The meaning behind Bob Seger’s 1977 soft rock hit “Mainstreet” is semi-autobiographical. As a songwriter, Seger frequently draws from his past, creating songs that echo his Midwest adolescence, and “Mainstreet” is among them. Opening with the ghostly cry of a piercing riff—tumbling through the slow-burning tune like debris down a deserted street—”Mainstreet” tells of an awakening, one that actually happened to the songwriter one night under the watchful glow of the Michigan moon.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Write What You Know…”
The “Main Street” that Seger sings of was actually just off Main Street in his hometown. Ann Arbor, Michigan’s Ann Street is where this story takes place.
“I grew up near that street corner,” Seger shared in an interview. “My older brother was a lot of trouble and I was not. My parents always called me ‘the good one’ and they said: ‘You’re the one we can trust.’ So at age 10, 11, 12, I was able to walk through Ann Arbor until midnight if I felt like it.”
[RELATED: Meaning Behind the Song: “Night Moves” by Bob Seger]
It was on those nights, wandering the city streets alone with a menagerie of midnight life on display all around, that something awakened within the young Seger.”There was a club, and this blues band from Chicago named Washboard Willie was playing there,” he explained. “In the window of this club there were people dancing, and occasionally there would be a beautiful girl dancing in the window.” This image would later give life to the verse of “Mainstreet.”
I remember standing on the corner at midnight
Trying to get my courage up
There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown
I loved to watch her do her stuff
Through the long lonely nights she filled my sleep
Her body softly swaying to that smoky beat
Down on Mainstreet
“The club was very lively, and to a 12, 13-year-old that was pretty cool,” Seger recalled. “I loved the groove because it’s Chicago blues, and the women are dancing and you’re starting to think the women are looking pretty good.” Further down “Mainstreet,” Seger begins to sing of pool halls, the hustlers and the losers, but a through line in the song is always the woman, swaying in and out of the lyrics as if off dancing with the melody.
In the pool halls, the hustlers and the losers
I used to watch ’em through the glass
Well I’d stand outside at closing time
Just to watch her walk on past
Unlike all the other ladies, she looked so young and sweet
As she made her way alone down that empty street
Down on Mainstreet
Yes, the woman in the song is a constant, but the musician’s awakening on those rambling nights wasn’t a sexual one. It was instead a musical awakening, informing his direction forward. “I would sit out there and watch through the window and listen to this great R&B,” he said. “I’m looking and I’m listening and thinking this is what I wanna do with my life.” That moment of epiphany is one he held on to, revisiting it in the song as if the street itself was the tether to that feeling.
And sometimes even now, when I’m feeling lonely and beat
I drift back in time and I find my feet
Down on Mainstreet
Down on Mainstreet
In a descent of Down on Mainstreets, “Mainstreet” comes to a close along with those bittersweet memories of youth. “What do they tell you about writing?” Seger said in the interview. “They say you have to write about what you know.”
Photo by Rob Verhorst/Redferns
