I don’t feel qualified to say much about Bob Seger. I know
lots of people loathe the guy, at least mildly, for cramming “Like a Rock” down
everyone’s throats in those Chevy commercials. Thus my mental image of Mr.
Seger is of a stereotypical iconic American pickup truck enthusiast – bearded,
big forearms, probably wearing a Stetson. An American man singing American
songs. Google tells me that he currently looks like a cross between Jerry
Garcia and Willie Nelson; on the LP cover to Night Moves, decades ago, he looked more like Ted Neeley in Jesus Christ Superstar. I know he’s from
Detroit, which perhaps motivated the Chevy thing.
Shortly before my senior year of college, I got heavily into
vinyl. From Tears for Fears to Creedence, oldies and pop radio had soundtracked
my life; now, hearing a needle drop onto uninterrupted analog signal made the
drums snap and the guitars shimmer in unheard dimensions. Night Moves was one of the albums I picked up my senior year,
namely because I recognized “Sunspot Baby” – a strange tale of a woman stealing
the narrator’s credit cards and treating herself to a tropical getaway. Women
and money: key themes in pop music.*
I once decided that all songs were either about having something or wanting something. I’m not alone in these sweeping statements; one of my favorites comes from Roger Bobo, LA Philharmonic tuba player, who insists there are only two kinds of songs: love songs and pirate songs. Between these two oversimplifications we can cover pretty much every possible combination, based on which type of “booty” the singer has or misses.
Although the old trilogy goes “wine, women, and song”, the
new trilogy is “bitches, money, and trees” – music and money being interchangeable,
except in the case of trying to make money as a musician. For female artists
like Destiny’s Child, the relationship to money is complicated: “Bills, Bills,Bills” rebukes a man who is unwilling to spend on his woman, while “IndependentWomen” is an ode to “all the mamas who profit dollars.” (Bobo would call these
both pirate songs, and would probably put Beyonce’s “Formation” and “Diva” in
the same category.) Fergie’s humps got her man spending all his money and time;
but more relevant to Mr. Seger is Blu Cantrell’s call for ladies to punish
cheating men by taking a man’s credit card and going on a shopping spree.
In “Sunspot Baby”, we don’t get an explanation for why she’s
robbed the narrator. He can’t understand why she did him so wrong. But where an
angrier narrator in this kind of pirate song might talk about how he’s going to hunt her down and kill her
(especially if it’s an old dark country song), Mr. Seger says he wants to
“catch up with her sometime, show her a real good time.” This woman has wrecked
his credit and his heart, and he still wants her! What power she has over him!
In the Bible story of Samson, a mighty warrior is ultimately seduced into
revealing his secret to a woman who betrays him and takes his strength. The tale includes a riddle of “What is stronger than a lion? What is sweeter than
honey?” and ought to be answered with “A woman.”
In the battle of the sexes, a man’s protests about the pressure on them and how women have it easy are met with hard facts from women
about sexual violence and 75% pay and being assumed to be stupid and expected
to be pretty. (If only there was some thought process to challenge all these
gender roles at once.) I dive into grad school level conversations about this,
but also enjoy ridiculous movies like White Chicks or songs like “Sunspot Baby” because they show how the
average human really feels about these things. In the world of “Sunspot Baby”,
she tried to seize power by taking his money, but he doesn't miss the money: he misses her. Is he a player who admires someone who can play him?
The next album track “Main Street” is probably my favorite Seger
song, and not just because my four-stoplight campus town was centered around
Main Street and I got the vinyl when senior year was wrapping up and the lead
guitar makes me sad, but because of the narrator trying to step out of his shyness
and only coming off as creepy.
The narrator of “Main Street” reminisces about standing on
the corner, trying to get his courage up. He’s watching a dancing girl through
a window (a stripper? Or just a regular bar fly?) but doesn’t muster the courage
to talk to her. He even watches her making her way alone down that empty street,
which seems like a huge feminist red flag – she could be walking to her car
with her key in a raptor claw and a can of mace (or her concealed carry
sidearm), fearing for her safety, and the last thing she wants is to be
approached by the narrator, no matter how romantic he may be. What's sad is that the narrator has no idea. He’s simply trying to get his courage up and
step out of his shell.
I like this song not just because the narrator doesn’t know
he’s clueless – a kind of dramatic irony – but because I too have been
clueless. I can’t even count how many times I’ve been shy or hesitant or
wanting to play it safe and have actually come off worse for it. It’s easy to be
creepy because of bad attitudes about people – but it’s also easy to be creepy
on accident. The struggle is real and the story is real. In scholarship,
there’s a “criterion of embarrassment”, which basically says that information
unflattering to the author is likely to be true, because it would have been
left out for being embarrassing, if not for it having to be included for being
true. Seger’s story is true.
The song ends with the narrator looking back on these days and
thinking that, now, when he feels lonely and beat, he drifts back in time and
finds his feet. I’m not sure how the memory of the dancer is supposed to
inspire him. Maybe he thinks, “I’ve come a long way since yesterday.” Maybe he
feels the need to offer repentance at the shrine of Dworkin and Steinem. Maybe
he thinks, “Wow, I was a clueless chump, and the shyness that stopped me is never stopping me again.”
Or maybe the narrator simply freezes in his mind the image
of him frozen, and the dancer – a beautiful, wordless tableau, like the
haunting guitar solo or the yell at the end of the song, like the way the
lights mixed with the train tracks on my own Main Street – because something
abstract and beautiful is the best way to capture, and ultimately work to make
sense of, far more complicated facts.
