With “American Storm,” Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band delivered one of their signature songs and one of the most inventive music videos of the 1980s. The video, featuring footage by acclaimed director Brian De Palma, has premiered on YouTube today, 40 years after originally hitting MTV.
Seger released “American Storm” in 1986 as the lead single from his album Like A Rock. Acclaimed at the time as a prime example of Seger’s heartland rock style, the song was a No. 13 pop hit and climbed all the way to No. 2 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart. Years later, in his 2003 book Rock ‘n’ Roll Gold Rush: A Singles Un-cyclopedia, Maury Dean called it “one of the Top 38 Rock and Roll Songs of All Time,” comparing Seger’s vocal power to some of the greatest singers in rock history.
When it came time to create the “American Storm” music video, Seger took an unconventional approach. In the mid-’80s, MTV was flooded with music videos promoting songs from movie soundtracks, which mostly adhered to a similar formula in which scenes from the movie are interspersed with performance footage of the band. Think Duran Duran’s “A View To A Kill,” John Parr’s “St. Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion),” or Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero.” The “American Storm” video follows this formula, except it’s not connected to a real movie.
Seger hired Brian De Palma, the acclaimed director behind films like Scarface and Carrie, to create scenes from a fictional thriller starring Scott Glenn, Lesley Ann Warren, James Woods, Morgan Brittany, and Randy Quaid. These clips were then threaded in alongside performance footage of the Silver Bullet Band directed by Jim Yukich. De Palma’s footage does not skimp on Hollywood theatrics. There are explosions, gunshot wounds, and dramatic confrontations galore. The scenes were so believable as snippets from a new De Palma movie that many viewers assumed “American Storm” really was part of a movie soundtrack.
All these years later, “American Storm” video stands as “both a touchstone and highwater mark for soundtrack music videos even though it cannot accurately lay claim to such distinctions,” according to a 2021 retrospective by University of Central Florida professor Ty Matejowsky. Now, fans without their own hard copy of the video can finally see it again.
