- The Seger File
- An unofficial web site about the music of Bob Seger
- This page last udated May 1998
- Written and edited by Scott Sparling
- sparling@segerfile.com
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The
Full
Contents
In March of 1974, I
drove from Yellow Springs, Ohio to St. Paul, Minnesota to
see the woman I hoped would become my girlfriend. It was
a good long drive in my '61 Valiant, and when I arrived,
dog-tired but hopeful, I discovered she was leaving. Her
father was ill and she had to fly home. As minor
consolation, she said I could stay in her dorm room for a
day or two, since I had made such a long trip. So I spent three lonely
days there. Three days with nothing to do in a city where
I didn't know anyone. It took about that long to get my
spirit good and flat, like roadkill. On the fourth day, I
got back in my Valiant and drove to my parents' house in
Jackson, Michigan -- my hometown, also known as
Snailsville, the Bermuda Triangle of the Soul. (The same
town where Seger played backup for worn out strippers in
the mid-'60s.) It was a dismal way to
spend spring break. But I had nowhere else to go, so I
went home. And there, in a
plasticized mall, in a mindless no-character franchise
record store where everything including your soul was
engineered to wipe clean with a damp cloth, my hand lit
for the first time on Seven. As a new and unexpected
Seger album it was a treasure all by itself -- a treasure
with the power to restore my interest in life and
possibly reverse all the bad karma I'd been enduring. All
I had to do was lay my money down and pick it up, so to
speak. But first I turned it over. When I did, a wave of
energy hit me like a freight. There, covering most of the
back cover, was a photo I had taken of Seger at the Primo
Showbar in Ann Arbor a year earlier -- the same photo I
had handed him once between sets. My name was in the
credits. Welcome, the photo
said, back to the world. Welcome back to a place
where wondrous and beautiful things can happen. And
welcome to some very fine rock and roll. How this all came to
pass, and how, twenty years later, Punch paid me $200 for
the photo, will be covered in an update featuring all the
details, other shots from the Primo and nothing else
about my ex-girlfriend.
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