You Can Bet on Him

Song 293: This week the playlist can introduce you to that Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man by the Bob Seger System, written by Bob Seger. Just as with the YT video for Midnight Confessions that I wrote about two weeks ago, the YT video linked to this track comes from a 1960s TV appearance by the artists, and so, once again, the performance sounds exactly like the record, which means that the band was basically going through the motions for the camera, miming to the recording. Last week I posted a Glen Frey song as a small tribute to him, having recently learned that he died on January 16th of this year, and in researching for that post, I learned that Glen’s first studio experience happened on this single, for which he played acoustic guitar and sang backup vocals for his friend Bob Seger. I missed this one during its initial chart run, when it peaked in January of 1969, but I got to know it very well in the summer of 1974. Seger at the time could fill a stadium in the area of his home town of Detroit, but was basically a club act in Chicago and other nearby cities. I happened to pass by Detroit a half-dozen times in that summer, traveling between Chicago and Windsor, Canada, and with the car radio on, I heard this cut from the Detroit rock station on every trip. I made those runs that summer out of necessity, and I did not enjoy the rides very much, but hearing this song on the way always made me feel better about the journey. In fact, back then, you couldn’t drive by Detroit while tuned in to the local rock station and not hear this track, and that was a good thing — a very good thing. I soon added this record to my collection, and when, a couple of years later, Mr. Seger reappeared with a new album called Night Moves that rocked up the airwaves, I felt as if I’d always known that he would make the big time at some point, and that he deserved to do so, because even if he wasn’t good lookin’, he also wasn’t shy, and he wasn’t afraid to look a girl (or the entire audience) in the eye.