In 1994, “Against The Wind” was featured in Forrest Gump, another litmus test for your perspective on his legacy. The same year, he earned his only #1 hit with “Shakedown,” which might be his worst song. In 1987, he and his most famous collaborators, the Silver Bullet Band, earned a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame right outside the doors of his longtime label, Capitol. (I grew up just a couple of hours outside Detroit, close enough to relate to the city’s Midwestness yet far away enough to mystify it in my head.) Mellencamp, for better or worse, would later pass the torch to Kid Rock. He passed the heartland-rock torch to John Mellencamp, a Seger fan and his equivalent in my home state of Indiana.

When MTV came around, he happily bowed out to focus on touring for his fans and spending more time with his family. They’re all at least fascinating, especially everything he released until 1980. They all range from classics to classics for their time to just … of their time. Seger has many litmus-test songs like this. Whether you think I’m overreacting or not going far enough will probably reveal how you feel about Seger, and maybe all of classic rock. Maybe he’s pulling a “joking not joking” troll for the sake of trying to make provocative art. Maybe he wished he could crawl into Brad Pitt’s car and drive off into the pre-Manson Hollywood night to the tune of Seger glorifying being a flake. A brilliant director and maybe the least self-aware human alive, Tarantino probably picked this song because it’s a great car song. It might be Seger’s most purely enjoyable song. There’s also “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” recently featured in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … In Hollywood. “Classic rock can be a marketing scheme,” wrote Steven Hyden in Twilight Of The Gods: A Journey To The End Of Classic Rock, “and it can also be transcendent.” In an age where we’re reevaluating the classic rock canon - and the cost of transcendence - is Bob Seger worth keeping? If you’re my age, you may think this song represents the worst of baby-boomer nostalgia, a reactionary cancer that continues to strangle the earth and millennials, and that Bob Seger, who comes from the same city as Eminem and Kid Rock, is responsible for climate change, white nationalism, and late capitalism. If you’re my age, “Old Time Rock And Roll” might be the opposite of fun. You’ve heard the idea of “Old Time Rock And Roll” your entire life. Go to any sporting event, wait seven minutes, and you’ll hear Seger’s boogie, which he technically didn’t write, and see Randy and Nance swooning the night away. It’s the playlist deep cut to every Applebee’s and some Olive Gardens. And when the rest of the world first heard Alto Reed’s famous saxophone riff that kicks off “Turn The Page” on Live Bullet, they discovered what Detroit already knew: Bob Seger is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest songwriters. By the time he got to “Turn The Page,” he had lived that song for years. When he got bored of that, he shifted from hot-shot guitarist and singer to full-time frontman, now writing songs championing the earlier, more playful rock ‘n’ roll that came from his childhood heroes Fats Domino, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Before he godfathered heartland rock, Seger was pushing forward the same proto-punk that his neighbors the MC5 and the Stooges would later perfect.

“These days,” wrote Marsh, “an interest in Bob Seger seems much less exclusive … Yet somehow, he’s still the same guy who struggled for fifteen years to get any kind of break out of Detroit at all.” He was holding out for the day when everyone, including Seger, would catch up. Like most critics and even some fans, Marsh admired the idea of Seger more than his actual music. Marsh, also from Detroit, was one of the great frenemies of Seger - he often reviewed Seger with backhanded praise, cringing over a huge talent wasting his potential - and he was relieved that Seger finally became famous. In 1978, he released Stranger In Town, arguably his best album. Two years before, Seger, having spent over a decade working his way through a competitive Detroit rock scene and retiring a few times, had just broken through with back-to-back career-defining LPs: Live Bullet, one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great live albums, and Night Moves, a contender for best car record ever. Bob Seger’s “might be the strangest career in the history of rock and roll,” wrote Dave Marsh in his 1978 Rolling Stone profile.

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