Two Albums That Turned the Midwest Into a State of Mind

Bob Seger recorded the bulk of 'Night Moves' in two different rooms, in two different states, with two different bands, and somehow made it sound like one continuous memory. Released on October 22, 1976, on Capitol Records, the album is his ninth studio record and the first to credit the Silver Bullet Band by name. Four tracks were cut at Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Sheffield, Alabama, with the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. Four more went down at Pampa Studios in Detroit with the Silver Bullet Band. And then there was one more song needed, which is how Seger ended up in Toronto at Nimbus Nine Studios with producer Jack Richardson, working past 2:30 in the morning on a piece he had been carrying around for six months and was not sure was worth recording. That song was the title track. The album opens not with 'Night Moves' but with 'Rock and Roll Never Forgets,' a straight-ahead rocker that announces Seger's arrival on the national stage. The title track sits second in the running order, and it is a different animal entirely.

The story of how 'Night Moves' got made is the story of the whole album in miniature. Seger's Silver Bullet Band had mostly gone home by the time the session at Nimbus Nine got serious. Richardson brought in local Toronto guitarist Joe Miquelon and organist Doug Riley to fill the gaps, alongside Seger and two band members who had stayed: bassist Chris Campbell and drummer Charlie Allen Martin. The female backing vocals came from Laurel Ward, Rhonda Silver, and Sharon Dee Williams, a Montreal trio who happened to be in the building. Richardson later told Mix magazine that the whole arrangement came together in the studio. Seger had been inspired by watching 'American Graffiti' and thinking nobody had told the story of growing up in his part of the country. He wrote the song over six months, and the bridge, where the narrator wakes to the sound of thunder and hums a song from 1962, was something he and Richardson invented on the fly. The production credit on the finished record became a small controversy of its own. When 'Night Moves' first charted, Billboard listed only Punch Andrews as producer. Richardson, who had run the Toronto sessions, called Capitol and demanded a correction. The next issue read 'Producers: Jack Richardson and Punch Andrews.' Richardson noted, with a chuckle, that Andrews had not been at the sessions.

The single reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 1977, making Seger a national name after more than a decade of regional fame in Detroit. Three singles came off the album in total: 'Night Moves,' 'Mainstreet,' and 'Rock and Roll Never Forgets.' The album was eventually certified six times platinum by the RIAA. Critics at the time noted the split personality of the record, the Silver Bullet Band tracks carrying a raw, ferocious energy while the Muscle Shoals sides had a looser, Southern-soul warmth. That tension, between the gritty Detroit rock and the Alabama groove, is part of what gives 'Night Moves' its range. Seger was not making a concept album. He was making the best record he could with the musicians available, and the seams show in the best possible way.

Nine years later and about 300 miles southeast, John Mellencamp walked into his own studio in Belmont, Indiana, and made a record that was angrier, more focused, and more politically direct than anything Seger had attempted. 'Scarecrow,' released July 31, 1985, on Mercury Records, is Mellencamp's eighth studio album and the first recorded at his Belmont Mall Studio. He co-produced it with Don Gehman, crediting himself on the sleeve as 'Little Bastard.' The band spent a month in rehearsals before a note was tracked, playing through a hundred rock and roll songs from the 1960s. According to Gehman, the idea was to absorb those devices from the past and use them in a new way with Mellencamp's arrangements. The result sounds like a band that has done its homework and then set the homework on fire.

The album opens with 'Rain on the Scarecrow,' co-written with George M. Green, and the subject is the collapse of the American family farm. Mellencamp had been watching the farm crisis tear through the Midwest, and the song does not soften the picture. Cash Box called it an 'impassioned plea on behalf of America's small farmers.' Billboard described it as 'raw rage and bleak visions of a disintegrating way of life.' The album's three top-ten singles, 'R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A.' at number two on the Hot 100, 'Lonely Ol' Night' at number six, and 'Small Town' at number six, gave 'Scarecrow' its commercial reach. 'Lonely Ol' Night' also hit number one on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart. The album peaked at number two on the Billboard 200, one slot short of the top, which is the kind of detail that gets lost in retrospect. It sold like a record that had reached number one.

The personnel on 'Scarecrow' is worth sitting with. The core band, Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic on guitars, Toby Myers on bass, Kenny Aronoff on drums, and John Cascella on keyboards, plays with a locked-in intensity that comes from those weeks of rehearsal. But the guest appearances are what give the album its texture. Rickie Lee Jones sings on 'Between a Laugh and a Tear,' a mid-tempo track that Rolling Stone called 'a gorgeous, riveting duet.' Mellencamp has said he was too nervous to meet Jones in person, so she recorded her vocals at a studio in Los Angeles while he stayed in Indiana. Ry Cooder plays slide guitar on 'The Kind of Fella I Am,' a track that also appeared as the B-side to 'Lonely Ol' Night.' And Laura Mellencamp, John's grandmother, sings lead on 'Grandma's Theme,' a short interlude built around the 1896 song 'In the Baggage Coach Ahead.' That detail, a grandmother's voice threading through a hard-rock album about economic collapse, tells you something about how Mellencamp was thinking. The personal and the political were the same thing.

The album's connection to Farm Aid is direct. 'Rain on the Scarecrow' helped ignite the effort, alongside Willie Nelson and Neil Young, to organize the first Farm Aid benefit concert in 1985. Mellencamp helped found the organization, which has continued for four decades. The album did not just describe a crisis. It participated in a response to one.

What connects 'Night Moves' and 'Scarecrow,' beyond geography and the broad label of heartland rock, is a shared conviction that the place you come from is worth the full weight of your attention. Seger's album is retrospective, a man in his early thirties looking back at adolescence and finding it both funny and aching. Mellencamp's is present-tense and furious, a man in his mid-thirties watching his neighbors lose their land and refusing to look away. Both records are built on specificity. Seger puts you in the back seat of a '60 Chevy, out past the cornfields where the woods got heavy. Mellencamp puts you in a courthouse yard with 97 crosses marking 97 lost farms. The Midwest, in both cases, is not a backdrop. It is the argument.

In 1989, Rolling Stone ranked 'Scarecrow' number 95 on its list of the 100 greatest albums of the 1980s, noting that it 'consolidated the band's rugged, roots-rock thrash and the ongoing maturation of Mellencamp's lyrics.' 'Night Moves' went six times platinum and has outlasted most of the records that outsold it in 1976. The two albums do not belong to the same moment, and they do not sound alike. But they share a refusal to be anywhere other than exactly where they are, which turns out to be a durable position.