Bob Seger's SEVEN album, from 1974

 SEVEN -Bob Seger (Reprise)

Bob Seger's SEVEN album is an uncommonly mature rock and roll statement in a scene where the rule of thumb dictates that rockers must be public idiots for audience consumption. Seger doesn't wear funny hats, tight pants showing the width of his rig, or bandy about the stage gasping and wheezing, acting like the power of the music has possessed his soul. No, Seger is content to sing his hard rock straight forward, letting the rough-edged intensity of the music supply its own excitement. And Seger is a singer of such manic power as to lay to rest forever all the inept rabble-rousing Slade, Foghat and Humble Pie indulge in. Seger has his finger on the rock and roll pulse—beat. "Get Out of Denver “opens the album, a Chuck Berry chop done the way Berry meant it—fast, intense and over with, quick. The truck driver as dope smuggler theme makes a believable image of a Semi hauling ass down a Midwest highway from a slew of county sheriff’s cars. "Need Ya" is a great lift from the Faces' "It's All Over Now." Seger's voice is breathless and hoarse, laden with an obvious base desire while some slippery slide guitar from Jim McCarty riffs under it. "School Teacher" is the weak link in the album's progression. Neither the rapid redundancy nor Seger's all stops pulled grate manage to salvage this nothing exercise.

Fortunately, this fluke is one of a kind, and everything that follows is an ecstatic upward climb. "UMC (Upper Middle Class)" smacks of brilliance. Brandishing a mocking Mel Torme blues scamper while fine-tuning a witty, Mose Allison outlay of mid-century irony, Seger sings a song about wanting to be rich. Why not? One can sing the blues convincingly if one's led a wretched life to back up bragging about hard times. But who sings about wanting to be poor? Seger at once lampoons his white culture and expresses a universal aspiration anyone with an eye for better things can identify with. "Seen A Lot Floors" is a great rock and roll touring song, a terse blues grunt whose matter of fact lyrical sparseness amplifies its meaning. "Seen a lot of flooooors....Seen a lot of dooooors " shouts Seger, letting the words drop into an abyss of ennui and low level dread, tangibly described.

The details of toad life—the motels, the groupies, the larger than humanly tolerable concert halls— all become an amorphous drug drenched blur. A Jim McCarty solo starting with a ruthlessly stretched harmonic enters, followed by a lazily drawled sax solo, returning bluntly to Seger's bone-tired voice. Indicative maybe that after a while even the music ceases to have meaning, that it becomes part of the systemized routine that earns the artist a living. "Floors" is great. "20 Years from Now" is the only let up in the brisk pacing of SEVEN; it's a mawkish love song crammed to the gills with Van Morrison phrasing. But the song is worth the listening effort, if only to hear Seger squeeze his words in an effective emulation of Otis Redding.

The last song, "All Your Love," again cops from the Faces. The guitar chords are chunky, metallic without approaching heavy metal, and Seger's phrasing cleanly takes from Rod Stewart without once suggesting imitation. Bob Seger is his own man, able to take from any number of mainstream rock sources and use them to his own best advantage SEVEN fires no innovating trails in the history of rock and roll, but at least it's honest, which is more than you have a right to expect from a scene dominated with disposable personas.

Bob Seger v Bruce Springsteen

Why Bob Seger isn't as highly praised as Springsteen is worth asking, and it comes down to something as shallow as Springsteen being the cuter of the two. In areas where we all say it counts--talent--Seger has it over Springsteen by considerable margins; he's a far better singer (one of the most underrated in rock-and-roll), and he's a superior songwriter. It's not as if Seger hasn't had his dalliances with fads and pretentiousness because I have enough old Seger albums to testify that his worst music is as misguided as the grimmest rock music ever released. But he's been a trouper, a constant tour-dog, a tireless professional and eternal journeyman who has always added more tricks and licks to his repertoire. The longer he played, the better his singing and songwriting chops became. Springsteen isn't a phony by any standard, and there's something likable about the man, although I think his music is so much less than rock critics find it. 

His lyrics are occasionally an interesting stew of impressions that are more muddle than the atmosphere, or even mood. For all his musical fanfare, for all his verbosity and blaring dynamics, Springsteen has always seemed like someone who was at the brink of saying something memorable, only to choke. Seger, in mid-career, dropped any ambition he had to become the next Dylan and Beatles and developed a lyric style as natural and sweetly clear-eyed as anything Chuck Berry himself could have worked out. Seger continued to suffer from lapses of taste and inspiration--remember that he never transcended his journeyman status--and produced some albums where he was witlessly trying to rewrite "Night Moves" over and over, proving nothing other than extended bouts of introspection didn't serve Seger well at all as a songwriter. It's not unfair to say that even with his aggravatingly erratic output, the best of Seger's work in a spotty career surpasses Springsteen's consistently middle-brow musings.

Seger did write "Hollywood Nights" in what sounds like a deliberate attempt to write in Springsteen's drive-all-night style, and it displays Seger's fatal flaw of trying to write in a voice besides his own. It sounds like The Boss and likewise sounds crammed with so much pop-culture mythos it winds up being mush-mouthed like Springsteen's grander attempts at significance.

Springsteen, though, has fared better when he pares back his excess and gives us some tub-thumping rock and roll; "Born in the USA" is a great song because it works on a strong backbone of a relentless beat, and The Boss sounds righteously pissed off; "Seger's epochal "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" is the model for this, and I know other Seger songs --"East Side Story", "Persecution Smith", "2+2=?"--were on Springsteen's mind when it came time for him to write a song that was topical and pissed off. Seger hasn't been the most consistent songwriter of all time, but his best work--and there's a lot of it-- easily bests Springsteen's work for economy, punch, grit. Seger has often equaled the genius of rock and rolls masters Chuck Berry and John Fogarty in writing what constitutes the life pulse of rock; short songs, spiked and fine-tuned rage in the lyrics, and credible, riveting beats to make the two or three minutes memorable, cathartic, and infinitely re-playable. Seger's strength as a lyricist is that he's not introspective and that what he has to say isn't hindered with club-fingered attempts at metaphor;unfortunately, Seger attempts poetry repeatedly, with laughable results, but his ability to recover these gaffes places him over Springsteen, who has not reined in his grating habits of poet-speak. Bruce takes too many paragraphs to say "ouch".

Each of these songs, rockers, and ballads, are notable for their lack of padding, filigree musically--there are no footprints of "grand music" here--and lyrically they are keen examples of the sort of lyrics Seger writes best and straight talk, unmarred by any reach for metaphysical density, in a voice that is something similar to what William Carlos Williams had in mind when he spoke of the American voice. Again, I've already spoken to Seger's faults and inconsistencies as an artist (bloat and bad poesy have visited his muse more often than I care to admit). But he's been superb much more of the time in his four-decade career, and his best work trumps Springsteen's output, which to me is the essence of poltroon mongering.

Where the trend had been for codgerly rock stars to give their careers, a third act with the issuing of albums wherein they croak their way to The Great American Songbook, graying Blue-Collar Hero Bruce Springsteen goes the other way and releases an album of old folk songs. The search for authenticity continues, and the plain-spoken Springsteen--remember when each of his lyrics were interminable operas of an intemperate desire?--sings it plainly, clearly, simply. No swelling melodies here, no subtle segues or seducing counterpoint. The new folk album, some have said, is suitable for Bruce, as he was never a great melodist anyway when he was doing the songwriting. I'm not a considerable fan of The Boss--it takes too much work to reissue the same objections, and after twenty-something years of bitching and groaning, I'm willing to maintain he's done music I've liked without embarrassment. Bruce Springsteen isn't Duke Ellington or even Burt Bacharach as a melody-drunk composer, but that was never the point of his work since his sound is big, brash and in-your-face rather than, catchy, seductive or otherwise subdued with subtler chord selection. His music is equal parts rhythm and blues, Phil Spector, British Invasion and folk rock, with generous portions of Kerouac, Dylan and a wee tram of Whitman stirred into the mix. For the blue-collar exhorting he does about love, death, being broke and struggling for a better future, Springsteen's melodies are exactly as they need to be; at their best, they work any of anything a popular pop-poet has done. When his work is contained and crafted, sufficiently edited, he's easily as good as Dylan as a melodist, the equal of Seger, the equal of John Lennon. I have found too much of his music overworked, grandiose and cluttered with the kind of business indicative of someone who hasn't found the central theme of what they're writing about; we see this in poets who compose at length, leaving no trace of a parse-able idea behind them, and one can witness it as well in novelists--Franzen, D.F. Wallace--who haven't in them to cut away the excess, so the art may show. Springsteen has this problem, a habit of overwriting, and the effect in his longer, louder pieces is a little Maileresque, circa the mid to late Sixties, where he keeps preparing to say something profound and yet, the message is deferred. I prefer the punchier, grabbier, riff-based rockers he puts forth, or the terser, grainier ballads. The big band material he comes up sinks as fast as any Jethro Tull concept album has in the past. It's about songs, not the arrangements.

Springsteen singing old folk songs and protest songs interests me not, although it might be a means for him to ease into the writing of decent material for his next great period. Dylan landed into a profound late period, as did the Stones and the quizzical Neil Young. Bruce would be a dandy addition to the grand pantheon of old guys. Productivity isn't, by default, a desirable trait. Talented artists can dilute their impact and lessen the esteem they've held in with the rapid issuing of mediocre, substandard or half-baked albums. Costello and Dylan are prime examples of this, although both songwriters frequently rebound with strong albums after some artistic lagging. There's an appeal for artists who aren't rushing to release product--I am a fan of Paul Simon's solo career (not crazy about Simon and Garfunkel music, which hasn't worn well) who has released albums at a snail's pace over the last thirty-plus years; he's a careful writer, and his body of work is therefore rich with strong, moving, intelligently evolving music. His musical ideas work more often than not. We may say the same for Steely Dan, a band I've always admired for their consistent excellence in melody, production, oddball melodies and especially well-crafted lyrics. Being slow to release albums of late places Springsteen in honorable company.