yeah motherfuckers it's another defend the indefensible, and this time it's BOB SEGAR

Add to that the mental picture of Tom Cruise dancing poorly in tighty-whities and I think that no amount of good-to-excellent radio hits can elevate him above "indefensible".

(and anyway, i'm the motherfucker who wants to throw every leonard cohen record on a fire and got screamed at for saying so -- so i'm used to having people turn their noses up at my tastes anyway.)

"Persecution Smith", "East Side StorY" <"Back in '72" "Rosalie", "Heavy Music", "Hollywood Nights", " "UMC", "Looking Back" yadda yadda yadda ... twenty or more songs that the knee-jerkers can suck on.

Stranger in Town has great stuff on it. Forget "Old Time Rock and Roll," if you feel you need to, and focus on "Hollywood Nights," "Still the Same," "Feel Like a Number," and "The Famous Final Scene." And maybe "We've Got Tonight," though the lyric is a little treacly. Still, a perfectly defensible album.

Well, me for one!

"You look like a commie and might be a member
so get out of Denver ... "

dave q you don't like "turn the page"?! oh man that's a great song!! also if you'd've killed the guy after that → no "hollywood nights" etc!

But one thing I like about Seger is that he pretty much disappeared. Am I missing it or has he been out trolling state fairs with the Styx/Journey types? Granted, he barely needed to work before he sold "Like A Rock" to Chevy, but now he's very much made of money.

He's written a handful of great songs. He's written another handful of very good songs. Fuck all you hatas.

---------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, Seger was great. Way better than the MC5. But never mind. (The only music question I REALLY care about: How come all his early Last Heard/Seger System-era (i.e.: pre Silver Bullet) garage punk classics -- "Looking Back," "Lucifer," "Back in '72," "2 + 2 = ?," "Heavy Music," "Get Out of Denver," "Rosalie," "East Side Story," "Persecution Smith," "U.M.C.," "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man", "Santa's Got a Brand New Bag," "Ballad of the Yellow Beret," etc. -- have never been compiled? Not even as a Japanese bootleg or whatever? And with all the obscure old talentless twerps post-punks and indie idiots have embraced over the past quarter century, how come they've never embraced Bob, one of the great punk rock singers and songwriters in history? It makes no fucking sense at all to me.)
-- chuck (cedd...), March 5th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But Bob exists in the collective consciousness for only three reasons these days -- that Tom Cruise mime sequence in Risky Business, the Ford truck ad song and being covered by Metallica. Therefore he is all too easily overlooked.
-- Ned Raggett (ne...), March 5th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yeah, I know. But the collective consciousness can be changed; lots of reissues have been about *changing* perceptions. And what's weird is that Seger has a huge, already existing audience for such a reissue. Certainly it'd be more marketable than, I dunno, Os Mutantes or Gary Wilson or Faust or White Witch, right? I assume there are some *legal* reasons the stuff never got reissued on Rhino or wherever, but I still don't see how that would prevent imports or bootlegs -- in fact, given the potential market, you'd think it would *inspire* them! (By the way, his Silver Bullet stuff through 1978 is mostly worth owning, too -- *Night Moves* and *Stranger in Town* are amazing albums. And he even had a couple good tracks in the '80s. But his early stuff is more punk rock than Brian Wilson or Nick Drake or Esquivel or Scott Walker will ever be, and nobody seems to care!)
-- chuck (cedd...), March 5th, 2003.

-- chuck (cedd...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

And oh yeah, I GUARANTEE Kid Rock (who has been known to do a "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man'/"American Band"/"Sister Anne"/"Strangehold" medley in live shows) has heard the early Bob songs mentioned above.
-- chuck (cedd...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cool - didn't see that earlier discussion or I would've jumped in. I have seen cd bootlegs of the early stuff, and there is at least one legit Hideout records comp out there (with tracks produced by Seger), but yeah he needs to let this stuff be made available.
Chuck, you heard "2+2=?", "East Side Story" and "Heavy Music" on the WRIF late 70's / early 80's didn't you? Tell me I'm not crazy here.

Seger is like Vernors is like Woodward Ave. Coney Islands.

-- Mr. Diamond (electrifyingmoj...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

as mentioned above, a lot of those early seger songs were compiled on the "Best of Hideout Records" comp - but good luck finding that
-- Fritz Wollner (fritzwollner5...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

there's a mail order address for it here: http://www.psychotronic.com/ioam/hideout_records.htm but it may well be out of date
-- Fritz Wollner (fritzwollner5...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>Chuck, you heard "2+2=?", "East Side Story" and "Heavy Music" on the WRIF late 70's / early 80's didn't you? Tell me I'm not crazy here.<<
Absolutely. (Unless it was WABX or WWWW. All three, probably.)

I vaguely recall seeing, like, 40 copies of a vinyl bootleg early Seger comp (same label as *Seeds and Stems* or *Michigan Brand Nuggets*, I think) at Sam's Jam's in Ferndale once in the mid-'80s; it cost around $16, and I was a cheapskate and didn't buy it, which I regret more than any other album non-purchase in my life. I never saw it again, and have never seen any early Seger compns, vinyl or CD, bootleg or legit, in person or on line, since. And I've definitely looked, though of course that doesn't mean they don't exist.

-- chuck (cedd...), April 29th, 2003.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Which isn't to say I haven't seen individual tracks, like those Hideout ones, compiled on various-artist collections here and there. But he needs his OWN comp. And I need it to take to my desert island!)
-- chuck (cedd...), April 29th, 2003.

Although some of the tracks Chuck mentions are still unknown to me, so perhaps that's where the gold lies.

http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dre200/e280/e28073z86nt.jpg
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drd200/d219/d21954hv102.jpg
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drd100/d107/d10762h2762.jpg
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drc400/c468/c468992eno1.jpg
http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/dre900/e960/e96000oehi4.jpg

Anyway, uh .. hey amateurist, Beautiful Loser is great! It has some of his best songs - "Beautiful Loser", "Travellin' Man" and "Katmandu". But actually those first two are probably best heard in the live medley on Live Bullet - really one of the best live rock albums ever, no joke. It has great forward momentum throughout the whole thing, good playing, a real sense of artist/audience interaction. That Brand New Morning record is really bad though. It's basically just him alone, playing these really bathetic ballads.

Just has "Ramblin Gamblin Man" and "2+2=?", if I remember right. Hardly near enough to judge his work. And I'm not sure what putting those album covers on line was supposed to mean (um...you don't like his haircut??), but again, *Stranger In Town* is great. *Beautiful Loser* has its title cut, Katmandu, Nutbush City Limits, + Travelin' Man, so I don't get how that's "indefensible", either. So here's the real question: Is there anybody indie rockers underrate MORE than Bob?

All I was saying is that I like the later stuff (yes, including the songs you just listed) better than the '68-'69 stuff I've heard, but I'm prepared to like the even earlier stuff even more if I ever have a chance to hear it.

Pretty much, and when it comes to the difference between Ford/Seger and Nike/Iggy, just look at the comparative commercials -- the latter is all about the hip and now (and is explicitly if simplistically multicultural, in that it assumes that there are African Americans as well as Caucasian Americans) whereas most of the Ford ads, if they were just considered visually, are all Reagan/'morning in America' looking-backward hoohah, I seem to recall.

(if you follow me ...)

btw, my sister Alex, who's now 17, used to think he was singing "Lock 'Er Up" in the commercial, which is kind of what it sounds like, actually.

also, Brian = totally OTM!

Seger seems kind of Neil Young-like in that his politics vacillate according to what side of the bed he gets up on. Just a couple years before he recorded the anti-war "2+2=?", he had recorded "Ballad of the Yellow Beret" - an anti-draft-dodger rant that starts out with him saying "This is a protest song against protesters" (!!)

TONIGHT: SEX PISTOLS
TOMORROW: MERLE HAGGARD

*activate your Typical Patrin Hyperbole Meters

I got the CD within 3 days of ordering. Pretty damn decent sound quality. And holy shit if Heavy Music isn't/aren't the greatest song/s ever. Persecution Smith = close second (and the only remotely clever anti-left/right peon he wrote, methinks)

Kate & Anna McGarrigle covering "You’ll Accomp'ny Me" (in French!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEaXa3KMDzY

(whoops...misspelled his name in the lookup)

accursed thread

just as well it misspelled the subject

TS Bob Segar vs Bob Mould's Sugar