Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
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Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
The title track from Bob and The Silver Bullet Band's '76 album -
What say you, BCB?
What say you, BCB?
Last edited by fange on 07 Sep 2018, 16:31, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
I wonder if our Bent considers Bob Seger a "hack"?
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
He dreams of 'hack'.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Diamond Dog wrote:He dreams of 'hack'.
Do go on, DD. What do you think of it as a song?
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Diamond Dog wrote:He dreams of 'hack'.
fange wrote:Do go on, DD. What do you think of it as a song?
To be honest it's pretty much the summation of what I think I dislike about that era.... but then I remember I like things like Boz Scaggs, Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan etc... so I'm not averse to that (very loose) genre*.... it's just that Bob Seger has a simply wretched voice and writes and sings stuff like it's come direct from the pages of "The American West Coast Soft Rock Guide To Music". And does that fairly poorly too.
Besides that it's fine.
* I do realise this a ridiculous, sweeping generalisation.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Fair enough.
Lord knows i'm not a huge Bob Seger fan, especially the stuff from the mid-70's onwards, but i've always loved this tune. Lyrically it's got a bit of a clumsy, cliched feel at times, while at others it nails things perfectly. (more mid-West than West Coast, though ).
I don't like the drum sound a lot, but the clarity of the production and the arrangement of the tune is fucking A-grade for me. The slow build-ups, the gentle rhythm and soul swing, the backing vocalists: there's an intangible rightness in those things and those changes here, which we've heard so many times but can still feel so alive when done right, which even Bob didn't do too often for me.
It's pure FM radio gold.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
fange wrote:It's pure FM radio gold.
That's exactly what I said!
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Diamond Dog wrote:fange wrote:It's pure FM radio gold.
That's exactly what I said!
Yeah, but i said it in a GOOD way!
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Shit.
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Yeah, it's no 'Worried Worried' is it.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
fange wrote:Yeah, it's no 'Worried Worried' is it.
It's several continents away!
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
BCB: Because we Celebrate the Bland
Matt 'interesting' Wilson wrote:So I went from looking at the "I'm a Man" riff, to showing how the rave up was popular for awhile.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Thank god for Steve Miller.
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
I wonder if our Bent considers Bob Seger a "hack"?
I was just reading the very cool article on early Seger that Muskrat posted yesterday.
"Night Moves"?
I think it's beautiful. His high watermark. Much like I said about "Lady Marmalade" recently, you can kind of imagine everyone looking at each other like "Well, I'll be damned!" at the end of the take. Great arrangement choices (piano, organ, tambourine, acoustic guitar, prominent backing vocals) that he had been building to forever and would consolidate for the remainder of the 70s.
The bridge, stop and breakdown in the middle really give it its epic feel. Such an unconventional choice, but...so right for the lyric.
Also - at some point it struck me (hearing it loudly on FM radio for the thousandth time) that the combination of analog tape and compression (and perhaps a hasty mixdown?) makes for a massively noisy patina of tape hiss when the song goes quiet in the middle. It's one of those instances where an unintended by-product becomes a musical element.
Amazing to think that he'd been around for over a decade when he finally hit with this one.
To your original question - I'm certainly a fan, but with some reservations. I've got all the albums, and...yeah, when he was good he was very good, but when he was bad...I don't think he's ever made a full length where I wouldn't be eager to skip songs (things like "Her Strut" or "Come to Poppa" are every bit as grim as their titles suggest). Seen him in concert. He's probably something of a "hack" in his less inspired moments, but...I'm not mad at him.
He's an easy target (and, for me, was just that and nothing more for decades) - seemingly shorthand for stodgy classic rock programmers/fans/etc....all of these songs about "looking back on being young" (you get the idea that he started writing these reminisces about being a teenager the day he turned 20)...on paper, it seems like something I shouldn't love, but there's some basic warmth and humanity in those records ("Mainstreet", "Still the Same", "Against the Wind", etc.) that I really respond to. Lester Bangs' contemporaneous review of 1978's Stranger in Town was an interesting perspective on the man's belated success from someone who'd been following since his more feral years...some acknowledgement that few people deserved such a breakthrough more (he'd spent a decade as an opening act for every schmuck you could name), but also some mixed feelings about the sort of soft middle age that his work had settled into.
What can I say? His vocal on something like "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" (Jesus, that fucking title tells you just how cheesy the whole enterprise is) is absolutely fantastic, but...you've really got to just "deal with" the whole package if you dig him.
I know why I like him, what I like about him, but its one of those things like...trying to explain to someone that 1973-76 era Aerosmith is the business...the case for the prosecution is difficult to refute, and you'd never strain yourself trying to proselytize. I mean, someone tells me the Doors are cheesy, I can't really argue. I sure love them, but...they aren't NOT cheesy.
(addendum) It may be a larger point I'm willing to digress into for some infinite number of paragraphs. There's some element of "letting it all hang out" that doesn't necessarily signify inherent greatness on its own, but...I'd say it's more useful and meaningful than the type of musicians/acts I've known who seemed so rigidly correct in their efforts to avoid ANY sort of potential cheesiness or naffness that they just kind of dissolve and evaporate into this void of absolute nothingness. You'd think...well, shit - if this straining to avoid X, Y and Z is how we end up in the middle of nowhere, it starts to look like as ignoble as any creative goal a person could ever have.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
I’m with Bent.
But I don’t have any Seger records. Yet.
This record was part of the furniture for most of my life and I never particularly cared for it. The tune did nothing for me, just brown in the worst way. But at some point in the last decade, I heard it again and everything changed. It’s damn near as emotional for me as “Good Time Charlie.”
I’m totally on board.
But I don’t have any Seger records. Yet.
This record was part of the furniture for most of my life and I never particularly cared for it. The tune did nothing for me, just brown in the worst way. But at some point in the last decade, I heard it again and everything changed. It’s damn near as emotional for me as “Good Time Charlie.”
I’m totally on board.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
All this talk of Bob Seger makes me wonder if the word association thread isn't the best thing about this place.
Like fast-moving clouds casting shadows against a hillside, the melody-loop shuddered with a sense of the sublime, the awful unknowable majesty of the world.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Bent Fabric wrote:I wonder if our Bent considers Bob Seger a "hack"?
I was just reading the very cool article on early Seger that Muskrat posted yesterday.
"Night Moves"?
I think it's beautiful. His high watermark. Much like I said about "Lady Marmalade" recently, you can kind of imagine everyone looking at each other like "Well, I'll be damned!" at the end of the take. Great arrangement choices (piano, organ, tambourine, acoustic guitar, prominent backing vocals) that he had been building to forever and would consolidate for the remainder of the 70s.
The bridge, stop and breakdown in the middle really give it its epic feel. Such an unconventional choice, but...so right for the lyric.
Also - at some point it struck me (hearing it loudly on FM radio for the thousandth time) that the combination of analog tape and compression (and perhaps a hasty mixdown?) makes for a massively noisy patina of tape hiss when the song goes quiet in the middle. It's one of those instances where an unintended by-product becomes a musical element.
Amazing to think that he'd been around for over a decade when he finally hit with this one.
To your original question - I'm certainly a fan, but with some reservations. I've got all the albums, and...yeah, when he was good he was very good, but when he was bad...I don't think he's ever made a full length where I wouldn't be eager to skip songs (things like "Her Strut" or "Come to Poppa" are every bit as grim as their titles suggest). Seen him in concert. He's probably something of a "hack" in his less inspired moments, but...I'm not mad at him.
He's an easy target (and, for me, was just that and nothing more for decades) - seemingly shorthand for stodgy classic rock programmers/fans/etc....all of these songs about "looking back on being young" (you get the idea that he started writing these reminisces about being a teenager the day he turned 20)...on paper, it seems like something I shouldn't love, but there's some basic warmth and humanity in those records ("Mainstreet", "Still the Same", "Against the Wind", etc.) that I really respond to. Lester Bangs' contemporaneous review of 1978's Stranger in Town was an interesting perspective on the man's belated success from someone who'd been following since his more feral years...some acknowledgement that few people deserved such a breakthrough more (he'd spent a decade as an opening act for every schmuck you could name), but also some mixed feelings about the sort of soft middle age that his work had settled into.
What can I say? His vocal on something like "Rock and Roll Never Forgets" (Jesus, that fucking title tells you just how cheesy the whole enterprise is) is absolutely fantastic, but...you've really got to just "deal with" the whole package if you dig him.
I know why I like him, what I like about him, but its one of those things like...trying to explain to someone that 1973-76 era Aerosmith is the business...the case for the prosecution is difficult to refute, and you'd never strain yourself trying to proselytize. I mean, someone tells me the Doors are cheesy, I can't really argue. I sure love them, but...they aren't NOT cheesy.
Fuck yes. Thank you.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Diamond Dog wrote:To be honest it's pretty much the summation of what I think I dislike about that era.... but then I remember I like things like Boz Scaggs, Fleetwood Mac and Steely Dan etc... so I'm not averse to that (very loose) genre*.... it's just that Bob Seger has a simply wretched voice and writes and sings stuff like it's come direct from the pages of "The American West Coast Soft Rock Guide To Music". And does that fairly poorly too.
Besides that it's fine.
* I do realise this a ridiculous, sweeping generalisation.
The fact that he most definitely can sing and has absolutely nothing to do with the "American West Coast" notwithstanding.
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Re: Bob Seger - Night Moves: yea or nay?
Yeah, as a matter of American Musical Geography, there’s almost nothing more midwestern than a Seger hit.
take5_d_shorterer wrote:If John Bonham simply didn't listen to enough Tommy Johnson or Blind Willie Mctell, that's his doing.