Bob Seger - Smokin' OP's

From what I’ve been told, the early Bob Seger albums are supposed to be revelatory. For years, from several reliable sources, I’ve been encouraged to examine his first few albums to get a taste of Seger in his natural Motor City rocking mode.
So I chose Smokin’ OP’s, with little consideration for the non-too-clever title that translates into “smokin’ other people’s songs,” on the basis that this was his first album after being dropped by Capitol. He later returned to, and had enormous success with, that label, but it’s interesting to hear how he handled getting the boot.
How he addressed it was, to quote another Motor City group, to kick out the jams. Smokin’ OP’s is a very loose and rocking affair, filled with performances that were probably noteworthy back in their day.
On the other hand, there’s very little on Smokin’ OP’s to be noteworthy today. The arrangements are well rehearsed, but they do little to warrant the claim that they actually “smoke” the original versions.
It ends with a pair of Seger originals, “Someday” and “Heavy Music,” both legitimately good tracks but hardly revelatory; “Someday” tie-toes around the singer/songwriter phase that he pursued in the mid-70’s while “Heavy Music” mines the same path as “Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man” did during his early efforts.
When added together, Smokin’ OP’s is a decent document of a bar band at the top of their game, but hardly a release that would get you to think differently about Bob Seger.