Steve Miller

Steve Miller Shares the Stories Behind His Greatest Hits (Parade)

Image: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

[ed. Quite a musical life, right there at the ascendance of the Chicago blues scene and widely respected by Muddy Waters, Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf, Charlie Musselwhite, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield, et al. See also: Born In Chicago (NYT).]

Five decades ago, in the summer of 1973, a nervous Steve Miller entered the studio to record an album he thought might very well bring his career to a close. By that point he had released seven worthy albums that only attracted a cult audience. “I definitely felt this record was my last shot,” Miller said by phone the other day, before a show on his current sold-out tour. “I was at the end of my recording contract, and I wasn’t hearing anything from the label. If this didn’t work, I thought I might be teaching high school English the next year.”

Instead, he wound up giving the world a master class in how to make a smash hit. The first song he recorded, “The Joker,” was the ‘70s equivalent of a viral sensation, taking off at radio stations around the country on impact, eventually soaring to No. 1. That turned out to be just the beginning. Over the next decade, Miller and The Steve Miller Band racked up a string of ingeniously upbeat singles like “Rock’n Me” (another No. 1 score), “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jet Airliner,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Jungle Love” and “Abracadabra” (a chart-topper in 1983).

To mark the start of his dramatic turnaround 50 years ago, Miller has just released J50: The Evolution of The Joker, a collection that marries the album’s original tracks to 27 previously unreleased recordings from the same sessions. To Miller, the secret to his late-breaking success had to do both with having nothing to lose and with finally gaining control over the recording process. While his earlier work had been produced by others, on “The Joker” he called all the shots. “Just going in with the band and doing it on my own was so much less cumbersome,” he said. “The whole process of making the album was 17 days, start to finish.”

Another key element was his eagerness to learn how to hone hits. “I had always enjoyed the art of making singles, but the more I did it, the more I learned,” he said. “I felt that you need at least five hooks in a single. And the first ten notes have to make people go, ‘What’s that?’ It’s quite a puzzle to put all that together.”

With a boyish enthusiasm that belies his 79 years, Miller told Parade the stories behind the key songs that have made him one of America’s biggest hit-makers.

"The Joker" (1973)

In Miller’s first No. 1 score, nearly every sound you hear is a hook, from the lazy bass to the loopy guitar to the quirky vocal. “I wasn’t consciously going for all that,” Miller said. “Everything just came together quickly and naturally. The song had a great chorus. It had this slide guitar. It had a different-sounding, lazy groove. It’s only in hindsight where you go, ‘well, that was brilliant!’”

For another draw, Miller quoted a racy line from an old hit by the vocal group The Clovers—“really love your peaches/wanna shake your tree.” He didn’t realize, however, that this would mean sharing the publishing royalties with its authors. “I thought it was just a tip of the hat,” he said. Despite the sexiness of the line, and a drug reference elsewhere in the lyrics, Miller said “nobody at radio questioned it. I think every kid that heard it got it, but no adult knew what it was about.” One thing that did get everyone’s attention was a line that later became famous in which Miller preached “the pompatus of love.”

“It sorta sounded like pompous,” the singer said of the nonsensical word he made up. “I get letters from lawyers all the time asking me to define it because lawyers always want to know what things mean. To me, it’s just funny.”

“Fly Like an Eagle” (1976)

One of Miller’s biggest hits was also the first to feature a new instrument—the ARP synthesizer—which he used to create a spacey sound that undulates throughout the song. “I was a huge electronic music fan, going back to Stockhausen in the early ‘60s,” Miller said. “The electronics I used back on the [earlier FM-radio hit] ‘Space Cowboy’ sounded like somebody turning over a car carburetor under water. But the new ARP was so much easier. It was a natural to become a pop hook.”

The catchy riff in “Eagle” had actually appeared in another Miller song, “My Dark Hour,” seven years earlier. That track featured none other than Paul McCartney on drums, bass and backing vocal, though few knew it. The improbable Miller-Beatles connection came about because his producer, Glyn Johns, was the audio engineer on “Let It Be.” In 1969, when Miller was in London to record with Johns, the producer introduced him to the Fab Four. “They were meant to record some tracks one day, but John and Ringo didn’t show,” Miller said. “I’d never seen guys not show up to a booked recording session before. That was unbelievably wasteful.”

To make use of the session time, Johns suggested Paul and Miller jam, resulting in “My Dark Hour.” “It was like we’d been playing together forever,” Miller said. “Anything Paul played was just right.”

Miller felt disappointed, though, when the Beatle only allowed himself to be pseudonymously credited on the song as “Paul Ramon.” Regardless, Miller thought this was “going to be the biggest single of my life! Instead, it was like it was dropped down the mail chute of the Empire State Building straight into hell.”

To compensate, Miller said the riff he repurposed for “Fly Like an Eagle” was “so much better.” It was so good, in fact, that the song went platinum and inspired a cover by Seal in 1996. “He didn’t do anything different with it,” Miller said. “So, I wasn’t impressed.”

by Jim Farber, Parade |  Read more:

Image: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images; Wikipedia
[ed. From the video comments re: "My Dark Hour"]

"This was recorded at Olympic Studios, Barnes, on the night of the 9th May 1969, when the four Beatles had an enormous bust-up about Allen Klein becoming their manager; they were all at the studios, when producer/engineer Glyn Johns, detecting an impending argument, left the room, and the conversation turned from music to business - the contract for Klein to manage them had been signed by John, George and Ringo, but Paul - who had been warned by Mick Jagger about Klein and didn't trust or like him - baulked at the 20% Klein was demanding, saying to the other Beatles that Klein should be offered 15%, because "we're a big band" and refused to sign. The other three thought it was another example of Paul stalling and derailing the contract negotiations, and a huge argument ensued, with them all verbally laying into Paul, and basically storming out while all individually telling him to 'fuck off'. He was sat alone in the studio, feeling pretty beaten up and isolated, betrayed by his three best mates and sorry for himself, when Steve Miller breezed in, looking for some studio time - Paul knew Steve and asked if he could play on the track, so did drums (which he'd previously done on several Beatles' tracks when Ringo had walked out of the White Album sessions for a week; most notably 'Back in the USSR'), bass, some guitar and backing vocals. The other three Beatles went ahead with assigning Klein as manager, and although John Lennon was the driving force in appointing Klein, years later he admitted Paul was right to be suspicious. He appeared on this track as 'Paul Ramon', which was first used as a stage name by Paul when the 'Silver Beetles' (then still with Stuart Sutcliffe on bass and Tommy Moore as a stand-in drummer) toured Scotland in May 1960, as the backing band to a Larry Parnes' act, Johnny Gentle (real name John Askew). John Lennon was 'Long John', George was 'Carl Harrison' (after his hero Carl Perkins) and Stuart was Stuart de Stael (after French-Russian artist Nicolas de Stael)."