Feel Like a Number

The Zoo Crew is spinning "Feel Like a Number" off Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band's 1978 album Stranger in Town, and if you have ever punched a clock, stood in a line, or watched somebody treat you like a blank form, this one already knows your name even when the boss does not. Over at THE ZOO, the Zoo Freaks have been calling in for the kind of rock that still smells like a factory parking lot and a highway shoulder. This cut is that record. It is not a ballad. It is a shove.

Seger told the Boston Globe in 1978 that the idea hit him after he watched a show about computer banks and how many names were sitting in them. Everybody is a number, he said, and in the record business you get treated as a number too, the amount you sell or whatever. Some of the humanity gets lost and the hype takes over. He called that the whole idea of Stranger in Town: identity, and trying to survive and keep it. The album arrived right after Night Moves had finally blown the doors open. Capitol had him. The radio had him. The charts had him. And he wrote a song about not wanting to be counted like inventory.

The other half of the story is older than the computers. In a later interview with Louder and again with Rock Cellar, Seger said he was proud of the song because he had been an auto worker for a short stretch. Six months making GM transmissions in Ypsilanti, Michigan, loading conveyors. Then another plant, an assembly line, putting rubber around windshields. That one was hard on a guitar player's hands, so he lasted about a month. Long enough, he said, to get it in his head that you can become a statistic. Not a person. A cog in a very gigantic wheel. He tried to put that discomfort in the track. He also said the road taught him something the line never did. He bends over backward to be decent to people who wait tables, because he knows how rotten it feels when somebody looks straight through you.

The Silver Bullet Band cut the rockers on Stranger in Town, and "Feel Like a Number" is one of theirs, a wall of guitar and keys under a vocal that AllMusic's Mark Deming later called pained, angry, and defiant. Seger admitted in a 1981 radio interview, preserved on the fan site the Seger File, that he used to write too high for himself. Early on there were no stage monitors, so he had to sing way up just to hear his own voice. "Feel Like a Number" was still about as high as he could go. Really pushing. He figured he could only do four or five songs like that in a show. A live take later landed on the 1981 live album, and that version is the one a lot of the faithful still reach for when they want the room to lean in.

Stranger in Town itself was a hard birth. Seger told interviewers the album was finished once, then scrapped because it did not feel right. He wrote new songs, went back to Muscle Shoals for the ballads the Silver Bullet Band did not want to carry, and recut. The title, he told Rolling Stone, was about being a stranger to the community of success. After thirteen years of people saying he was going to make it, and not making it, the sudden lift from Live Bullet and Night Moves left him half convinced he had just gotten lucky. Rolling Stone's Dave Marsh heard a working-class anthem in "Feel Like a Number," the kind of thing you expected from a tougher southern band. The chorus does not ask permission. I feel like a number. I am not a number. Dammit, I am a man.

Before any of that chart noise, Robert Clark Seger was a Detroit-area kid, born in 1945 in Dearborn and raised around Ann Arbor after the family moved. His father worked at Ford and left when Bob was young, which put a permanent lean in the songs about work, leaving, and holding on. He picked up guitar and piano, soaked up the local clubs, and came up through the usual Michigan grind: the Decibels, the Town Criers, the Omens, then Bob Seger and the Last Heard. Punch Andrews, the Ann Arbor manager who stayed with him for the long haul, was already in the picture. The 1968 single "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man" gave him a national nick on the charts, with Glenn Frey, still a kid from the neighborhood, singing backup. Then came the years of regional albums, bars, hockey barns, and almost-hits. Heavy Music. Lookin' Back. Turn the Page, written from the road when the band was still invisible outside the Midwest. He has said he made half a dozen albums over ten years with almost nobody helping except Punch. Live Bullet, cut at Cobo Hall in Detroit in 1975, and Night Moves in 1976 finally made the rest of the country catch up. Stranger in Town, out in May 1978, was the sound of a man who had the prize and did not trust it.

That is why the Zoo Crew keeps this one close to the top of the stack. It is Midwest rock with the serial number still stamped on the crate. The official home for the catalog, including the Stranger in Town tracks and the live remaster of "Feel Like a Number," is Bob Seger's website. The verified pages worth following are Facebook, Instagram, and X. For the deep file of interviews and song notes, the long-running fan site the Seger File still walks through Stranger in Town song by song, "Feel Like a Number" included. Fans also gather in the public Bob Seger Fan Club group. Drop a needle on the album cut, turn it up past polite, and remember you are not a spoke in the wheel. You are a Zoo Freak, and this station still plays the whole song.