Bob Seger - Ebbets Field, Denver, CO, 7-8-1974

Here's a Bob Seger concert from 1974. In terms of sound quality, this may be the earliest live record of Seger that sounds this good.

Seger achieved massive success in 1976. In that year, he sold millions with his live album "Live Bullet," and then later in year sold millions more with his studio album "Night Moves." Prior to that, he'd been in the music business for many years, but usually at the level of playing at clubs. He'd had just one song in the U.S. Top Forty, "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" in 1968. The venue he was performing in here, Ebbets Field, only held a couple of hundred people. Whereas a few years later, he would be filling enormous arenas and even stadiums.

So it's interesting to hear Seger before he hit the big time. About half of the songs here would appear on his "Live Bullet" album two years later. But the other half are songs that would soon be permanently dropped from his concert set lists.

The reason we have this bootleg recording with outstanding sound quality is because many concerts at this Ebbets Field venue at the time were broadcast on a local radio station. So they were professionally recorded. I've already posted a few others of those, and I plan to post a lot more in the future.

This album is an hour and eight minutes long.

01 talk by emcee (Bob Seger)
02 Don't Burn Down the Bridge (Bob Seger)
03 talk (Bob Seger)
04 I've Been Working (Bob Seger)
05 talk (Bob Seger)
06 U.M.C. [Upper Middle Class] (Bob Seger)
07 talk (Bob Seger)
08 Sail On (Bob Seger)
09 Someday (Bob Seger)
10 Nutbush City Limits (Bob Seger)
11 Heavy Music - Ain't Nothing You Can Do (Bob Seger)
12 Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (Bob Seger)
13 talk (Bob Seger)
14 Gang Bang (Bob Seger)
15 All Your Love (Bob Seger)
16 Let It Rock - Little Queenie (Bob Seger)
17 talk by emcee (Bob Seger)
18 talk (Bob Seger)
19 Get Out of Denver (Bob Seger)
20 talk by emcee (Bob Seger)
21 talk (Bob Seger)
22 Rosalie (Bob Seger)
23 talk (Bob Seger)
24 Song to Rufus (Bob Seger)
25 talk by emcee (Bob Seger)

https://pixeldrain.com/u/kF3AgzeT

alternate:

https://bestfile.io/en/bfKAQ38k9fUTvL0/file

The cover photo is from a concert at the Highway Drive-in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on October 19, 1974. The original was in color, but the colors were off. So, I think for the first time for this blog, I actually colorized a color picture. I like the new colors a lot better.

Bob Seger - Bringing It Back - Non-Album Tracks (1973-1974)

As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm not that big of a Bob Seger fan. I mostly like him on the hits only level. So I'm pretty damn surprised that I ended up making a stray tracks album for him, and equally surprised that it's quite good. If this were an actual album, I think it would be one of his best.

Seger certainly has written many quality hits and even some all-time classics. But my main issue with him has been consistency. I've found the songs on his studio albums hit or miss, with a lot of a misses. What makes this album, in my opinion, is that it's nearly all covers. Only the last song is an original. Like all the other songs here, it's never been officially released in any form.

Seger spent many years in the late 1960s and early 1970s playing small clubs and getting people to dance with his rocking music. Along the way, he probably played many more covers than originals, to give the audience more songs they were familiar with. He put out an album mostly consisting of covers in 1972, "Smoking O.P.s," but I actually like this one better. This comes right at the brink of his stardom, when he would drop most covers from his concert sets. 

Luckily, there were a couple of concerts that were professionally recorded for radio stations and saved as bootlegs right before he retired most of these songs. I had no intention of making this album, but I happened to stumble across it while getting material for the Seger early best of albums I posted here recently, and I was intrigued enough to find more songs to fill out the album.

All the songs were recorded live in concert, but I removed the audience noise, as I often do, to make this sound like a studio album. The sound quality is so good, and the audience was so quiet during the songs, that I was able to do that.

By the way, this comes from right before he formed the Silver Bullet Band he would find fame with. Most of the songs are with the short-lived Borneo Band. But for simplicity's sake, I'm just crediting all the songs to Bob Seger.

01 Carol (Bob Seger)
02 [Your Love Keeps Lifting Me] Higher and Higher (Bob Seger)
03 St. Dominic's Preview (Bob Seger)
04 Will the Circle Be Unbroken (Bob Seger)
05 As Long as I Can Play (Bob Seger)
06 Born Under a Bad Sign (Bob Seger)
07 Don't Burn Down the Bridge ['Cause You Might Wanna Come Back Across] (Bob Seger)
08 Bringing It Back (Bob Seger)
09 See Me in the Evening (Bob Seger)
10 Full Circle (Bob Seger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15174949/BobSgr_1973-1974_BrngingItBck_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo dates to 1972, though I don't know the details.

Bob Seger - Back in '72 (1973)

Here's something else from Bob Seger while I'm at it. As I mentioned previously, all of Seger's albums through 1973 remain officially out of print. I got a request from my musical associate Lil Panda to post all of one of them, "Back in '72" from 1973. He thinks it's a particularly strong album, so if you only get one of the out of print albums, it should be the one. Indeed, if you look at the crowd sourced ratings of all his albums at rateyourmusic.com, this album gets the third highest rating of all his studio albums, behind only "Night Moves" from 1976 and "Stranger in Town" from 1978.

Lil Panda sent me his version of the album, which is the best quality version he could find. So that's what I'm sharing here. 

By the way, I have four of the songs here on the second early best of album that I just posted: "Rosalie," "Back in '72," "I've Been Working," and "Turn the Page."

This album is 35 minutes long.

01 Midnight Rider (Bob Seger)
02 So I Wrote You A Song (Bob Seger)
03 Stealer (Bob Seger)
04 Rosalie (Bob Seger)
05 Turn the Page (Bob Seger)
06 Back in '72 (Bob Seger)
07 Neon Sky (Bob Seger)
08 I've Been Working (Bob Seger)
09 I've Got Time (Bob Seger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15174951/BobSgr_1972_Bckin72_atse.zip.html

The cover is the exact same as the original without any changes.

Bob Seger - Best of the Early Years, Volume 2 (1971-1973)

A couple of days ago, I posted the Volume 1 to this blog. My explanation from that remains the same here. Bob Seger wasn't well known outside of his home town of Detroit until he hit it big around 1975. Later, after he became a rock superstar, he decided he didn't like his early albums and let all of them from 1973 and earlier go out of print. Amazingly, they're still out of print and not well known decades later. So this compiles the second half of what I consider the best songs from his out of print era.

All of the songs come from three albums, except for "Lookin' Back," which was an A-side in 1971. The three albums are: "Brand New Morning" in 1971, "Smokin' OPs" in 1972, and "Back in '72" in 1973. "Brand New Morning" is a solo acoustic album (though against Seger's wishes, as the record company released his demos without his permission), "Smokin' OPs" is a covers album, and "Back in '72" is a more typical rocking album mostly made of originals. 

The songs "If I Were a Carpenter," "Love the One You're With" and "I've Been Working" are covers; the rest are originals. A live version of the last song, "Turn the Page," would become a rock classic when it was released on the album "Live Bullet" in 1976. But this is the original studio version.

By the way, for the time period of album and the previous Best Of, Seger's backing back went under different name, such as Bob Seger and the Last Heard, the Bob Seger System, and Bob Seger and the Borneo Band. His more famous Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band wouldn't be formed until 1974. For simplicity's sake, I just label everything as "Bob Seger."

01 Brand New Morning (Bob Seger)
02 Railroad Days (Bob Seger)
03 Sometimes (Bob Seger)
04 Lookin' Back (Bob Seger)
05 If I Were a Carpenter (Bob Seger)
06 Love the One You're With (Bob Seger)
07 Back in '72 (Bob Seger)
08 I've Been Working (Bob Seger)
09 Rosalie (Bob Seger)
10 Turn the Page (Bob Seger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15174937/BobSgr_1971-1973_BstofErlyYearsVolume2_atse.zip.html

The cover art photo was taken at a concert in Lakeview High School in St. Clair Shores, Michigan, some point in 1973.

Bob Seger - Best of the Early Years, Volume 1 (1966-1970)

Who is the person in this album cover photo? Would you believe it's Bob Seger? Seger is well known for his many hits from the mid-1970s onwards. But what a lot of people don't know is that he had a pretty interesting musical career for about ten years before he became famous around 1975. And a key reason people don't know is because he has made it hard for people to know, due to letting all of his albums prior to 1973 go out of print. 

Personally, I'm not that big of a Bob Seger fan. If I ever hear a horribly overplayed some like "Old Time Rock and Roll" it'll be too soon. As I write this, his early material remains out of print with the exception of the collection "Early Seger Vol. 1," but that only contains six songs that date from his out of print era. So I've put together two albums of what I consider the best songs from that time. 

In the 1960s, the Detroit music scene was known for rocking, with bands like Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, the Stooges, and the MC5. The city kept going with the garage rock sound popular around 1965 and 1966 long after most other bands switched to different styles. Seger was very much in that vein. He put out some excellent singles from 1966 to 1968, including the minor hit "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man." Then he started putting out albums mostly in the same style. 

Seger has consistently been a rocker first and foremost for his entire career, and that's true of his early material. But his early songs aren't as formulaic as his later hits. As a case in point, consider his 1968 A-side "2+2=?" It's a strident protest song against the Vietnam War. It's strange title is a reference to the classic George Orwell book "1984," where people are brainwashed into thinking that two plus two doesn't equal four.

I believe all the songs here are originals, except for "River Deep, Mountain High," originally done by Ike and Tina Turner. And "Sock It to Me Santa" is basically James Brown hit "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" with new lyrics.

01 East Side Story (Bob Seger)
02 Sock It to Me Santa (Bob Seger)
03 Persecution Smith (Bob Seger)
04 Chain Smokin' (Bob Seger)
05 Vagrant Winter (Bob Seger)
06 Heavy Music, Part 1 (Bob Seger)
07 2+2=? (Bob Seger)
08 Ramblin' Gamblin' Man (Bob Seger)
09 Tales of Lucy Blue (Bob Seger)
10 Innervenus Eyes (Bob Seger)
11 Lucifer (Bob Seger)
12 Evil Edna (Bob Seger)
13 Highway Child (Bob Seger)
14 River Deep, Mountain High (Bob Seger)

https://www.upload.ee/files/16373063/BOBSGR1966-1970BstofErlyYearsVolum1_atse.zip.html

I don't know what year the cover art photo is from, but I'd guess it's from around 1967. Not long after that, he let his hair grow much longer. Then he started favoring more facial hair, until he had a full beard around the time he started hitting it big in 1974 or 1975.