Interview

Tom Weschler; Bob Seger at Crosley Field (Cincinnati), June 27, 1970

Smell is commonly recognized as the strongest sensory gatekeeper to memory. For me, it has always been music. A certain refrain from a certain '80s song heard from a passing car window works on me like a kidnapper's van–or, really, like a teleportation device–sending me to some tragically too-real Cincinnati, Ohio, scenario of my youth. Some of my early musical obsessions have proved enduring; in retrospect, others are so confounding as to seem to belong to somebody else. For every prescient discovery of a band like the Violent Femmes, there is the confession that during one particularly dark summer it was the soundtrack to the movie Beaches mixed with the original prduction of Jesus Christ Superstar that resonated most with my life.

One particular singer who entered my life early and has since remained is Bob Seger. My father listened to Bob Seger. He owned a floor-installation company, one so small that he himself installed the flooring. And the guys who worked for my father listened to Bob Seger.

We lived in a nice house and had nice lives growing up on the east side of Cincinnati. But I remember being mesmerized by these guys who would roll into our driveway on motorcycles, all beards and mustaches and tight blue jeans–really like extras in a Bob Seger video–reeking of smoke and pulling out fresh cigarettes from soft packs of Marlboro Reds. They had tattoos and children who lived with women they were never married to and they sounded exactly like their motorcycle engines when they talked. And best of all, they came with an instant soundtrack. Just hearing the opening guitar riff of "Against the Wind" sends me back to my former self, staring up at Ed and Charlie. Seger's rough, wailing three-day-bender voice matches the looks in their eyes. Other Seger songs have a similar effect on me, particularly "Night Moves" and "Roll Me Away" (which, if I remember correctly, played during the closing credits of Peter Bogdanovitch's 1985 film Mask. To be honest, I can't recall what Ed actually looked like anymore; in my mind he is Sam Elliot's character Gar from that movie). (PHOTO: TOM WESCHLER; THE BOB SEGER SYSTEM, 1969)

As Travelin' Man: On the Road and Behind the Scenes with Bob Seger (out today from Wayne State Press) beautifully demonstrates, by way of Tom Weschler's stunning black-and-white tour photographs, Bob Seger had a life beyond my driveway in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1983. Bob Seger starts out as his own unmoored child playing guitar in Detroit, and only becomes the legend of peripatetic America in the early '70s with his own long brushed hair, black tight vests, and thick unkempt beard. I asked my father a few years ago what happened to Charlie and Ed and a number of his other workers. He said they mostly had died of lung cancer from smoking too much.