The Motown legend who gave Bob Seger his career
When you think of the artists that inspired Bob Seger, who comes to mind? Having given the world a song called ‘Old Time Rock & Roll’, one would feel confident assuming the inspiration must come from the standard bearers of ‘old time rock ‘n’ roll’. Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, y’know, the lads. Look a little deeper, though, and Seger’s work comes from a much more interesting place that questions the boundaries of the genre on a very real level. You see, even more than any artist or genre, Seger’s work was influenced more directly by the city he was born and raised in, Detroit, Michigan.
Today, the ‘Motor City’ has a legitimate claim as the greatest music city in the United States, up there with New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Nashville. In the early 1960s, while still on the rise, Detroit was a hotbed of musical talent. It already had a thriving network of local venues and bars, with a new record label that was going to change the world of popular music forever. In 1959, Berry Gordy started the label Tamla Records. A year later, he would incorporate the company, changing its name to Motown.
Motown’s early success was built off the back of Gordy’s star attraction, a singer he’d met in 1957 named Smokey Robinson. By 1961, Robinson wasn’t just a recording artist for the label, with his backing band The Miracles, but also their chief songwriter and producer for other companies. His music was getting national attention, but by the mid-1960s, Robinson was arguably the ‘King of Detroit’, possibly even more so than Gordy. One of the many young musicians who took notes from the great man was a young Bob Seger.
Decades later, Rolling Stone put together a list of the greatest artists of all time, commissioning artists inspired by those greats to write about how they inspired them. Seger was picked to pay tribute to Smokey Robinson and had this to say about how the soul singer’s influence laid the groundwork for his whole career: “When my brother went into the service, and I was the sole support of my mother, I was playing bars six nights a week, five 45-minute sets a night. This was ’63–’67, and I could make the most money playing in a trio.”
“It was always a good idea to do some Smokey.”
bob seger
He added, “We had a medley of six Smokey songs that we played at least twice every night: ‘You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me’, ‘Shop Around’, ‘Bad Girl’, ‘Way Over There’ and a couple of others. It was a survival move—the people demanded it. Also, if you were after a girl in the audience, it was always a good idea to do some Smokey.”
This level of bar-band mastery inspired by Robinson didn’t just give Seger the experience he needed to become the rock legend we know today; it also established an almost symbiotic relationship with Detroit itself.
By the time he went solo with the Silver Bullet band, Seger’s fame in his home city nearly eclipsed Robinson’s in his prime. Famously, Seger and his band were able to sell out the 80,000-capacity Silverdome stadium in nearby Pontiac, Michigan, in 1976 before playing to less than 1000 people in Chicago the next day.
That’s a level of local heroism that Seger would never have been able to achieve without the influence (not to mention the music) of Smokey Robinson.
