He speeds up the schlock and, it still sounds like schlock. But five years is a hell of a short time between live doubles. I know they've been hit-filled-deservedly so, I once thought. Just in case you think he's "sold out" or some such. Title, concept, and follow-up single: slow song about the futility of life. Slow songs about sex and medium-rocking songs about sex contend with slow songs about love and medium-rocking songs about love. Exception: "Feel Like a Number," in which the banal critique of quantification is renewed by Seger's measured intensity. So he sounds phony at times, desperate to inject drama into run-of-the-mill material that might work in a more fluid, less fraught-with-meaning live setting. This isn't just an honest, rough-and-ready craftsman reverting to form, because he's trying to repeat an inspired, uncharacteristically precise success. Worrying about your credit rating-now that's what I call rock and roll realism.
both virtues also come across in lyrics as hard-hitting as the melodies, every one of which asserts the continuing functionality of rock and roll for "sweet sixteens turned thirty-one." In one of them, the singer even has his American Express card stolen by a descendant of Ronnie Hawkins's Mary Lou, if not Mary Lou herself.
The riffs that identify each of these nine songs comprise a working lexicon of the Berry-Stones tradition, and you've heard them many times before in fact, that may be the point, because Seger and his musicians reanimate every one with their persistence and conviction.
But this album is a journeyman's apotheosis. I've never had much truck with Seger's myth-he's always struck me as a worn if well-schooled rock and roll journeyman, good for one or two tracks a year. But I'm from New York, I see a lot of rock concerts, and even when I'm in the room it takes more than "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" and "Heavy Music" and refurbished songs from a guy's last album to get me excited. The impassioned remakes from Beautiful Loser on side one are what live doubles are supposed to be for, and this one is sparing with the cheerleading and calisthenics. Robert Christgau: CG: Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band
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