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Bob Seger released his first single in 1961 when he was 16, and even if "The Lonely One" was never heard much beyond his home town of Ann Arbor, Mich., it did send him down a rock 'n' roll road that he's still traveling.
A half-century later, at 66, Seger has a new single, a remake of Little Richard's "Hey Hey Hey Hey." The song is an unreleased bonus track from Seger's new best-of compilation, "Ultimate Hits: Rock and Roll Never Forgets," a title that hints at the dynamic that keeps sending him back into the studio and on tour.
Seger was almost 31 when he wrote "Rock and Roll Never Forgets," and he was no doubt thinking back to his first single when he sang, "So now sweet sixteen's turned thirty-one / you get to feelin' weary when the workday's done." He had been playing music full time for 13 years and had little to show for it. The hopes of his 20s had collided with the struggle to pay the bills in his 30s. But Seger's song suggested those hopes could be revived by music. A song by Chuck Berry or Little Richard, he implied, was not just an echo of youthful feeling but a well of optimism that one could draw from again and again. "If you're in a fix," he sang, "come back, baby, rock and roll never forgets."
"I wrote that song when we were working on the 'Live Bullet' and 'Night Moves' albums at the same time," Seger says by phone from the road in Florida. "I'd done 13 years of clubs, a bazillion gigs a year, clearing about $6,000 a year. I didn't know what the future was going to be; I didn't know if I was going to be able to keep doing it. But when I wrote 'Rock and Roll Never Forgets,' I knew my feeling for rock-and-roll was never going away.
"There's a Tom Waits song that he wrote with Keith Richards, 'That Feel,' that I've been meaning to record. It has that same message, that once you have that feeling, it never leaves you."
"Rock and Roll Never Forgets" wasn't one of Seger's biggest hits, but better than any other song, it articulated the theme running through his best music: the struggle to keep youthful optimism alive in the face of adult disappointments.
"A key song for me around that era was Kris Kristofferson's 'Me and Bobby McGee,' " Seger says. "He was looking back at his youth and telling a narrative, and that song just killed me. It struck such a chord with me that I saw there was a different way to write. I knew I had to go deeper. So I finally insisted on having the time to sit down and write."
From 1976 through 1982, Seger succeeded artistically and commercially, releasing such hits as "Night Moves," "Mainstreet" and "Against the Wind." Perhaps the best album from that time was his most underrated, 1982's "The Distance," which delved into adult issues most successfully. It also included Seger's first venture into country music, a cover of Rodney Crowell's "Shame on the Moon." That track was his most Springsteenish recording, with Springsteen pianist Roy Bittan contributing to the sessions, as well as Bonnie Raitt and Glenn Frey.
"The producer on 'The Distance' was Jimmy Iovine, who had been working with Tom Petty, because I was trying to get a really big sound for those songs," Seger says. "Jimmy and I would hang out at an Italian restaurant up on Mulholland Drive. One night Bruce Springsteen rolled up in his car, an old Chevy I think, after driving all the way from New Jersey. He was working on 'Born in the U.S.A.' He played me those tracks, and I played him 'The Distance.' He really loved 'Little Victories' and 'Even Now.' He played me 'I'm on Fire,' and I told him, 'Bruce, that's the shortest bridge in history; it's just one line.' By now, it's 2 in the morning, and we're laughing so much that the neighbors complained. We had to drive around in his car to listen to the rest of it."
After that seven-year winning streak, Seger slowed down, releasing albums less frequently and putting his career on hold from 1986 to 1989 to care for his mother, who was dying of emphysema. When he tried to reboot his career, it was hard to recapture the knack. It wasn't that rock 'n' roll had forgotten, but its memory had dimmed.
"I saw this show about Shakespeare the other night," he says, "and a critic said, 'An artist's worst enemy is his history.' I had been multiplatinum for seven years, and I felt like I was locked in a cage a bit. For the next 10 years, I tried very hard not to write songs like those '70s hits.
"After a while, though, and I think Dylan would agree with me, those songs you wrote when you were young may be your best," says Seger, who nevertheless is working on an album to be released next year. "If that's what people want to hear, that's what you have to play. You just try to play them the best you can."