Bob Seger “The Fire Inside”
Want to know how good Seger is when he’s good? In 1984, my Dad would drive to Edgewood Country Club in a red Jaguar convertible, pink polo shirt, collar popped, and howl “Baby, I’m not a number. I’m a man!” Bob Seger has a Springsteen-esque ability to make a nouveau riche, suburbanite with a sports car and a second home feel like a Midwest factory man. In that convertible, with his golf clubs in the trunk, I’m certain my Dad felt like a bearded second keyboardist in the “Silver Bullet Band,” holding up Seger’s hand in triumph as a frenzied Silverdome crowd sweats out their orgasm.
A big part of this trick is his voice, one for the most honest and compelling instruments in the history of Rock music. But there’s also this other trick he does in some of his best songs, where he basically lets two chords of guitar syncopate to a simple beat, repeating themselves, gradually building momentum and tension until you want him to howl to just break the repetition. And you know what Seger does, then? He fucking howls. He gives you what you want. That trick is a big part of what makes “Night Moves,” “Hollywood Nights” and “Against The Wind” almost impossible to resist. It’s an indefensible trick. It’s like Kareem’s sky hook.
When Drew Brees throws the ball the Michael Thomas on a curl route, his completion percentage is something like 95% and he averages twelve yards per completion. I’ve often wondered why they don’t just run that play fifty percent of the time. Why not sixty percent? The answer to this question lies somewhere in Bob Seger’s fourteenth studio album, “The Fire Inside.” Turns out, sometimes even perfect plays fail and indefensible patterns get a little boring.
Released in 1991, “The Fire Inside” was Seger’s first studio album since 1986’s “Like a Rock,” which was itself a bit of a disappointment. Outside of his Midwest home, it was fair to wonder how relevant Seger was in the waning days of Hair Metal. So much had changed since his late seventies and early eighties heyday. Among them was his voice, which, while still powerful and singular, sounded ten percent less fluid and ten percent more tired. Bob Seger was forty five when he made this album. Middle age comes for all of us who are lucky to make it. It promises us that it will replace our physical regression with wisdom. But it also seems to break that promise all the time. Like in the case of Bob Seger.
Seger is a legend of the road. When you picture him, you picture him live, bearded and possibly in flared denim jeans. He wrote “Turn The Page,” the only song about touring that even matters. He had miles and miles on him before he was thirty. And then, that year, with “Night Moves,” he became a Rock star. His five year run from “Beautiful Loser” to “Against the Wind” is unassailable. He would have more hits and more hit records after 1980, but in retrospect, Bob Seger, the songwriter, had run out of gas around the time he was thirty five. The studio albums became more sporadic and erratic. We continue to love him because he was the working man, the good guy, the team player, the road warrior. But, in retrospect, we were loving the idea, the nostalgia and the signifier; not the new songs or new albums.
“The Fire Inside” is not terrible in any way. It’s like when Kareem’s percentage on the sky hook would go from 60% down to 49%. It’s respectable. But it’s also kind of sad to see something that great break down. The two “hits” from the album were “Take a Chance” and the title track. The former uses the old Seger trick. It just repeats the same basic chords and refrain, delivered by the underdog with that voice, until it howls at the moon when the tension has properly built up. The song “The Fire Inside” rolls along, with Roy Bittan’s excellent piano. The fire builds and builds and, as you’d guess, it burns up until Seger has nothing left to give. It’s a good one.
Bob Seger’s voice is so good -- even in its attenuated form -- that you almost always want to like his songs. It’s as though when the songs start you are rooting for them. But, sadly, most of these songs on “The Fire Inside” are boring mid-temp plodders (“The Real Love”) or ballads (“Always in my Heart”) that just make you remember how perfect “We’ve Got Tonight” was in 1978. There are two serviceable Tom Waits covers and a couple nice Country songs, including the “The Long Way Home” which would have made a great Country radio single twenty years earlier.
The album’s outlier, and low point, is “The Mountain,” an uninteresting, heavy rocker that seems vaguely interested in Metal but less interested in tune or structure. It goes on for nearly seven minutes. I disliked all seven minutes. But, also, when it was over I thought, “what a voice.” I also thought that if Chris Stapleton released that song and this album, that the world would lose its mind with excitement and accolade.
The thing is, Chris Stapleton — great as he may be — never had the sky hook. And Bob Seger did.