Trawling through the vast amount of music I’ve collected over the years to put on here is proving to be very therapeutic in a way. Listening to some of these songs certainly brings back the memories. I’m wondering how the hell I managed to collect all this stuff as well, I couldn’t play it all. It’s crazy really, all this music just sitting here and the biggest part of it never actually gets played. God knows how many mp3 files I have here, I’ve accumulated so much.. bought it, had it given, downloaded it, copied it from friends. If it was all on vinyl I wouldn’t have enough room to store it all, but maybe that’s the reason we all have so many mp3’s, they’re easy to store. All my vinyl records are wrapped away and stored in a spare room in the house, they very rarely see the light of day.. and that’s a shame. Plus all the CD’s I bought, once you’ve ripped them to audio files you very rarely play the originals anymore… but still I continue to collect them, must be some sort of illness.
Anyway.., while I was going through it all this afternoon I came across a ton of stuff I have by Bob Seger, pretty much everything he’s done. I came across his album “Night Moves”.. I was looking for this song to post, Mainstreet, the one I listen to the most because it’s one of my all time favourite songs. I can cast my mind back and remember buying it. I bought it from a sale of fire damaged stock from a record store, my dad used to work for a man who did all that kind of thing, it was mainly textiles but he somehow came across all these records from a shop that had been on fire. He salvaged what he could from them and put them all in a room at the side of a warehouse, opened it to the public and sold them off cheap. Because my dad worked there I got the chance to go in there and rummage through them all before the doors were open for the general sale… I thought that was brilliant. I came away with an armful of albums.. very, very cheap, but some had no album cover with them. Night Moves was one of them, it just had the inner, paper sleeve… but I didn’t care. I just took them all home and played them to make sure they weren’t warped from the heat of the fire, they all played perfect and were all brand new.. a bargain.
So I’m playing the Night Moves album, I liked it straight away but the one song that jumped out at me was Mainstreet, it was just so good. I played it over and over, trying to pick up the words.. the guitar was brilliant as well. And so it became a firm favourite of mine and I’ve never got bored of hearing it. It’s a high ranking desert island must have.
It was released in 1976 and the album brought Bob Seger to the attention of the masses for the first time really, not a bad track on the whole album. Mainstreet was obviously written about the time when he was growing up. The story goes that it was written about a dancer, or maybe a stripper?.. who he’d taken a shine to in his hometown of Ann Arbor, in Michigan and in writing the song he was casting his mind back to his youth. The lyrics to the song are wonderful, they’re telling a true story from a part of his life. I think that’s a very honest thing to do and that’s what makes it such a great song. So into the desert island collection it goes to bring back a few memories of my own.
