- Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
- Night Moves made it to #8 on the Billboard albums chart and generated three hits: “Night Moves”, “Mainstreet”, and “Rock & Roll Never Forgets”.
Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band – Night Moves (1976): Motown is of course the best-known music from the Motor City, but Detroit and the rest of Michigan has always had a hard-edged rock scene as well. Over the years, Ann Arbor-born Bob Seger developed into a classic heartland rocker: roots rock delivered in a hard-charging fashion with Seger’s raspy voice, having mostly blue-collar themes that are thoughtful and well-developed. Bob Seger first began playing music in 1961 while he was a teenager, and he later fronted the Bob Seger System and recorded as a solo artist before making it big in the mid-1970’s with the Silver Bullet Band.
It is a peculiarity of the 1970’s that a rock musician with just one Top 20 single to his name and a series of low-charting albums could have as his first major hit a double-album live set, Live Bullet (1976), which stayed on the album charts for more than three years and eventually went quadruple-Platinum. The buzz generated by Live Bullet led to the success of Night Moves, the first studio album by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band and his 10th album overall. Actually, four of the songs on Night Moves are credited to Bob Seger and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, not Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band. Night Moves made it to #8 on the Billboard albums chart and generated three hit singles: “Night Moves”, “Mainstreet”, and “Rock & Roll Never Forgets”. Other notable songs on Night Moves include “The Fire Down Below”, “Ship of Fools”, and “Come to Poppa”, one of two covers on the album. One nice touch is that Bob Seger revived the classic violet Capitol record label for Night Moves. The next five studio albums by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were all Top Ten albums, including their #1 album Against the Wind; and they generated a series of hit songs that still get a lot of radio airplay. One of the most beloved songs by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, “Old Time Rock and Roll” was selected for the Songs of the Century list in 2001; from Wikipedia: “The ‘Songs of the Century’ list is part of an education project by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scholastic, Inc. that aims to ‘promote a better understanding of America’s musical and cultural heritage’ in American schools’.” Bob Seger has had sales of an estimated 75 million records and was selected for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004.