Turn The Page (Original Studio Cut)

"Turn the Page" is a song originally recorded by Bob Seger in 1971 and released on his Back in '72 album in 1973. It was not released as a single until Seger's live version of the song on the 1976 Live Bullet album got released in Germany and the UK. The song became a mainstay of album-oriented rock radio stations, and still gets significant airplay on classic rock stations.
Inspiration

"Turn the Page" is about the emotional and social ups and downs of a rock musician's life on the road. Seger wrote it in 1972 while touring with Teegarden & Van Winkle. Drummer David Teegarden (of Teegarden & Van Winkle and later the Silver Bullet Band) recalls:

We had been playing somewhere in the Midwest, or the northern reaches, on our way to North or South Dakota. [Guitarist] Mike Bruce was with us. We'd been traveling all night from the Detroit area to make this gig, driving in this blinding snowstorm. It was probably 3 in the morning. Mike decided it was time to get gas. He was slowing down to exit the interstate and spied a truck stop. We all had very long hair back then – it was the hippie era – but Skip, Mike and Bob had all stuffed their hair up in their hats. You had to be careful out on the road like that, because you'd get ostracized. When I walked in, there was this gauntlet of truckers making comments – "Is that a girl or man?" I was seething; those guys were laughing their asses off, a big funny joke. That next night, after we played our gig – I think it was Mitchell, S.D. – Seger says, "Hey, I've been working on this song for a bit, I've got this new line for it. He played it on acoustic guitar, and there was that line: "Oh, the same old cliches / 'Is that a woman or a man?' " It was "Turn the Page."

Tom Weschler, then road manager for Seger, remembers the same incident:

"Turn the Page," Bob's great road song, came along in '72, while we were driving home from a gig. I think we were in Dubuque, Iowa, in winter and stopped at a restaurant. We stood out when we entered a store or a gas station or a restaurant en masse. At this restaurant it was particularly bright inside, so there weren't any dark corners to hide in. All these local guys were looking at us like, "What are these guys? Is that a woman or a man?" – just like in the song. ... That was one incident, but there were so many others on the road that led Seger to write that song.

Seger said of the song:

I never thought that song would last as long as it has. That’s one of the songs we must play or people get very agitated. If we don’t play that the fans are definitely disappointed.

That song captured something. I wrote "Turn The Page" in 1971. It was the eight or ninth year of that 10-year period where I was going nowhere fast. We’d been harassed at a truck stop in Wisconsin at two in the morning by some salesmen who kept calling us “girls” because we all had long hair. So we left because we didn’t want to get into a fight and become some police report. The next night I’m sitting there singing:
‘On a long and lonesome highway, east of Omaha.
You can listen to the engine moanin’ out it’s one-note song…
You can think about the woman...
Or the girl you knew the night before.

Well you walk into a restaurant all strung out from the road.
And you feel the eyes upon you as you’re shakin’ off the cold.
You pretend it doesn’t bother you but you just want to explode….’

I was thinking about how these people hate you because of the way you look, and how unreasonable it is. That became part of it. But the bigger thing, I think, was the real weariness of the road, and I tried to capture that. I think I captured it for truck drivers. I think I captured it for traveling businessmen. And I think I just captured it for people who have to travel a lot and just plain miss home or family or both.

While on tour in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on November 16, 2006, promoting his 16th studio album Face the Promise, Seger said he wrote the song in a hotel room in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

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