Songoftheday 10/10/12 - Until you've been beside a man, you don't know what he wants...

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band - "Shame On The Moon"
from the album The Distance (1982)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #2 (four weeks)
Weeks in the top-40: 19

Today's Song of the Day is by Michigan native Bob Seger, who played in various rock bands in the Detroit area before making his first impression on Canadian radio with the minor hit "Heavy Music" in 1967 with a band named the Bob Seger System on Cameo-Parkway records (Chubby Checker's label). A year later the System signed to Capitol and broke through to the States with "Ramblin' Gamblin' Man", which went to the top-20 on the US pop chart.

After letting go of the System and trudging on for a half-decade without any big success but with a local following, Seger put together the Silver Bullet Band in the mid-70s, and in 1976 came back in a big way with his #4 pop hit "Night Moves", which kicked off five years of A-lister success, with four consecutive top-10 albums and nine more top-40 hits, including another that matched "Night Moves'" success, "Still The Same". In 1981, his live album Nine Tonight scored him a #2 rock radio hit with "Tryin' To Live My Life Without You".

In 1982, after shuffling his crew again, and stealing musicians from Bruce Springsteen and the Eagles' backing bands, Seger released The Distance, his 12th album at Christmastime. The first single released from the set was the epitomy of understatement, a gentle and sparse cover of Rodney Crowell's album track "Shame On The Moon". Here's Rodney's original...

Seger's version doesn't stray far from the original, in fact making it more serene, making it seem like it was recorded in the night in the American desert. He even bucked the system by not releasing a video for the song for MTV to guzzle up, keeping the integrity of the work going. Glenn Frey sings backup on this, and Jimmy Iovine produced...

The song was too sedate for rock radio, but it was a #1 hit on the adult-contemporary (soft-rock) chart, and even made the top-20 on the country chart. And on the pop chart it held the runner-up spot for a month, playing second fiddle to Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean". And five years later, he used the completely opposite approach to get a #1 single.

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The same year, Dallas country singer Karen Brooks covered the song on her debut album...

Up tomorrow: Bette Davis seems to forget...