Seger isn’t longing for the past but finding pleasure in the fact that he can carry it with him into the present that because of his age, distance has made his memories matter in a way they didn’t when he was younger. At its most acute, it’s about memory: not maudlin nostalgia but delight in the buried secrets of one’s own mind. Night Moves is about getting older and keeping faith with both the present and the past. It sold, received national FM airplay, made it possible for Seger to headline in some areas, and it’s likely that the strength of Night Moves is a direct result of the confidence and renewed ambition-commercial and artistic-that sometimes only a hit can bring. His music has taken shape, and the reason may be that last year Seger finally got that hit-when he wasn’t looking for it, with Live Bullet, intended merely as a time-filler between “real” LPs. There is raunch and there is subtlety Seger knows when to bear down and when to hold back, when to shout and when to murmur. Plenty of rock and rollers keep pushing for a decade and more after even a single national hit, but not many last 12 years, recording misses and playing the bottom of the bill, looking for the first one.Now, though, Seger has made a first-rate album, Night Moves (after seeing the Arthur Penn movie, Seger must have realized that’s a great title for anything), and it holds together as his career does not: there is a distinct sensibility here, songs no one else could have written, vocals no one else would have sung, themes no one else is dealing with on the title tune, the arrangement is so precise and unforced few could have conceived it. How do you make sense of a track record like that? The only common denominator is a distinct lack of commercial success outside of Seger’s home base in Detroit-even “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” was not a national smash-and the fact that Seger never gave up. His parting line is as clean and straight as rock and roll is supposed to be: “Oh baby, when you gonna learn?! Them folks uptown got bread to burn.” There was a ridiculous Dylan imitation in ’65, and just recently the dull screamer “Katmandu” and the arty “Beautiful Loser.” As the Beatles arrived there was a crude, impressive bit of fuzztonecalled “East Side Story,” which anticipated the teen melodramas of the Shangri-las with the tale of East Side Johnny Brown, who leaves home with a gun and doesn’t come back. Ten years ago he put out a sizzling antiwar rocker, “ 2+2=?,” a roar of fear and refusal tougher than any similar tune I know by the early ’70s he had sunk low enough to cover “Love the One You’re With,” but the same LP included perhaps the best version of “ Let It Rock” ever cut.

His career and his music lack shape, direction, a point of reference. The difference-one of them-is that while in Creedence Fogerty discovered a lost mother lode, mined it for all it was worth, and for a time set up his own town with the proceeds, Seger has spent the 12 years since the release of his first single staking small claims and sometimes jumping them.

Bob Seger has been compared to John Fogerty, and there is a surface resemblance: both are unpretentious rockers, both have good, rough voices, and neither has charisma.

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