It’s fair to say that Bob Seger’s landmark live album ‘Live’ Bullet took his career to a whole new level. When it was first released in April 1976, the enduring Michigan singer-songwriter had been active for 15 years, but while he’d issued 8 studio albums and numerous 45s, he’d only once made the Top 20 of the national Billboard listings, with his gutsy “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” single in 1969.
What Seger had accrued, though, was a formidable following in and around his native Detroit and this proved pivotal to the success of ‘Live’ Bullet. Seger’s first live recording, this 14-song collection spread across two discs presents the electrifying highlights of the two nights Seger and his Silver Bullet Band performed at Detroit’s Cobo Arena during September 1975. It was the ideal time to roll tape too, for as Seger has since admitted, his band was first hitting peak form after slogging through countless small club dates in the U.S. Midwest. “We were doing 250 to 300 shows a year before ‘Live’ Bullet,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. “We were playing five nights a week, sometimes six, as the Silver Bullet Band, and we just had that show down.”
‘Live’ Bullet also makes it abundantly clear that transitioning from the small club circuit to the cavernous 12,000-seat Cobo Arena held no fear for Seger and his cohorts. Greeted with rapturous applause, the band launches into its hypnotic cover of Ike & Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” and then holds the audience captive for the next hour. Prioritizing energy and intensity, the set list is expertly chosen, drawing heavily upon Seger’s then-recent studio album Beautiful Loser in addition to several of his key early songs (“Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man,” the proto-Stooges grind of “Heavy Music”) and rousing, crowd-pleasing medleys of classic songs by Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry.
Predictably, a clutch of tracks from the album quickly became staples of local Michigan FM radio, but crucially ‘Live’ Bullet‘s reputation soon spread far beyond Detroit. Gaining significant national airplay, its spin-off single “Nutbush City Limits” made the Top 75 of the Billboard Hot 100, while the press also spread the gospel, with Rolling Stone’s Dave Marsh declaring ‘Live’ Bullet to be “one of the best live albums ever made.”
Collectively, this well-deserved acclaim made all the difference on a national level, with ‘Live’ Bullet climbing to No. 34 on the Billboard 200 and eventually going platinum five times over. Sensing that his time had finally come, Seger pressed home the advantage with his next studio album, October 1976’s Night Moves: a U.S. Top 10 smash featuring the classic hits “Night Moves” and “Mainstreet.”
Decades after it was first released, ‘Live’ Bullet remains one of rock’s most sought-after in-concert collections and rightly so, for as Detroit Rock ‘n’ Roll magazine so succinctly put it: “It’s a rare occasion when a double live album captures an artist at an absolute peak, while summarizing his talents, and that’s exactly what ‘Live’ Bullet does.”
Buy Bob Seger’s ‘Live’ Bullet now.