Soundtrack of Your Life: Rock 'n' Roll Never Forgets

An occasional feature in which we mark the songs of our relative youth as played over public muzak systems and beyond.  

Date: 29 July 2017, 9:05 a.m.
Place: Walking past the Broken Arrow Tap Room, Inn of the Mountain Gods near Ruidoso, N.M.
Song:  "Feel Like a Number"
Artist: Bob Seger
Irony Matrix: 3.7 out of 10

Comment: I was big into Bob Seger as a teen. It was his potent mix of muscular Detroit rock 'n' roll and his earnest, confessional lyrics that spoke to a young male still forming an emotional self and a worldview. He was a cruder, cred'er Springsteen -- maybe it was the long hair and beard. It started with Night Moves, the album and the song, released in 1976 -- alongside the other hits, the cheesy "Rock 'n' Roll Never Forgets" and the wistful "Mainstreet," and the rougher workout "The Fire Down Below"

"Live Bullet," released the same year, allowed us to experience the band live and work backward into the catalog --- the blistering Side 3 culminating in "Katmandu," the most perfect rock song I could image at that time. There were the R&B covers, "Nutbush City Limits," the epic "Let It Rock." The howling saxophones on "Turn the Page" still pierce deep to this day.

Bob hit it big by '78 with the album "Stranger in Town," barreling out of the gates with "Hollywood Nights" and including my favorite song of his, "Still the Same," and my mom's favorite wedding reception song, "Old Time Rock 'n' Roll," not to mention the prom-theme standard "We've Got Tonight."

It's that album where you'll find "Feel Like a Number" closing out Side 1. It's a working-man song that rivals anything Springsteen or Merle Haggard could crank out on their assembly lines.

Gonna cruise out of this city
Head down to the sea
Gonna shout out to the ocean
"Hey, it's me!"
And I feel like a number ...

Fed up with being just a statistic, a "spoke in a great big wheel," just another folder in a bureaucrat's file, he implores: "Dammit, I'm a man!" When I heard it earlier today, I was taking a break from an attorneys bar conference just outside Ruidoso, N.M., at a majestic golf resort that burrows into the earth as well as puffing its chest out into nature via two-story window panels that gawk out onto a view that truly looks unreal, like a massive, meticulous painting. There's an elegantly rippling man-made lake, a sea of unnatural green, a forest that you wouldn't expect to see in a desert, its furry trees crowding hills and climbing mountains in the distance.  This human-engineered spectacle was created by the Mescalero Apache Tribe on their land and dubbed, immodestly, the Inn of the Mountain Gods. Nice ring.

Bob Seger's music had a majesty to it. But by 1980, his tank was nearing empty. He was running up "Against the Wind," and his feel for middle-class angst was slowly abandoning him. The earnestness was morphing into mawkishmess. He and the Silver Bullet Band struck live gold one more time with "Nine Tonight" in 1981, but by the mid-'80s he was churning out harmless adult-contemporary fare like "You'll Accomp'ny Me" and covering John Fogerty. And what the hell does "Like a Rock" mean? Was he truly feeling like that emotionally hollow post-WWII male? And what does it mean in the context of a commercial for a Chevy pickup truck? "Yessir, she drives like a rock!" No thanks. "Like a Rock" is rote, mechanical songwriting -- the same affliction that often doomed the likes of Billy Joel and Paul McCartney in the '80s -- stone cold proficiency.

But back in the '70s, there was a raw power to Seger's music that shared DNA with the rest of the Michigan crew -- the MC5, the Stooges, even Ted Nugent ("Stranglehold"!). It must have sounded corny at the time of punk and new wave, but it never felt like a guilty pleasure, either then or now.

With "Feel Like a Number" stuck in my head, I returned to the frigid Grand Ballroom for the remainder of the plenary session covering the various pitfalls leading to legal malpractice, including Pac-Man defense-attorney insurance policies (whatever those are) and proposed changes to Rule 16-101 regarding the use of social media. I earned 1.5 professional ethics credits toward my quota of continuing legal education (CLE) credits for the calendar year. I wanted to stand before that man-made lake and shout out to the world, "Dammit, I'm not a number!"

I wrote this up during a break between sessions and then met a new acquaintance at the Gathering of Nations Buffet for lunch.



Bonus track: "Still the Same":



Go on and "Let It Rock" ("We're reCORdin' tonight!"):