O

f all the unnecessary wor-
ries I had going into my 
freshman year at the Uni-

versity of Michigan (and there 
were a lot), the one I now laugh 
at most is that I wouldn’t like Ann 
Arbor. Having grown up in a major 
metropolitan area, I was hesitant 
about going to school in a college 
town.

As if it’s possible to not like Ann 

Arbor.

This place means something dif-

ferent for all of us who’ve lived 
here, certainly, but something I 
especially love is how much his-
tory is embedded in the city — how 
many people have walked these 
streets, have discovered my favor-
ite hole-in-the-wall restaurants, 
have pulled all-nighters in my fa-
vorite study spots before I arrived. 
I love that idea — that I am becom-
ing one of so many people that have 
been shaped by this place.

Something I love even more is 

that the people who live in Ann 
Arbor shape the town as much as 
it shapes those who temporarily 
stay. The energy in these streets is 
somehow more malleable, more at-
tuned to the specific group that’s 
here right now than to the count-
less faces that came before. Maybe 
that’s just the nature of a college 
town, but it’s still amazing to think 
about what Ann Arbor used to be 
like and what we could help it be-
come.

One of my favorite times to pic-

ture is the Ann Arbor of the late 
60s. I’m an avid fan of what my 
friends have jokingly termed “dad 
music” — Creedence Clearwater 
Revival, The Doors, The Beach 
Boys, basically any music that re-
sulted from the Vietnam War — 
and seeing photographs from The 
Michigan Daily of the University 
in those days sparked that interest 
even more.

With this in mind, you can imag-

ine how excited I was to learn that 
Bob Seger, singer of “Old Time 
Rock & Roll” and numerous of my 
other dad playlist staples, is from 
Ann Arbor.

I immediately started listening 

through his songs, on guard for 

anything that might be about Ann 
Arbor. After doing some research, 
I was able to piece together a 
Bob Seger’s Ann Arbor tour, so to 
speak. It’s beautiful how this place 
that’s shaped me so much has also 
shaped some of the music I love.

The song “Mainstreet” was writ-

ten about a little old jazz club on 
West Ann and North Main Streets, 
where Seger used to listen to a per-
former known to everyone in town 
as Washboard Willie. There’s a 
certain wistfulness to the opening 
guitar riff. You can almost picture 
it echoing down the quiet streets, 
the soft piano chords underneath 
it as solid as the footsteps on the 
pilgrimage home.

“Standin’ on the corner at mid-

night / Tryin’ to get my courage up 
…”

That club is long gone now, and 

the dreamy dancer Seger longs for 
has long since disappeared into 
the chords of life. Instead, there’s 
a party store with faded awnings 
and crackling window paint at that 
intersection, a brick building cast-
ing a shadow over the juncture. 
There’s a hotel across the street, 
the kind where visiting parents or 
alumni or businessmen might stay 
when they come into town.

But somehow, the sort of hazy, 

hopeful scene that the song sets 
up doesn’t feel that far off. Sure, 
it might not be happening in the 
exact same place, but even now, 
decades on, something of Seger’s 
sentiment still rings true. Walking 
these streets at night, the everyday 
commotion not gone, but softened, 
wondering about the lives of pass-
ersby — that Ann Arbor scene still 
happens, still shapes us, still com-
pels us into that same wistful won-
dering that’s audible on Seger’s re-
cord.

“Sometimes even now, when I’m 

feelin’ lonely and beat / I drift back 
in time and I find my feet / Down 
on Main Street …”

Seger grew up in the neighbor-

hood along Packard Street. He’d 
frequent Blue Front, the old conve-
nience-store-turned-craft-beer oa-
sis, with his brother; it was an easy 
walk from their home. Another of 

Seger’s old haunts is still as much 
an institution in 2021 Ann Arbor 
as it was in the 1960s. Brown Jug 
Restaurant at the corner of Church 
Street and South University Av-
enue is today just as beloved as the 
music of Seger, their former pizza 
delivery boy. Although Brown Jug 
declined to comment for this story 
and Seger’s music rarely plays at 
the restaurant these days, it still 
somehow seems fitting that he was 
involved with this Ann Arbor sta-
ple; it seems right that he, like so 
many of us, has memories of nights 
centered on this place.

Brown Jug isn’t the only long-

standing legacy Seger grew up 
with. The singer also used to play 
concerts at the University’s fra-
ternities. Chris Cioe, the musician 
and writer who provided jazz in-
strumentals to The B-52’s and The 
Manhattans, among others, vividly 
remembers seeing Seger, clad in 
“skin-tight black jeans, a turtle-
neck and a blue Beatles style cap — 
the quintessential greaser-rocker,” 
performing on the front lawn of 
the Chi Phi house at 1530 Washt-
enaw.
T

hese days, the music echo-
ing out of the old stone 
structure might tend more 

towards Chance the Rapper than 
Creedence 
Clearwater 
Revival, 

more towards hip-hop than old-
time rock ‘n’ roll. But if you think 
hard enough about what this scene 
might’ve looked like in 1966, it’s 
not so hard to picture Seger play-
ing on those front steps. It’s not 
so hard to imagine the twanging 
of the guitar floating out across 
the busy street as the brothers and 
their dates danced in the sunshine, 
caught at that exciting juncture 
between culture and countercul-
ture that came to define their gen-
eration, both shaping and being 
shaped by Ann Arbor.

Seger’s fingerprints are also still 

visible at Pioneer High School, 
which Seger attended back when it 
was still Ann Arbor High. He let-
tered in track and field, graduat-
ing in 1963. You can still find his 
photograph in the yearbook. It 
makes all of this a little more real: 

He really was here. Those lyrics 
really are about this town. You re-
ally have seen the same landscape, 
walked the same streets.

That shared experience is wist-

fully portrayed by “Night Moves,” 
one of Seger’s most-loved songs, 
and arguably one of his best. Its 
longing lyrics and the vivid scenes 
of late nights sneaking away when-
ever possible still feels like a real 
account of what it means to be 
young.

“Workin’ on our night moves / 

Tryin’ to lose the awkward teenage 
blues …”

The song was inspired by “grass-

ers” that Seger and his friends 
held in high school, out on Zeeb 
Road. They turned on the head-
lights, played records from the car, 
drank, smoked and danced. “Night 
Moves” is simultaneously an ide-
alizing tribute to that youthful 
rebellion and a sincere, profound 
rendering of it.

“We weren’t searchin’ for some 

pie in the sky, or summit / We were 
just young and restless and bored 
/ Livin’ by the sword / And we’d 
steal away every chance we could 
/ To the backroom, the alley, the 
trusty woods …”

As I reached the end of the Bob 

Seger tour, it felt as if it truly came 
full circle, from the wistful longing 
of “Mainstreet” all the way back 
around to the earnest remembrance 
of “Night Moves.” The songs seem 
to have the same energy as Seger 
intended when they were initially 
created, somehow — the same bit-
tersweet recollection of earlier, 
less complicated, but no less mean-
ingful days. The honest version of 
Ann Arbor we see in Seger’s lyrics 
that still affects us years down the 
road seemed a fitting place to end.

Maybe this candid sentimental-

ity is why Seger’s music has en-
dured these many decades, because 
it’s Seger’s Ann Arbor that I’d most 
like to think is still accurate: Young 
people, still trying to figure their 
lives out, earnestly stumbling to-
wards some nebulous future, but 
just as sincerely trying to appreci-
ate the good days before we’ve ac-
tually left them.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement

Bob Seger’s 
Ann Arbor

BY ABIGAIL SNYDER, STATEMENT CORRESPONDENT

Wednesday, March 10, 2021 — 13

REBECCA MAHON /Daily

