Writing Prompt #58
50 Years, Where’d They Go?
Music from my “road trip”
50 years, where’d they go? 50 years, I don’t know. My response to the Crow’s Feet writing prompt, “Music.”
Just like Bob Seger leaning on the fender of his Corvette and watching the long train roll by in the “Like a Rock” video, I’ve had cause to think about the ways his music has intersected with my life.
I liked Seger well enough as I was growing up in the 70s, but I wasn’t a huge fan. Perhaps it was easy to take him for granted because he was so ubiquitous. It seemed as if he always had a song on the charts, playing in the background of most of my memories from my teens, twenties, and thirties.
They were songs of wheels and women, of loving and leaving, and of doing whatever it takes to have a good time that became an American bushido of masculinity for an era. The style was gritty and sometimes deep and it was a match made in Marketing when Chevy hitched its truck line to the Detroit-born and bred Seger’s “Like a Rock” hit. It almost turned the song into a parody of itself but it sold a lot of quarter- and half-ton trucks, and Seger sold a crap ton of records as Americans found a certain resonance, real or hoped-for, in the words and images.
