WCSX Classic Cuts : Old Time Rock and Roll
WCSX Classic Cuts
Bob Seger: “Old Time Rock and Roll”
The Hook: Seger wishes he gotten at least some of the songwriter’s credit.
Album: Stranger in Town
Year: 1978
Writers: George Jackson and Thomas E. Jones the Third
Stats: Peaked at number-28 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Background: Bob Seger recorded his cover of “Old Time Rock and Roll” by Southern songwriters George Jackson and Thomas E. Jones the Third in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but despite the record becoming a classic he says he has one regret about the way things went down.
Bob Seger on one regret he has about the way things went with his cover of “Old Time Rock and Roll,” which is credited to George Jackson and Thomas E. Jones the Third. OC:…I kept. :30
“I rewrote the verses, because I thought they were kind of corny, but it was the last song we put on Stranger in Town and we didn’t have a whole lot of time to mess with it, so I said, ‘Just keep the royalties.’ I wish I’d never done that. Because if I’d just even asked for ten percent of it or something, they wouldn’t have been able to make Wendy’s commercials with it and stuff like that, which we had no approval over at all, because they owned the copyright. But I feel like I helped write the song. I rewrote the verses, the only thing I really kept was ‘Old time rock and roll soothes the soul’ and ‘Take the records off the shelf.’ That’s all I kept.”
