The Demo from Muscle Shoals
In 1977, Bob Seger was deep into recording Stranger in Town, the album that had to prove Night Moves was no fluke. As he often did, he was splitting the work between Detroit and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Sheffield, Alabama, where the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section — bassist David Hood, drummer Roger Hawkins, keyboardist Barry Beckett and guitarist Jimmy Johnson — served as his Southern studio band. During the sessions, the Rhythm Section sent Seger a demo of a song by two writers in their orbit: George Jackson, a prolific soul songwriter, and Thomas E. Jones III. It was called “Old Time Rock and Roll,” a valentine to the music of the 1950s.
Seger liked the chorus immediately. The verses, he decided, needed to be his. Decades later he laid out exactly what happened: “All I kept from the original was: ‘Old time rock and roll, that kind of music just soothes the soul, I reminisce about the days of old with that old time rock and roll.’ I rewrote the verses and I never took credit. That was the dumbest thing I ever did.” He rewrote every verse — the lonely opening over a piano vamp, the dismissal of modern disco (“Don’t try to take me to a disco, you’ll never even get me out on the floor”), the salute to blues and soul (“Call me a relic, call me what you will / Say I’m old-fashioned, say I’m over the hill”). Then he made the decision that would cost him a fortune: “I didn’t ask for credit. My manager said: ‘You should ask for a third of the credit.’ And I said: ‘Nah. Nobody’s gonna like it.'”
Not everyone accepted his account. George Stephenson of Malaco Records insisted that “Old Time Rock and Roll” was “truly Jackson’s song, and he has the tapes to prove it,” claiming Seger had simply asked to hear other songs for the future after finishing his own recording. Seger, for his part, was still restating his version of events in December 2019, forty years on: he wrote the verses; Jackson and Jones wrote the chorus; the paperwork says only two names.
It is worth pausing on who George Jackson was, because the dispute over this song is really a dispute between two music industries. Jackson was a veteran Southern soul writer, based in Mississippi and associated with Malaco Records, who had spent years supplying songs to soul and R&B singers and had, by his camp’s account, a finished song and the tapes to document it. Seger was a rock star from Detroit passing through Alabama’s great studio scene, hearing a chorus he loved and reaching, by instinct, for his notebook. Both men could tell their version of the session with complete sincerity, and both did, for the rest of Jackson’s life — he died in 2013, with an obituary in The Independent describing a man who “penned hundreds of soul, rock and R&B tunes,” of which this accidental rock standard was by far the most famous. What is not disputed is the hybrid nature of the record that resulted: a Mississippi soul writer’s chorus, a Michigan rocker’s verses, an Alabama rhythm section, and a Detroit saxophone, all arguing cheerfully about whether the music of 1957 was better than the music of 1978.
“Not Silver Bullety”
The recording itself was made at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio with additional work at Sound Suite Studios in Detroit. The famous sixteen-note piano vamp that opens the record was played by Randy McCormick of the Rhythm Section, Howie McDonald contributed the guitar solo, and Seger’s own saxophonist Alto Reed is credited alongside Seger’s lead vocal, backed by singers including Jackson himself. The production was credited jointly to Seger and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section.
Oddly, the men who played behind Seger at home wanted nothing to do with it. The Silver Bullet Band was displeased with the song’s inclusion on Stranger in Town, arguing, according to Seger, that it was not “Silver Bullety.” It was a fair description of their suspicion: the track was a nostalgic, horn-kissed shuffle cut with a different band in Alabama, celebrating a musical era that predated all of them. What changed their minds was Europe. On tour there, the band watched audiences erupt for the song night after night, and resistance quietly collapsed. Seger later said he considered it his favorite song — a strange fate for a record his own band had tried to keep off the album.
A Modest Single in 1979
Stranger in Town arrived in May 1978 and produced a sequence of singles: “Still the Same,” “Hollywood Nights” and “We’ve Got Tonite.” “Old Time Rock and Roll” was held back until March 1979, when it became the album’s fourth single. Its chart performance was respectable and no more: No. 28 on the Billboard Hot 100, No. 34 in Cash Box and No. 40 in Record World. Billboard praised Seger’s “rough-edged vocals and the power charged instrumentation,” and Cash Box called it “a piece of infectious raucous joy” that highlighted his concerts. But in the spring of 1979, with disco at its commercial peak, a song whose hero tells the DJ to take away the modern records and play him some blues or some funky old soul looked like a statement whose moment had passed. “Nobody’s gonna like it,” Seger had said. For about four years, the charts seemed to agree with him.
Risky Business and the Scene That Ate the Song
The moment arrived in 1983, wearing nothing but a shirt, socks and underwear. In Paul Brickman’s film Risky Business, Tom Cruise’s Joel Goodsen, left home alone for the first time, cranks up the stereo and slides into the room lip-syncing to “Old Time Rock and Roll,” using a candlestick as a microphone. The scene lasted about a minute of screen time and permanently fused the song to the image of suburban teenage freedom. The single was re-released and returned to the Hot 100 at No. 48; in Australia, where the film’s success lingered, the song charted for a total of 55 weeks across two runs, finally peaking at No. 3 in late 1987 and finishing as the third-biggest-selling single of that year in the country.
The transformation happened onstage first. Whatever its chart history, the song had become a detonation point in Seger’s concerts — Cash Box had noticed as early as 1979 that it was a highlight of his shows — and the Risky Business scene simply taught the rest of the world what his audiences already knew. Seger began to be introduced by it, identified with it, asked about it above songs that had charted far higher. It is routinely described as his favorite of his own songs, which makes a certain sense: alone among his classics, it is not about his life at all, but about the music that made him want a life in music. It is the fan’s song in his catalog, sung from the audience’s side of the footlights.
The honors accumulated in a way they rarely do for a former No. 28 single. In 1996 the Amusement & Music Operators Association ranked it No. 2 on its survey of the Top 40 Jukebox Singles of All Time. It was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001, and in 2004 it placed No. 100 in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years…100 Songs poll of the greatest songs in American cinema — a list on which it may be the only entry whose film appearance lasts barely a minute. The recording has been certified double Platinum in the United States, triple Platinum in New Zealand and Silver in the United Kingdom. Seger performed it at his own Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2004, and had earlier joined both Billy Joel and Don Henley, on separate nights in 1990, to play it at their concerts in Auburn Hills, Michigan.
The Cost of a Missing Credit
There is a sting in the tail, and Seger tells it on himself. Because he never took a writing credit, he could not control the copyright. “Meanwhile, it got into a Hardee’s commercial because I couldn’t control it,” he recalled. “Oh my God, it was awful!” — the song, re-recorded by the Chipmunks, was used in a 1985 Hardee’s promotion for Alvin and the Chipmunks glasses, exactly the kind of use the famously licensing-shy Seger would have vetoed. The licensing floodgates the Cruise scene opened were never his to close: the song turned up in ALF (in a direct parody of the Cruise scene), The Nanny, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Scrubs, South Park and The Flash; Activision built a series of Guitar Hero: World Tour commercials around celebrities re-creating the slide across the floor; and in 2020 Domino’s restaged the scene with Curtis Armstrong — an actual Risky Business cast member — for a commercial about contactless delivery.
The covers tell their own story of a song that became public property in every sense. Johnny Hallyday cut a French version, “Le Bon Temps du Rock and Roll,” in 1979. Ronnie Dove recorded it in 1987. Status Quo, Britain’s boogie institution, released it as a single in 2000, reaching No. 4 in Norway. Meanwhile Seger, who had shrugged “nobody’s gonna like it,” spent four decades closing shows and accepting awards with a song whose verses he wrote and whose authorship he waived. “That was the dumbest thing I ever did,” he says — usually right before the piano vamp starts and an arena full of people begins to sing his uncredited words back at him.