Thursday, September 09, 2010

Fuck Your Old Time Rock and Roll

Okay, this may be the biggest surprise to regular readers of this blog. It was certainly a surprise to me. Seriously? Bob Seger? What the fuck is the matter with me? Old Time Rock and Roll makes me want to punch old people in the face. I hate that song and never need to hear it again, but my friend, and 70's rock connoisseur, Jeff mentioned that I may like the early Seger stuff...before he got the Silver Bullet Band, and was just a part of the System. I can't remember what finally pushed me to download and check it out, but I was sure surprised when I did. The debut album, Ramblin' Gamblin' Man, from 1969 is killer. If you dig early 70's rock, you need to check this out.

There isn't any polish on this album. The singing is a little off key during parts of Train Man, and the war protest song of 2+2=? is pretty raw. When I'm pulling old records off the shelf, this is the shit that I'll be reaching for. As a side note, Bob Seger has disowned these early recordings and therefore they will never be in print again. Bob Seger is obviously a douche.


I've wanted a copy of this album for a few months now, but I wasn't sure which pressing to get. I think that I had seen three different Capitol labels on eBay at one point...red, yellow and green, and I had no idea which one was the first pressing. I'd seen some early pressings list for $100, and while I really liked this record, it wasn't a record from The First Step, so I wasn't really going to pay a lot for it. In the end, I just wanted a good, clean copy, and when I had the chance to pick up this pressing for $10, I took it. Once I received it, it was pretty obvious that the green labels were from the Capitol Re-issue. The barcode on the back tells me that this must have been from the early 80's.

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