Silver Seger | LIVE @ The Dirty South

The first time I saw the Bob Seger System I was in high school and he was opening for the Beach Boys on what was likely his first national tour. His only song getting radio play was Rambling Gambling Man and unfortunately the concert was on the first night of the rodeo, so attendance was meager. I suspect the evening was more memorable for me than for him, but you wouldn’t know it from his show.

After that night he went on to write and record close to thirty top ten songs and has sold out arenas and concert halls for decades. It’s a feat few artists come close to matching.

So how did Silver Seger come to be?

John and I have been a musical team off and on for two decades. Our last projects were soul and blues oriented including founding the House Rules Band with award-winning vocalist Annika Chambers. We both love Seger’s authentic, gutsy, bluesy rock feel and this time we wanted to RnR.

John recruited Hank. They too had played together and are friends. Hank’s a multi-instrumentalist, great singer, and has serious arranging skills due to majoring in music at North Texas State University. You may recognize him from his numerous performances on TNN (The Nashville Network) where he shared the stage with artists including Mark Chestnut, Kenny Chesney, the Ventures, and Clint Black. I also opened for the Ventures and recorded with Clint, so I thought there was a bit of Kismet there.

Finding Alex and Xan was pure luck. My friend Hugh at Texas Music Emporium (where I tend to leave much of my money) told me about this incredible sax player. He wasn’t exaggerating; Alex is amazing. We were falling all over ourselves to hire him before finishing the first song. Better still, Alex brought his musical partner drum wiz extraordinaire Xan to play percussion.

So we were set except for one thing…where’s our “Seger”.

We have a number of good vocalists in the band, but no one had “that” voice.

Enter Kenny    wait for it     who is of course, from Detroit. The motor city. His dad and Bob went to high school together. He grew up on this stuff! Kenny moved to Houston when he was twenty to find love and money and never left. He read an ad Hank posted and thought "this is for me"!

So now we are Silver Seger and we intend to make your head "bob".

That’s our story and we're sticking to it. As my friend Peter Tork used to say “Be there or be square”.

Curt