Uncle Bob: Seger and the Uncanny

At a karaoke bar in Southern California a man in his early 20s took to the stage and the music started. I recognized it from the first note the way you recognize that certain distant relative in public. You know, the one that’s mostly drunk, entirely Republican, and wears camouflage to do his shopping. You don’t know if you should look the other way or embrace him. It was “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger. The guy was butchering the song and no one wants to see family maimed. I off-handedly muttered something to my co-worker sitting next to me about how I was probably the only person there who could really sing Seger. “Do It.” She insisted. I pointed out that I really couldn’t sing and I was speaking more spiritually than technically and then she said something that bemused me enough to sit down and write this essay. She said, “Sing? Seger’s not a singer. He’s a fucking trucker. Get up there.” I sang “Night Moves.” I was fantastic.

She didn’t really mean Bob Seger was a trucker. What she meant was Bob Seger was trash. Just look at the cover of his albums. An old man on a motor cycle, the rising sun behind the statue of liberty, air brushed horses running over a majestic stream, and the close-up of that face—they all look like prizes won at the ring toss in the carnival held in a Kroger parking lot. And just like those carnivals, when you grow up in Michigan you cannot avoid the sounds of Seger.

He provided the soundtrack while I crawled around on brown shag carpeting in a diaper. Growing up, he was all over the airwaves. The oldies station played his first hit with the System, “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” and even the contemporary “Old Time Rock & Roll.” The top 40 station played “Like A Rock” and the classic rock stations played everything else. I probably learned the lyrics to his songs before any others.

And those lyrics are just as trashy as his album covers. “Just then I saw a young hawk flying and my soul began to rise,” is a line I would use to teach my students about failed imagery and clichéd symbolism. And when Bob Seger attempts subtlety and euphemism he fails again with lines like, “Tight pants, points hardly renown.” Only to be followed by, “with points of her own sitting way up high/ way up firm and high.” Points? The term is at once vague and bluntly specific. Who would ever describe male genitalia and breasts with such a non-poetic algebra conjuring euphemism as points? It’s not even crude enough to be macho. You’ll never hear this conversation:

“Did you see the points on that one?”

“Yeah. I’ve got some points of my own I’d like to give her.”

And “working on my night moves”? Sounds like something a junior high wrestler would come up with. It’s definitely not “making the beast with two backs” or even “knockin’ boots”–which may be my favorite sexual euphemism of all time.

So he’s not a singer; he’s not a poet. What is he? To begin, he is more than the sum of his parts. There is nothing about his music that is technically unique or innovative and reading his lyrics without the music is at times a bewildering endeavor (“Living by the sword”?). Bob Seger is not Dylan or Hendrix. He was not blessed with gifts that leave the common man baffled. Bob Seger is the common man. He is the everyman. But when Stranger in Town begins with those usual riffs, standard drumbeats and trite themes of moving west “‘cause he thought that a change would do him good,” it’s not tired; it’s familiar—like that relative in camo. We went hunting with Uncle Bob as a kid, talked about motorcycles and bows and arrows. When we got a little older, a little more educated, we were ashamed of him. Then as we aged, headed west ourselves, we realized how close we were to becoming him. In German the term is unheimlich; in English it is uncanny—the idea that something can be both familiar and foreign. And that’s what Seger is to me. He allows me to flirt with the memory of a 12-year-old-kid who went fishing and wanted a Harley and probably could have got a good job at GM when he grew up.

And that’s why I was the only one in that bar who could sing his song. My relative, Bob and I, we were up there just doing it. And we were all trash. And we are all fantastically familiar.