This year, Every Sunday Evening, Album Rock WXYG, The GOAT will be featuring a full album at 8:00 PM from the halcyon musical days of 1976. 1976 was one of the top Years in Album Rock history. Another year of tough choices every week. So many great ones to choose from. After 52 Weeks of featuring so many of the great albums that debuted in 1975, next Sunday we will be moving on to another amazing year of ALBUM ROCK EXCELLENCE, 1976.
We hope you’ll tune in at 8:00 PM, Next Sunday, May 10th for “Live Bullet”, obviously, a “live“album by Bob Seger & the Silver Bullet Band, released on April 12, 1976.
It was recorded at Cobo Arena in Detroit, Michigan, during the heyday of that arena's time as an important rock concert venue. The album is credited, along with Night Moves, with launching Seger's mainstream popularity.
'Live' Bullet became a staple of FM rock radio in Detroit. Classics such as the live version of "Nutbush City Limits" and the medley of "Travelin' Man/Beautiful Loser" were among the most widely played live tracks on Detroit stations such as WWWW (W4), WRIF, and WABX. Other tracks such as "Let It Rock", "Turn the Page" and "Get Out of Denver" also received wide airplay in Detroit.
The success of Seger's music at this time, however, was highly regional, with Seger still remaining quite unknown in adjacent media markets such as Chicago. Even in his home state of Michigan, Seger often struggled to garner mass appeal outside the Metro Detroit area. In December 1975, 3 months after 'Live' Bullet was recorded, a scheduled concert at Western Michigan University was cancelled after only a few hundred advance tickets were sold. In June 1976, Seger played the Pontiac Silverdome in metropolitan Detroit at a historic concert that also included Point Blank, Elvin Bishop and Todd Rundgren. 78,000 people were in attendance and the concert lasted until nearly 1:30 a.m. The next night, Seger played for fewer than a thousand people in Chicago.
However, it was only in the following winter that the release of his next recording, “Night Moves”, launched Seger into more national markets. Over time, the life-on-the-road tale "Turn the Page" would become the most nationally played song from 'Live' Bullet, and a perennial favorite on Album Rock radio stations everywhere.
For Detroit fans, however, the entire 'Live' Bullet recording captured a Detroit artist at the height of his energy and creativity, in front of a highly appreciative hometown crowd. 'Live' Bullet also captured the wild and free spirit of rock concerts in the 1970s and has great historic value in that regard.
As I told everybody last night, I was reading in Rolling Stone where they said, "Detroit audiences are the greatest rock and roll audiences in the world." I thought to myself, "Shit! I've known that for ten years!"
— Bob Seger, "Nutbush City Limits", 'Live' Bullet
Critic Dave Marsh called Live Bullet "one of the best live albums ever made."
In 2015, Live Bullet was ranked No. 26 on Rolling Stone's "50 Greatest Live Albums of All Time" list. Readers of Rolling Stone ranked it No. 10 in a 2012 poll of all-time favorite live albums. In an article supporting the 2015 list, Seger states, "We were doing 250 to 300 shows a year before Live Bullet. We were playing five nights a week, sometimes six, as the Silver Bullet Band, and we just had that show down.”
Live Bullet introduced Bob Seger to a wide audience, revealing a rocker of unbridled passion and a songwriter of considerable talent. Prior to its release, Seger had been toiling away, releasing seven albums and touring constantly ever since his debut scraped the national consciousness in 1968. The psychedelicized days of Ramblin' Gamblin' Man are long gone on Live Bullet, leaving behind a rocker who loved the Stones for their toughness, Dylan for his honesty, and Chuck Berry for his narrative -- and one who found his own sound when the Silver Bullet Band came into its own through countless tours. Live Bullet was recorded live at Detroit's Cobo Hall, in front of a passionate, loving hometown audience spurring him into a great performance. The song selection relies heavily on Beautiful Loser, yet it dips into the previous albums enough to prove that Seger had been delivering consistently as a songwriter for years. But what really sold Live Bullet is how these terrific songs are delivered with a ferocious, committed intensity. This might not be much more than a simple rock & roll album, but it's one of the best of its kind, establishing Seger, in the eyes of skeptics, as a first-rate performer and writer. Here, "Heavy Music," "Get Out of Denver," "Turn the Page," and "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" all become hard rock classics, as does the band itself. It's a rare occasion when a double live album captures an artist at an absolute peak, while summarizing his talents, and that's exactly what Live Bullet does.
Tune In and Turn On Sunday evening, May 10th, and every Sunday evening at 8:00 PM for The GOAT'S "The Long Play with Al Neff”.
