have been able to do more than just “watch her walk on past.”

Here he is in a live performance in Maryland in 1980. The quality of the video is grainy, but the quality of the song shines through.

If you have made it this far, it will occur to you if this is #45 in this series, then there must be 43 previous ones. This is a correct assumption, and here I will link #44. At the bottom of it, you will find a link to #43, and at the bottom of that, you can — if you so choose — be taken to #42. This ingenious system that I thought up all by myself continues all the way to #1.

I really do hope that you like what you have just read. If you want unlimited access to thousands of writers, consider a subscription to Medium. It will set you back $5 a month, and if you use the link below, then I get a slice of that. I’m going to buy more Bob Seger records.