One night in the spring of 2007, when I was thirteen, my little brother and I cupped our hands to our upstairs hallway window, looked through the cigar smoke in our backyard, and tried to find Steve Miller. There was a grown-up party swirling around outside, but we couldn’t figure out which adult was the celebrity guest. We’d learned every Steve Miller Band classic rock hit from 93.3 The Bone, but we had no idea what the guy looked like. The albums we owned either had a painting of Pegasus or a man in a Joker mask on the cover, and every male standing in our backyard looked like he worked in real estate development.
Steve Miller had attended the Dallas all-boys school St. Mark’s fifty years before we did, and he was back to play its hundredth birthday concert. Our house was near campus, and St. Mark’s borrowed our yard for his welcome dinner. We were bummed we couldn’t spot the famous guy mingling with everyone else, but after a few hours of gawking, my brother and I were allowed to come down and say good-night. We walked outside, and our parents tilted their heads toward the blazered man who could sign our CD copy of Greatest Hits 1974–78.
He was the one who looked the most at home with a cigar. Even though he was sixty-something years old, his hair was longer, featherier, more swooped and tangled than the dad cuts at the party. We walked up, and he blew out smoke and grinned. “When I was your age,” he told us, “I was already a working musician! I wrote out professional contracts, and I paid my brother to drive us to gigs at frat parties.” Not to be one-upped, I told him my band had recorded four songs and was a fixture on the bar mitzvah circuit. His grin widened, and he asked if I had two guitars I could bring outside.
I did, and my brother brought his bass. Mr. Steve—he said he wasn’t comfortable with “Mr. Miller”—left the donors’ table to play music on the porch with two middle schoolers. My brother sat down and thumped out a rhythm. Mr. Steve laid down some chords, and I tried to show off. I played some blues licks, the only kind of guitar licks I sort of knew how to play. I ran up the pentatonic scale like my uncle had taught me, hammered a Freddie King riff, and watched Mr. Steve’s eyes light up a bit.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was crudely speaking the same vocabulary that he’d used to build his career. Before he rejoined the adults, he showed me a chord progression the great Texas blues musician T-Bone Walker had taught him when Mr. Steve was my age, and then my parents made me go to bed.
But before I left, he extended an invitation: He was headlining the school centennial concert, which was being held on our football field the next day, and he asked if I wanted to watch the sound check. Yes, I said, I did.Thirteen-year-old Max Marshall (background) and his eleven-year-old brother, Charlie, playing with Miller on their back porch the night they first met him, in 2007.
The following afternoon, from the side of the stage, I watched Mr. Steve twist knobs on his amp for twelve minutes. He said he was chasing a perfect high-end tone. He walked up to the mic and kicked off “Fly Like an Eagle.” Halfway through the song, he spoke into the P.A., “Mr. Max, come up and play a solo.” He handed me his guitar. Between the band members, my family, the sound technicians, the groundskeeping crew, and assorted onlookers, there were maybe a few dozen people there—my third or fourth biggest crowd ever. I tried to imagine I was still on the porch, and I played the same licks as I had the night before. The song ended, and Mr. Steve asked if I wanted to sit in with his band that night at the concert.
I was bummed, because I had to decline. I was going to be a groomsman at my childhood nanny’s wedding that night, and it started at six. I told Mr. Steve thank you and asked if maybe we could play together at St. Mark’s 125th birthday. He said sure—but if I arranged things right, maybe I’d be able to make the 100th, too.
Thanks to my mom’s willingness to drive her Toyota Highlander at illegal speeds, I did. That evening, after the wedding ceremony, I walked a bridesmaid out of the chapel, changed out of my tuxedo in the car, and made it onstage while Steve and a band of St. Mark’s high schoolers began “Fly Like an Eagle.” I didn’t have a guitar, so I stood behind them and looked out at the hundreds of people gathered in the audience. After the second verse, Mr. Steve unstrapped his Fender Stratocaster and handed it to me. Take a solo! Biting the left side of my tongue, I stared at my tennis shoes and played the same licks I’d played the previous night in my backyard, and at sound check earlier that day. I gave him back the guitar about two minutes after he had lent it to me. The song ended, and I walked offstage and made it back to the wedding reception in time for cake.
Driving around Dallas–Fort Worth in the early aughts, it was hard to miss hearing the Steve Miller Band’s seventies hits. Stuck on the LBJ Freeway or gunning down the tollway, my parents would flip between 92.5 KZPS and 93.3 The Bone, DFW’s nearly identical classic rock stations. Each station played a narrow rotation of songs that rarely reached past the early eighties, soon after people started burning disco records. Before I was out of a car seat, I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t bothered by Watergate, what portion of the night AC/DC got shook, and what Steve Miller had to say about the “pompatus of love.”
I remember multiple childhood car rides during which we’d toggle stations and discover that 92.5 and 93.3 were playing the same Steve Miller track at the same time. Songs like “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Rock’n Me,” and four or five others felt like they were always there, riding some permanent radio wave. I didn’t mind. I grew to dig the sweet pastoral harmonies, the laid-back grooves, the trillion-dollar hooks. With militant ambition and a light touch, Miller wove psych rock, Texas blues, country music, and other threads into escapist, inescapable pop.
But though I’d heard so much of Steve Miller’s music, I didn’t know anything about Miller himself. His songs dance around any sense of biography: “The Joker,” after all, is a fictional list of alter egos—and “Steve Miller” the man is as elusive as his singles are ubiquitous. I don’t think I ever saw his face on TV or in magazines. (I wasn’t alone: one time, I was told, a security guard in Las Vegas wouldn’t let Steve onto his own stage without seeing a pass.) His name doesn’t come up in too many conversations either; many people never realize that all these songs belong to one guy.
Growing up, I didn’t know any of the music Steve Miller made before or after his hit parade. He released his first album fifty years ago and his most recent one in 2011, but KZPS and The Bone mostly played songs from 1974 to 1978. As a result, I didn’t know that Mr. Steve had recorded a 1967 live LP with Chuck Berry. I hadn’t learned that Les Paul—the jazz-and-standards legend and co-inventor of the solid-body electric guitar—was his godfather and mentor. (Steve’s father, a doctor and recording equipment enthusiast, was the best man at Paul’s wedding—which was held in the Miller home—and Paul and his bride, Mary Ford, spent their honeymoon in Steve’s parents’ bedroom.) I had no idea that when Steve was about nine years old, T-Bone Walker—a guest at his parents’ house—taught him to play guitar behind his back. Or that he had been a major figure in the sixties San Francisco psych rock boom. Or that he had opened a few of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s last shows. I didn’t know that he had the foresight to control his own publishing when that was an unusual thing to do; I didn’t know what publishing was. I didn’t understand what it took to do all of that stuff, and I didn’t know why he wanted to show me how to do any of it, either. (...)
The Steve Miller Band visits forty to fifty cities each tour, and they play roughly twenty songs a show. (Their 2018 tour, which will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Steve’s first album, hits San Antonio, Allen, Sugar Land, and Austin in late July.) Since at least the nineties, the band hasn’t been able to leave town without playing “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Swingtown,” “Rock’n Me,” “Abracadabra,” “Jungle Love,” and a few other greatest hits. In the remaining slots, they squeeze in obscurities from new albums, or jazz standards featuring Steve’s cigar-smoke legato voice, or Texas blues songs that let him wail on the guitar. The problem is, when Steve announces a song that’s not chocolate cake, hundreds of people get up for a hot dog. So, halfway through that set in Houston, he didn’t say, “We’re going to take a break from radio hits and play four blues covers”; he just asked the crowd to help welcome to the stage a fourteen-year-old kid from the great state of Texas.
I walked out, plugged into a Dr. Z amp, and helped kick off “Mercury Blues,” a song first recorded by the K. C. Douglas Trio in 1948. Things immediately felt different than they had at sound check. A few hours earlier, I had been standing under daylight, with my guitar echoing off empty seats. Now the stage was a fish tank. The spotlights beat down on me, and I couldn’t see beyond the first couple of rows. I turned to the band for some signals, but on a stage that can fit a symphony orchestra, the seven guys dressed in black disappeared behind a row of towering purple stage columns. Any sound roaring from the main speakers got absorbed by thousands of bodies, and the stage was so quiet I could hear my pick clacking the strings. (...)
A decade or so after that night, people ask me, “Are you still doing music?” I say yes, and in a way, it’s the truth; I still play guitar and write songs. But in the way that they mean—performing onstage and trying to make it—the honest answer has faded to no.
At one point, it looked like things might turn out differently. In 2008, when I was in New York City for summer vacation before my freshman year of high school, Steve invited me to play with him and Les Paul. It was a minor show, a Monday gig at a Times Square jazz club, but I got stage fright knocking on Paul’s greenroom door. Inside was my mentor’s own mentor, the guy who taught Steve his first chords. I walked in, and 93-year-old Les Paul looked up from the sofa. “What kind of music do you play, kid?” I wobbled out an answer, and his eyes got small. “The blues? Kid, anybody can play the fucking blues!” When we got on stage, Les grinned, Steve grinned, and I coated my Gibson Les Paul with sweat. They played thirteenth chords and weird textures and led me away from the blues. After the show, some guy from the crowd asked me to sign his guitar. As I told the Dallas Morning News two years later, when they wrote an article about my friendship with Steve, “In some ways, I’m getting the same treatment from Steve that he got from Les. It’s a cool opportunity.”
But I eventually botched my cool opportunity. I spent a good chunk of high school flying to Sun Valley to record my songs, but by the time I showed up in New York for college orientation, in 2012, I barely mentioned to people that I played guitar. Fear and laziness had killed my music routine, and I hadn’t talked to Steve in a year. He was grieving the deaths of some close friends (including Les, who died a year after I’d met him), and I was trying to be a normal freshman. Being Steve’s mentee had put me under the spotlight and in his shadow, two places where I wasn’t confident enough to stand.
No longer a naive fourteen-year-old, I couldn’t black out and play under stage lights without thinking. Becoming aware of how I looked and sounded robbed me of my blind confidence. By the time Wikipedia listed me as a member of the Steve Miller Band (an error that was eventually corrected), I knew I was being defined in terms I’d fail by. I wasn’t a member of his band, and I was never going to make itlike he did. On some level, I wouldn’t make it like he did because musicians my age had come along too late to surf classic rock’s never-ending radio wave. Mostly, though, I wouldn’t make it like he did because I didn’t have it like he did.
When I started playing music, I thought the it in having it was some glowing X factor that famous musicians receive at birth. And when talent and undeserved privilege dropped me onto a big stage at a young age, I thought I had it. Then I looked under the hood of a successful music career. Five decades after Steve Miller released his first LP, he still practices singing on his bus, extends sound checks to the point of exhaustion, and pulls all-nighters to overdub thirty-second guitar parts. Steve’s mentorship taught me something that I didn’t want to learn: it isn’t a quality that you’re given but a question of how much you’re willing to give. Whether you want to make high art or big-money chocolate cake, you have to be monomaniacally committed to getting there. You won’t create music that’s effortless or individual without giving your effort or yourself completely to it. And by that definition, Steve has it, and I clearly never did.
Steve Miller had attended the Dallas all-boys school St. Mark’s fifty years before we did, and he was back to play its hundredth birthday concert. Our house was near campus, and St. Mark’s borrowed our yard for his welcome dinner. We were bummed we couldn’t spot the famous guy mingling with everyone else, but after a few hours of gawking, my brother and I were allowed to come down and say good-night. We walked outside, and our parents tilted their heads toward the blazered man who could sign our CD copy of Greatest Hits 1974–78.
He was the one who looked the most at home with a cigar. Even though he was sixty-something years old, his hair was longer, featherier, more swooped and tangled than the dad cuts at the party. We walked up, and he blew out smoke and grinned. “When I was your age,” he told us, “I was already a working musician! I wrote out professional contracts, and I paid my brother to drive us to gigs at frat parties.” Not to be one-upped, I told him my band had recorded four songs and was a fixture on the bar mitzvah circuit. His grin widened, and he asked if I had two guitars I could bring outside.I did, and my brother brought his bass. Mr. Steve—he said he wasn’t comfortable with “Mr. Miller”—left the donors’ table to play music on the porch with two middle schoolers. My brother sat down and thumped out a rhythm. Mr. Steve laid down some chords, and I tried to show off. I played some blues licks, the only kind of guitar licks I sort of knew how to play. I ran up the pentatonic scale like my uncle had taught me, hammered a Freddie King riff, and watched Mr. Steve’s eyes light up a bit.
I didn’t realize it then, but I was crudely speaking the same vocabulary that he’d used to build his career. Before he rejoined the adults, he showed me a chord progression the great Texas blues musician T-Bone Walker had taught him when Mr. Steve was my age, and then my parents made me go to bed.
But before I left, he extended an invitation: He was headlining the school centennial concert, which was being held on our football field the next day, and he asked if I wanted to watch the sound check. Yes, I said, I did.Thirteen-year-old Max Marshall (background) and his eleven-year-old brother, Charlie, playing with Miller on their back porch the night they first met him, in 2007.
The following afternoon, from the side of the stage, I watched Mr. Steve twist knobs on his amp for twelve minutes. He said he was chasing a perfect high-end tone. He walked up to the mic and kicked off “Fly Like an Eagle.” Halfway through the song, he spoke into the P.A., “Mr. Max, come up and play a solo.” He handed me his guitar. Between the band members, my family, the sound technicians, the groundskeeping crew, and assorted onlookers, there were maybe a few dozen people there—my third or fourth biggest crowd ever. I tried to imagine I was still on the porch, and I played the same licks as I had the night before. The song ended, and Mr. Steve asked if I wanted to sit in with his band that night at the concert.
I was bummed, because I had to decline. I was going to be a groomsman at my childhood nanny’s wedding that night, and it started at six. I told Mr. Steve thank you and asked if maybe we could play together at St. Mark’s 125th birthday. He said sure—but if I arranged things right, maybe I’d be able to make the 100th, too.
Thanks to my mom’s willingness to drive her Toyota Highlander at illegal speeds, I did. That evening, after the wedding ceremony, I walked a bridesmaid out of the chapel, changed out of my tuxedo in the car, and made it onstage while Steve and a band of St. Mark’s high schoolers began “Fly Like an Eagle.” I didn’t have a guitar, so I stood behind them and looked out at the hundreds of people gathered in the audience. After the second verse, Mr. Steve unstrapped his Fender Stratocaster and handed it to me. Take a solo! Biting the left side of my tongue, I stared at my tennis shoes and played the same licks I’d played the previous night in my backyard, and at sound check earlier that day. I gave him back the guitar about two minutes after he had lent it to me. The song ended, and I walked offstage and made it back to the wedding reception in time for cake.
Driving around Dallas–Fort Worth in the early aughts, it was hard to miss hearing the Steve Miller Band’s seventies hits. Stuck on the LBJ Freeway or gunning down the tollway, my parents would flip between 92.5 KZPS and 93.3 The Bone, DFW’s nearly identical classic rock stations. Each station played a narrow rotation of songs that rarely reached past the early eighties, soon after people started burning disco records. Before I was out of a car seat, I knew that Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t bothered by Watergate, what portion of the night AC/DC got shook, and what Steve Miller had to say about the “pompatus of love.”
I remember multiple childhood car rides during which we’d toggle stations and discover that 92.5 and 93.3 were playing the same Steve Miller track at the same time. Songs like “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Rock’n Me,” and four or five others felt like they were always there, riding some permanent radio wave. I didn’t mind. I grew to dig the sweet pastoral harmonies, the laid-back grooves, the trillion-dollar hooks. With militant ambition and a light touch, Miller wove psych rock, Texas blues, country music, and other threads into escapist, inescapable pop.
But though I’d heard so much of Steve Miller’s music, I didn’t know anything about Miller himself. His songs dance around any sense of biography: “The Joker,” after all, is a fictional list of alter egos—and “Steve Miller” the man is as elusive as his singles are ubiquitous. I don’t think I ever saw his face on TV or in magazines. (I wasn’t alone: one time, I was told, a security guard in Las Vegas wouldn’t let Steve onto his own stage without seeing a pass.) His name doesn’t come up in too many conversations either; many people never realize that all these songs belong to one guy.
Growing up, I didn’t know any of the music Steve Miller made before or after his hit parade. He released his first album fifty years ago and his most recent one in 2011, but KZPS and The Bone mostly played songs from 1974 to 1978. As a result, I didn’t know that Mr. Steve had recorded a 1967 live LP with Chuck Berry. I hadn’t learned that Les Paul—the jazz-and-standards legend and co-inventor of the solid-body electric guitar—was his godfather and mentor. (Steve’s father, a doctor and recording equipment enthusiast, was the best man at Paul’s wedding—which was held in the Miller home—and Paul and his bride, Mary Ford, spent their honeymoon in Steve’s parents’ bedroom.) I had no idea that when Steve was about nine years old, T-Bone Walker—a guest at his parents’ house—taught him to play guitar behind his back. Or that he had been a major figure in the sixties San Francisco psych rock boom. Or that he had opened a few of Janis Joplin’s and Jimi Hendrix’s last shows. I didn’t know that he had the foresight to control his own publishing when that was an unusual thing to do; I didn’t know what publishing was. I didn’t understand what it took to do all of that stuff, and I didn’t know why he wanted to show me how to do any of it, either. (...)
The Steve Miller Band visits forty to fifty cities each tour, and they play roughly twenty songs a show. (Their 2018 tour, which will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Steve’s first album, hits San Antonio, Allen, Sugar Land, and Austin in late July.) Since at least the nineties, the band hasn’t been able to leave town without playing “Take the Money and Run,” “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Swingtown,” “Rock’n Me,” “Abracadabra,” “Jungle Love,” and a few other greatest hits. In the remaining slots, they squeeze in obscurities from new albums, or jazz standards featuring Steve’s cigar-smoke legato voice, or Texas blues songs that let him wail on the guitar. The problem is, when Steve announces a song that’s not chocolate cake, hundreds of people get up for a hot dog. So, halfway through that set in Houston, he didn’t say, “We’re going to take a break from radio hits and play four blues covers”; he just asked the crowd to help welcome to the stage a fourteen-year-old kid from the great state of Texas.
I walked out, plugged into a Dr. Z amp, and helped kick off “Mercury Blues,” a song first recorded by the K. C. Douglas Trio in 1948. Things immediately felt different than they had at sound check. A few hours earlier, I had been standing under daylight, with my guitar echoing off empty seats. Now the stage was a fish tank. The spotlights beat down on me, and I couldn’t see beyond the first couple of rows. I turned to the band for some signals, but on a stage that can fit a symphony orchestra, the seven guys dressed in black disappeared behind a row of towering purple stage columns. Any sound roaring from the main speakers got absorbed by thousands of bodies, and the stage was so quiet I could hear my pick clacking the strings. (...)
A decade or so after that night, people ask me, “Are you still doing music?” I say yes, and in a way, it’s the truth; I still play guitar and write songs. But in the way that they mean—performing onstage and trying to make it—the honest answer has faded to no.
At one point, it looked like things might turn out differently. In 2008, when I was in New York City for summer vacation before my freshman year of high school, Steve invited me to play with him and Les Paul. It was a minor show, a Monday gig at a Times Square jazz club, but I got stage fright knocking on Paul’s greenroom door. Inside was my mentor’s own mentor, the guy who taught Steve his first chords. I walked in, and 93-year-old Les Paul looked up from the sofa. “What kind of music do you play, kid?” I wobbled out an answer, and his eyes got small. “The blues? Kid, anybody can play the fucking blues!” When we got on stage, Les grinned, Steve grinned, and I coated my Gibson Les Paul with sweat. They played thirteenth chords and weird textures and led me away from the blues. After the show, some guy from the crowd asked me to sign his guitar. As I told the Dallas Morning News two years later, when they wrote an article about my friendship with Steve, “In some ways, I’m getting the same treatment from Steve that he got from Les. It’s a cool opportunity.”
But I eventually botched my cool opportunity. I spent a good chunk of high school flying to Sun Valley to record my songs, but by the time I showed up in New York for college orientation, in 2012, I barely mentioned to people that I played guitar. Fear and laziness had killed my music routine, and I hadn’t talked to Steve in a year. He was grieving the deaths of some close friends (including Les, who died a year after I’d met him), and I was trying to be a normal freshman. Being Steve’s mentee had put me under the spotlight and in his shadow, two places where I wasn’t confident enough to stand.
No longer a naive fourteen-year-old, I couldn’t black out and play under stage lights without thinking. Becoming aware of how I looked and sounded robbed me of my blind confidence. By the time Wikipedia listed me as a member of the Steve Miller Band (an error that was eventually corrected), I knew I was being defined in terms I’d fail by. I wasn’t a member of his band, and I was never going to make itlike he did. On some level, I wouldn’t make it like he did because musicians my age had come along too late to surf classic rock’s never-ending radio wave. Mostly, though, I wouldn’t make it like he did because I didn’t have it like he did.
When I started playing music, I thought the it in having it was some glowing X factor that famous musicians receive at birth. And when talent and undeserved privilege dropped me onto a big stage at a young age, I thought I had it. Then I looked under the hood of a successful music career. Five decades after Steve Miller released his first LP, he still practices singing on his bus, extends sound checks to the point of exhaustion, and pulls all-nighters to overdub thirty-second guitar parts. Steve’s mentorship taught me something that I didn’t want to learn: it isn’t a quality that you’re given but a question of how much you’re willing to give. Whether you want to make high art or big-money chocolate cake, you have to be monomaniacally committed to getting there. You won’t create music that’s effortless or individual without giving your effort or yourself completely to it. And by that definition, Steve has it, and I clearly never did.
by Max Marshall, Texas Monthly | Read more:
Image: Max Marshall
