Top Ten Reasons the Boss Kicks Bob Seger's AssNo disrespect to Mr. Seger, but he's clearly (at least) one tier down from Springsteen in the rock and roll game. I'm not gonna limit this to "pre-MTV" b/c that's an arbitrary and pointless limitation. It's sort of like saying that Blur or Oasis are better bands than Radiohead, as long as you stop counting before OK Computer came out. Seger had more Top Forty hits than Bruce did in the seventies, but his albums were demonstrably inferior during that period, and Springsteen has more than surpassed Seger in the longevity department.
And with that out of the way ...
10. Seger needed a "greatest misses" live album to make a splash on the national stage -- he took the Peter Frampton route to stardom. Unlike Frampton, Seger was actually able to cut and release two albums of grade A and B material (Night Moves and Stranger in Town) before running out of musical ideas and falling into lyrical cliches (on the hopelessly flat and utterly predictable Fire Lake, which has a total of one really good song, Against the Wind, which speaks directly about not knowing "what to leave in, what to leave out." There was a lot of pressure on Bruce to release a live album after E Street instead of Born to Run, but Bruce (and Jon Landau) stuck to his guns, and produced a masterpiece instead.
9. Seger didn't make it big nationally until after Bruce kicked the door open for this kind of rock. Look at when Live Bullet! was released -- 1976, the year
after Bruce had made people interested in this kind of bar band inspired, r&b based rock and roll again. If Bruce had done what the label (and his then manager) had wanted and followed up Born to Run right away with either another album of new material or a live record, Seger might never have gotten that big break. Much of Seger's late seventies success had to do with filling a demand for Springsteenesque music which The Boss couldn't meet.
8. Seger has cut a total of one great album (Night Moves) in his career. All the rest of his work is hit and miss. In contrast, Bruce released nothing but great albums from late 1973's The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle through 1987's Tunnel of Love. He then released three hit and miss recordings without the E Street Band, and then returned to form on The Rising.
7. Springsteen writes rings around Seger's lyrics. Seger has written some fine songs, but nothing to lyrically match, just for example, "Thunder Road," "Atlantic City," "My Father's House" or "Darkness on the Edge of Town."
6. Springsteen's artistic vision, no matter how you measure it, is both deeper and broader than Seger's. Bruce has musically accomplished more than Seger, and lyrically he's both covered more ground and more fully explored it. Seger has nothing in his catalog that can compare to the complex examination of father/son relationships that Bruce has explored from "Adam Raised a Caine" through "Independence Day" and "My Father's House" and on to "Walk Like a Man."
5. Bruce has never done anything as maudlin or cliched as "We've Got Tonight." Just the fact that Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton had a big hit with this says it all. Kenny fucking Rogers.
4. The Big Man shits all over the sax player from the Silver Bullet Band. Clarence has more character and stage presence than Seger himself, for that matter.
3. Miami Steve Van Zandt. Bruce had not one but two foils on-stage, and Steve was his musical collaborator and compatriot during the crucial period of '75 through '84. Again, no one in the SBB can match Steve's contributions to the E Street sound. For that matter, Roy Bittan and the rest of the E Streeters deserve some mention here. Springsteen was always musically more challenging and harder to keep up with in a live setting than Seger was. For proof of this, all you need to do is compare Seger's second live album, Nine Tonight, with Springsteen's exhaustive '75-'85 compendium. Every song on Nine Tonight is flat and sounds exhausted when compared to the studio cuts (no small accomplishment considering that the tracks from Fire Lake already sounded pretty tired in their original incarnation), but every song on Bruce's set sounds more vital, more fully realized, than in the studio. There is more (and better) interplay between the Boss and his band than Seger and his musicians, too.
2. Bruce is an ace guitarist, one who many who heard him play when he was the fastest axe-man on the East Coast wish would really cut loose with a workout of Hendrixian proportions. Bruce can play his ass off, but he sticks to what the songs need rather than just playing to his own ego. In contrast, Seger, well ... can Bob Seger even play guitar? He sure as hell never played his own leads.
1. Born to Run. Right there, Bruce shuts down every comparison between himself and the rest of the pretenders to his throne. On this one album, he redeemed every promise he'd ever made, every ounce of faith that anyone had rested in him. Seger has nothing close to it. Nothing.
OK, there are actually more points that I could go on and on with, but I'm not going to. It's pretty obvious to anyone with ears to hear and half a brain to follow the lyrics that Bruce is the winner of this "competition." Anyway, it was kind of fun to write this all out ... hopefully some of you guys will enjoy reading it.
