Hang Left out of Nutbush

By JAY COCKS

Comin' right at'cha. No curves, and short on the fancy moves. Just bedrock rock 'n' roll, the kind of good-natured badass music that keeps you dancing. It can get you a little teary, and get the blood jumping too, like maybe you ought to tear up a couple of seats and pass them up onstage to Bob Seger.

For a time, Seger was Detroit's best-kept secret, a rocker who commanded a fanatic home-town following but kept missing a big national break. He had a national hit single in 1969 with his hard-driving Ramblin 'Gamblin 'Man, but trouble with his band kept him from touring to promote it properly. By the time he had finished his third album, Seger, with half a dozen local hits behind him, was back to living on $7,000 a year.

He hung in, though, barnstorming through the Midwest. In 1974 he came up with a ballad called Beautiful Loser that sounded bold and bitter and pretty personal: "He's always willing to be second best/ A perfect lodger, a perfect guest/ Beautiful loser, read it on the wall/ And realize, you just don't need it all."

That song became the title cut on a well-reviewed album, which was followed by Live Bullet, a kinetic concert set that went platinum and paved the way for last year's Night Moves, a smash album that sold over 2 million copies and contained one of the most haunting of all contemporary songs, a fond, sexy memory of adolescent love:

Out in the back seat of my '60

Chevy Workin 'on mysteries without any clues

Workin 'on our night moves Trying to make some front page

drive-in news Workin 'on our night moves in the

summertime In the sweet summertime.

That song made Bob Seger a national star after a decade of hard traveling. Now he has a fine new record, Stranger in Town, out just a few weeks and already following an unerring trajectory to the headier regions of the charts. It should prove that this particular local boy is not only a national star but something of a vital natural resource.

There is no slick stuff about Seger, not on the records and not in concert. His brown hair flows over the collars of modified Elizabethan shirts, stage gear long out of favor. The music has no labyrinthine lyrics or arcane chord changes. Seger still opens his show with Tina Turner's good-humored, hard-rocker Nutbush City Limits, and the song sets the tone for what follows: plain good times.

For all the powerhouse energy, there is an underlying melancholy in some of Seger's new music, which may be one reason he is writing more ballads these days. "Writing rock is too limiting," he says. "I have ten times as much freedom writing ballads." Stranger in Town contains some exemplary rockers, but it is the ballads that set off the lasting echoes. The Famous Final Scene at first appears to be about the end of a romance ("Think in terms of bridges burned/ Think of seasons that must end"), but could also be about the closing circle of a career or a life. The last verse of Night Moves takes the song out of teen-age memory and into a reflection on a larger ending:

Ain 't it funny how the night moves When you just don't seem to have

as much to lose Strange how the night moves With autumn closing in.

For all the current of sadness that runs through his music, Seger remains a modest, ebullient figure who still drives him self home from local concerts in a red BMW. A working-class kid from Ann Arbor, Seger lives with his steady girl in a modest ranch house 50 miles from Detroit. Fans have discovered the address, and "just the other night," Seger reports, "a girl tried to get into the kitchen."

This month Seger is moving, for the fourth time in two years, to a remote spot north of Detroit, vowing, "This time we will be isolated."

His recreations are modest enough: a lakefront cabin, a 36-ft. Chris-Craft and a Honda cycle, "a great bike, with a windshield, cigarette lighter and a cruise control." A somewhat more comfortable concert schedule -- just over 100 dates, cut down from the 260 Bob and the Silver Bullet Band played in 1975 -- allows time for a touch of reflection. "I'd like to be more like B.B. King, become more sophisticat ed," Seger muses. "Maybe I'll just make records after a while, write songs or produce. After all, I don't know how much longer I'm going to look like this. Probably not when I'm 40."

Just turned 33, Bob Seger already senses autumn in the air and has started to map the terrain. Funny how the night moves.

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