More and more, I find myself pondering artists who weren’t particular favorites of mine, sometimes even artists I actively disliked, due in part to the handiness of their online histories (maybe you go down similar wormholes), but probably because rock is dead and I’m running out of people. So, Bob Seger. In 2023, what do we do with this guy? Is he even alive? (Yes, and about to embark on his “final” tour.) In our era of representation, this white male with his classic-rock profile, only without Neil Young’s or Springsteen’s iconic currency (or even Tom Petty’s megahit legacy), might fill up the Wells Fargo Arena with nostalgic Boomers and a few young Trumpers, but he is culturally deader than dead. A son of Detroit, he even licensed his last big single, “Like a Rock,” to Ford Trucks. But this would-be journeyman was an honest-to-god singer—there’s some Wilson Pickett in there, and definitely Van Morrison, but he cultivated an unmistakable, personal voice—and he was a songwriter capable of melodies of great longing, who gravitated toward well-worn metaphors (main street, turning the page, the autumn imagery in that ode to growing old, “Night Moves”) but somehow made those old saws work, just through his commitment and his ingenuousness, his presence.
The title of “Fire Lake” hits us with one of those stolid metaphors of Seger’s—something explosive is going to happen here, it’s there in the name. It isn’t Johnson Lake or Lake Travis, it’s Fire Lake. And what’s happening is that Uncle Joe is cutting out on Aunt Sarah. Love gone wrong, somebody jumping ship—pretty stock stuff. The strangeness and effectiveness of the song lies in its rhetorical structure: Seger tells the story through a series of questions. Who’s going to ride that chrome three-wheeler? Who’s going to make that first mistake? This is not an obvious authorial choice; in fact, I can think of no other song built quite this way. There’s no model for this. It implicates the community rather than the searching Joe, who the song’s sympathy is clearly with, albeit with the knowledge of how tough this is—it’s empathetic but not celebratory. This is no You go, girl! song. It’s downbeat, it’s dark. Implicit in these questions is the bigger question: Which one of us? Who is going to act on the frustration we’re all drowning in? Who’s going to take the risk we’d all like to take? Who’s going to call the bluff? Why, Joe, of course—the guy who “was afraid to cut the cake” (a beautifully economical, marriage-centric phrase about commitment and ambivalence). This is a community song, as much as Richard Thompson’s gorgeous and long-forgotten “Small Town Romance.” And another thing, Seeger rightly asks: who is going to break the news? The implications spread out further. He’s talking about Joe, but he’s talking to you.
Paul Simon once confessed that the third verse to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” fell a little short for him: he had written the song with two verses, but it seemed to want a third, and so he whipped up another, based on a remark he’d made to his wife who’d found a gray hair on her young head, but it always felt like an add-on, something a bit less inspired, something not from the same well as the first two verses. I feel something similar happened with “Fire Lake.” The internet tells us Seger first wrote the song in 1971, but only finished it in 1979; that makes sense. The first two verses and the bridge come from the same place; the third verse, almost certainly written later because the song needed to finish or simply be longer, comes from somewhere else; and, while it will do—just as the “Sail on, silver girl” verse does the job in the Simon song—it is distinctly lesser, with a regrettable resort to gambling clichés that lessen the scope when it needed to widen. It does not live up to, and even betrays, the uncanny poetic ambition of the rest of the song. In other words, he blows the landing and, unfortunately, misses out on a masterpiece. If it adds anything, it does so sonically, and on that level it does succeed (the same is true of “Bridge”). If the fade-out—replete with Eagles backing vocals pushed way up in the mix—has any power, it is in Seger’s pleas of “Who’s gonna do it?” in which he relocates the spirit of the song.
The true climax of the song is its bridge—a glorious reach that probably surprised even Seger himself. It comes out of nowhere, a true imaginative leap. Here the song shudders to a stop and he suddenly takes us away from the baffled, judgmental community and to that infernal lake, where he reveals the whole impetus, the women who “smile so shy, flirt so well, and lay you down so fast.” Heaven and hell collide. He can only respond: “Oh Lord, am I really here at last?” I’m not sure the fulfilled dream of erotic arrival has ever been so simply stated. The puerile joke of this can be found in that scene from Animal House where the Playboy bunny drops into the kid’s bedroom, and the kid says, “Thank you, God!” But the moment in this song transcends lust or temptation: it is a dream turned into real life, with all its consequences. Could this be real? Yes, and as Chekhov said in “The Lady with the Lapdog,” the trouble is only beginning.
