The Steve Miller Band, famous since the early '70s for hits including "The Joker," "Rock'n Me," "Jet Airliner," "Take the Money and Run," "Fly Like an Eagle" and "Abracadabra," has all the earmarks of a rock star group - "large and loyal followings" and songs that people enjoy so much that they have memorized the lyrics and can easily sing along.
When the band takes the main stage Saturday night, Aug. 8, at 9 p.m., fans can expect to hear the Steve Miller classics they have come to love.
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"I'll say during a show that we've recorded some new music and that I'd like to play some songs, and I'll see 5,000 people leave to go get a hot dog," Miller remarked. "And they won't come back until . . . ."
He's not offended. In fact, he loves the band's classic songs as much as anyone.
"I've never gotten tired of 'The Joker,' " Miller told The Chicago Sun Times for an interview last summer. "I hope to be singing it when I'm 100. It's such a fun song to watch the audience response."
At the Feet of Giants
Steve Miller was born Oct. 5, 1943, in Milwaukee, Wis. His mother, Bertha, was a jazz-influenced singer who enjoyed playing piano and harmonizing with her two sisters; their three brothers were active as performers on guitar, banjo, and violin. And his father, Dr. George Miller, mixed his successful practice as a pathologist with a deep interest in music, from the technical as well as artistic perspectives.
Shortly after World War II, Dr. Miller invested in a Magnacorder, an early pro-quality tape recorder, and set it up at home. A frequent customer at local jazz clubs, he struck up friendships with many of the headliners as they passed through town. Some of Steve's earliest memories are of his father bringing a succession of musical giants - Charles Mingus, Tal Farlow, Red Norvo - home for dinner and an informal recording session.
One visitor made an especially important impact. When guitar innovator Les Paul and his fiance Mary Ford were first putting their act together, they got to know Dr. Miller when he offered to record them during their six-week run at a Milwaukee nightclub. During their visits to the Miller home to check out these recordings, Paul offered to show Steve some chords on a Gibson guitar that Steve's uncle Dale had given him.
Just 5 years old, the young acolyte proved eager to learn. This encounter would cement a friendship that exists between the Millers and Les Paul to this day.
In 1950 the Miller family moved to Dallas. For Steve, this relocation marked another next step in his musical awareness. His father took him out to hear different kinds of performers who typically came to Milwaukee - country luminaries like Okee Jones, Reilly Crabtree, and the immortal Hank Williams, as well as Chuck Berry, the Clovers, Carl Perkins, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, the first of the rock and roll vanguard.
More importantly, Dr. Miller kept inviting musicians over for evenings of conversation and recording. As a budding guitarist, Steve was particularly drawn to T-Bone Walker, the father of Texas-style electric blues. Wisely, Steve's father let him stay home from school one day to watch Walker lay down tracks. This experience left a permanent imprint; from this point, the blues would insert itself into everything Steve played and chart the course of his development on guitar.
Schooled in the Blues
After graduating from Woodrow Wilson High School, Miller moved up to Madison, Wis., to begin working on a bachelor's degree in comparative literature at the University of Wisconsin. After spending the summer of '64 writing songs, Miller left to spend his first semester as a senior studying literature at the University of Copenhagen. On coming back to the States he took a few days to relax in Chicago.
Shortly after blowing into town, he caught the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at a club gig. Though just six credits shy of graduating, Miller left school, moved to Chicago that fall and started picking up session work for Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Howlin' Wolf - the leaders of the most dynamic blues scene in the world.
In '65 he joined with keyboardist Barry Goldberg to form the World War Three Band, which soon became the Miller-Goldberg Blues Band. An A&R scout from Epic, won over after hearing them at Big John's, offered them a deal, and in short order the Miller-Goldberg Blues Band had released a single, "The Mother Song" b/w "More Soul Than Soulful," and earned a guest shot on the TV hit music series "Hullabaloo."
Western Adventures
The momentum from "Hullabaloo" carried the group eastward, where they replaced the Young Rascals as house band at a hot Manhattan nightspot. Chasing down sets by Bob Dylan, the Lovin' Spoonful, and other trendsetters on his nights off, Miller was excited, only to be let down when he went back to Chicago and found the blues scene suddenly and inexplicably expired.
Miller rushed to his manager's office, only to find it shut down. With that, the band dissolved, and Miller went back to Dallas.
He drifted to Austin with hopes of studying music at the University of Texas but his application was turned down. Miller took that as a hint to break completely with his past.
Rumors were spreading of something going on out in San Francisco - an emergent music scene unlike any other, based as much on lifestyle as on performance. Figuring he had nothing to lose, Miller sold his books, bought a beat-up Volkswagen Microbus, and hit the interstate toward the Bay Area.
On his very first day in San Francisco, he pulled out his last $5 for a ticket to hear the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore Auditorium. When Butterfield invited his Chicago colleague to jam on a couple of songs, Miller took to the stage and played with an intensity that roused the beatific crowd into an ovation. Impulsively, he ventured over the microphone that he had decided to stick around and join the local action; when this provoked an even bigger reaction, Miller decided this actually wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Throughout the last months of 1966 Miller assembled a band whose sound would be as eclectic as anything else in San Francisco, but whose professionalism owed more to the real world of hard-core gigs than from the addled aesthetic of psychedelia. He summoned guitarist James "Curley" Cook and drummer Tim Davis, whose bands had battled Miller's for jobs in Wisconsin, brought in local bassist Lonnie Turner, took them all into a basement beneath the Architecture building at UC Berkeley, and started rehearsing.
They called themselves the Steve Miller Blues Band.
They unveiled the act toward the end of the year, at the Matrix in San Francisco. They built a following playing shows with acts like the Doors, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Butterfield and Chuck Berry.
Miller's childhood friend Boz Scaggs joined the band as Cooke departed. The group adopted a more abbreviated and elegant handle, the Steve Miller Band. By this time, the buzz about these guys was rattling throughout the music industry. Asked to contribute to the soundtrack for a bit of period cinema called "Revolution," the Miller Band caught the ear of Jann Wenner, a young local scribe who was just getting his new magazine out the door. In the 15th weekly issue of Rolling Stone, Wenner skipped past songs by Quicksilver and Mother Earth to single out the Miller Band's three tracks as "the best stuff on the album."
Following these clues, Alan Livingston, president of Capitol Records, made it clear that he saw even greater possibilities ahead for the group.
Miller also knew that he had a good thing going and, having already paid business dues as a preteen band booker, he knew how to make it even better. After some serious negotiation, the Steve Miller Band signed a contract with Capitol that was way ahead of its time in terms of artist rights and remuneration: In exchange for a five-album commitment, they would receive an unprecedented advance of $50,000 from the label while retaining complete ownership of publishing and artistic control. Capitol was only too glad to oblige - in fact, they didn't mind the full-page ad in Rolling Stone in March 1968 that ran a portrait of Miller beneath the headline: "Capitol Records paid him $50,000 and you probably don't even know who he is." Soon everyone did.
Hits Keep Comin'
The Steve Miller Band made its first recording in October 1967 with a Barry Goldberg tune, "Sittin' in Circles." Three months later, they boarded the U.S.S. United States and sailed to the U.K. to complete their first Capitol album, Children of the Future.
The Steve Miller Band recorded several more albums - Sailor, Brave, Your Saving Grace, Number Five, Rock Love, Recall the Beginning, A Journey From Eden - before earning their first No. 1 hit in 1973 with "The Joker," on the album of the same name.
Before the end of the year the album would be certified as gold. Packed with concise, catchy material, and sharpened by a residual bluesy edge in both writing and performance, The Joker marks the Miller Band's move toward a more economic, modern sensibility, one that would pay off through more massive fan support than ever.
From there the hits continued to flow.
At concerts, the Steve Miller Band introduced innovations like rear-screen projection, quad sound, laser sculptures that later became standard practice at rock extravaganzas. By the end of 1978, the Miller Band had racked up more than 9 million album sales and delivered some 300 shows throughout North America and Europe in just a little more than a year.
In 1982, the Miller Band scored another hit with "Abracadabra," lauded for its "effervescent melodies" and tagged "pretty damn irresistible" by Allmusic.com. It peaked at No. 3 and broke the platinum barrier as the title cut soared to the top of the singles chart.
"Abracadabra" was the band's last big hit. New wave, punk and heavy metal music took over in popularity, and Miller thought his career was over. He even tried retirement, but found that he missed the stage and playing music for people.
Today the Steve Miller Band's legacy is one of enduring currency. They continue to draw large and loyal followings at landmark concerts, and the public continues to buy their music.
So this train evidently still rolls.
