1974 · Behind the Songs
The opening track of Seven — Bob Seger’s first album with the Silver Bullet Band — packs a roadhouse riot into two minutes and forty-four seconds and became a Detroit radio staple.
Some careers turn on a single song. For Bob Seger, that song might be “Get Out of Denver” — not because it was his biggest hit (it wasn’t), but because it was the blast of noise that announced the arrival of the band that would carry him to stardom. Two minutes and forty-four seconds long, opening his 1974 album Seven, it is pure bar-band fury: a getaway tale told at full throttle, with guitars snarling, saxophone wailing, and Seger shouting like a man with the law one verse behind him. It reached only number 80 on the Pop Singles chart. In Detroit, it might as well have been number one.
The song’s real importance is what it introduced. Seven, released in March 1974, was Seger’s seventh studio album — and the first to feature the Silver Bullet Band, the group that would become synonymous with his name. Recorded around 1973 at Quadrafonic Sound in Nashville, Tennessee, and produced by Punch Andrews with Seger himself, the album captured a singer finally finding the vehicle his songs deserved. The critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine would later give the record five stars on AllMusic and call it one of Seger’s strongest, hardest-hitting rock records. “Get Out of Denver” is the reason the album starts at a sprint: it is track one, and it never looks back.
The first Silver Bullet record
By 1974, Bob Seger had been grinding for the better part of a decade — regional hits in Michigan, a national near-miss or two, and a reputation as one of the hardest-working live acts in the Midwest. What he hadn’t had was a band built to last. The Silver Bullet Band changed that. On Seven, the lineup included Drew Abbott on lead guitar, Alto Reed on saxophone, Rick Manasa on organ and piano, Robyn Robins on Mellotron, Chris Campbell on bass, and Charlie Allen Martin on drums, with Seger himself on guitar and vocals — plus heavyweight Nashville guests including Jim McCarty on lead guitar, Charlie McCoy on rhythm guitar, David Briggs on piano, Tommy Cogbill on bass, and Kenny Buttrey on drums.
That personnel list tells you how seriously Seger took this record. He wasn’t just cutting another album; he was assembling an outfit. And “Get Out of Denver” was the audition tape and the mission statement in one: here is what this band sounds like when the tape is rolling and nobody is holding back. The guitars of Abbott and McCarty slash at each other, Reed’s sax answers Seger’s vocal like a second voice, and the rhythm section drives the whole thing like a getaway car with no brakes.
Two minutes and forty-four seconds of trouble
The song itself is a chase. The narrator is running — from Denver, from the law, from whatever went wrong the night before — and the music runs with him. There is no verse-chorus-verse architecture to admire, no bridge to catch your breath; it is all forward motion, the way the best roadhouse rock always is. Seger sings it the way he sang everything in those years: like a man who has played four sets a night in bars where the audience would let you know, immediately, if you were faking it.
What elevates it above a simple rave-up is the playing. This was a band discovering its own power in real time. Abbott’s lead guitar has a barbed, restless quality; Reed’s saxophone — the instrument that would become one of the Silver Bullet Band’s signatures — is already essential, not decorative. And underneath it all, the Nashville session muscle of players like Buttrey and Briggs gives the track a tightness that Seger’s earlier records sometimes lacked. It sounds like a band that knows it’s good and is in a hurry to prove it.
Detroit takes notice
The single’s national chart peak — number 80 — tells you almost nothing about its impact. In Detroit, “Get Out of Denver” got heavy airplay and became a genuine local anthem, the kind of record that bars and radio stations adopted as their own. Seger had always been a Michigan phenomenon first; this was the song that made the rest of the state’s rock fans feel like they were in on the secret.
The wider rock world noticed too. Around this period, Kiss invited Seger to open for them on tour — and after the first set, impressed by what they’d seen, asked him to stay on for the rest of the run. It’s easy to imagine “Get Out of Denver” doing the convincing: two minutes and forty-four seconds is all it takes to understand exactly what Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band were selling. The song became a fixture of Seger’s live shows — it would later appear on the legendary Live Bullet album, where the Detroit crowd’s roar tells you everything about what the song meant at home — and a longtime favorite among his most devoted fans.
What to listen for
Play it loud — there is no other way — and listen first to the guitars. Abbott and McCarty don’t so much solo as duel, trading stinging phrases while the rhythm section refuses to let up for a single bar. Then listen to Alto Reed’s saxophone answering Seger line for line; it’s the beginning of one of rock’s great singer-and-sax partnerships, and you can hear both men figuring out how much space to give each other.
Finally, listen to the whole of Seven with this track as its doorway. Everything Seger would become — the heartland poet of “Mainstreet,” the arena rocker of “Hollywood Nights,” the weary romantic of “Against the Wind” — starts here, in a 2:44 sprint out of Denver with a brand-new band at his back. The single stalled at number 80. The career it launched never stalled at all.