Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band – Night Moves

“Night Moves” – Single by Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band from the album Night Moves
B-side “Ship of Fools”
Released November 1976
Label Capitol
Songwriter Bob Seger
Producers Jack Richardson, Bob Seger, Punch Andrews
Charted No.4 in US; No.5 in Canada

“Night Moves” has roots in Seger’s adolescence; he wrote the song to capture the “freedom and looseness” he experienced during that period. At a certain point, he began socializing with a rougher crowd, who thought he was cool because he played music. The song’s contents are largely autobiographical; for example, the group of friends would often hold parties they called “grassers”, which involved going to a farmer’s field outside Ann Arbor to dance. Through these, he met a woman—credited as Rene Andretti in the Encyclopedia of Great Popular Song Recordings—whose boyfriend was in the military and was away. “It’s about this dark haired Italian girl that I went out with when I was 19, she was one year older than me,” he later recalled. Seger promptly pursued a romance with the girl, but eventually her boyfriend returned, and they married, leaving Seger broken-hearted. Seger later told journalist Timothy White that many of his early songs were written to impress the girl.

In 1994, nearly 20 years after the original song was released, an official accompanying music video was released. Directed by Wayne Isham, it was set in a drive-in movie theater in the early 1960s; it interspersed footage of Seger performing in a present-day version of the drive-in (seemingly, now abandoned) with various vignettes featuring characters described in the song. Matt LeBlanc, a friend of Isham’s, was in the starring role before his debut in Friends; he later claimed that he was drunk through the whole video, as Seger had shared a bottle of tequila with him in the musician’s motorhome immediately before the shoot. Also featured in the video was Daphne Zuniga of Melrose Place. In the video, Zuniga’s dark, edgy young woman becomes an object of visual fascination for LeBlanc’s clean-cut young man. Johnny Galecki and Natasha Gregson Wagner also appear in the video as a young couple.

“Night Moves” was named by Rolling Stone as Best Single of the Year for 1977 and was included in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time at No. 301. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named it one of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll, Seger’s only such selection.