Ex. 1. Here’s something similar to the famous stutter lick that begins the song. Rumor has it that someone in the engineer’s booth made a boo-boo and the band had to stop and start over. Bob Seger liked the resulting mistake so much that it made it onto vinyl, and into the lexicon of great rock piano licks. One lesson to learn from this lick, in case you haven’t spent a lot of time onstage with guitar players, is that even though the tune is in F# major, the lick walks down with an En. The minor seventh is usually implied on rock tunes, just as with the blues. Sometimes players get accustomed to working with major scales so much that their fingers want to gravitate to the E# (enharmonically spelled as F), which is the seventh tone of the F# major scale. You’ll find this works on the other two chords in the song as well: Instead of the corresponding major scale for each chord, use the corresponding Mixolydian mode.
Ex. 2. Billy Payne’s part throughout the song is a great example of how a piano can rock the house. Syncopation, I-IV chord movement, and octave lines that outline the dominant seventh harmonies make this much more interesting than a sustained rhythm on a single chord. Note the polychords in bar 4 and 5: The clash of IV over I is no problem when you’re rockin’!