What's so great about the Steve Miller band?

"What's so great about the Steve Miller band?"


Ya got me?

Other than the title track and "My Dark Hour" on the "Brave New World" album, the rest is lowest-common-denominator dreck with horrible lyrics/rhymes.

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Back in 69 or 70 I had Sailor and Brave New World. They were somehow packaged together (don't remember exactly), but I played the s*** out of those 2 albums. A couple years later I bought The Joker when it acme out. I distinctly remember thinking WTF is this? What a let down...never bought another Steve Miller album.

Sometime in 73, must've been before The Joker was released I went and saw Steve Miller in concert at an outdoor venue in Raleigh, NC. It was an awful show, just awful.

 

Again, my curiosity was based on what kind of music do you like or John54? Because IMO, as I stated before, two of his albums are what I love about music, fun loving guitar based rock. Considering that my all time favorite artist is Bruce Cockburn, who I also consider the best lyricist ever, I don't need to have deep lyrics to enjoy music, but I do dig well thought out lyrics as well. I can listen to Foot Stompin' music and DADA in the same sitting.

BTW, John54 used both the words "repulsed" and "hate", and that is why I replied.

 

SMB is like other great acts that had the misfortune of achieving too much popularity for the 'no-fun-allowed' crowd. Those for whom music - and especially lyrics - requires 'importance' and similarly pretentious elements.

 

Help Me Rhonda......Steve Miller style!

 

Summer of '87...putting myself through college washing dishes. The cooks were allowed to play the radio in the kitchen and we are getting bombarded with T'Pau's "Heart and Soul," and Madonna's "Who's That Girl." Though not really a big fan of his, you wouldn't believe how great Steve Miller sounded when he came on. The other washer and I looked like the flippin' Butabi brothers bopping our heads to the beat in sweet relief.

 

I was going to say that too in my earlier post. Even though ELP are a 'prog' band, I have always thought of Lucky Man as a pop song (extended synth solo included).

Again, just because there's a synth in Fly Like An Eagle doesn't makes it 'prog~like'. It's like saying that Here Comes The Sun is 'prog~like', or any regular pop song that has a synth in it.

 

Yeah, it's almost like two different artists. I prize my vinyl of those first three as high watermarks of late sixties rock. Yet I have no use for the later stuff at all.
As a side bar, I live in the S.F. bay area and must have seen Steve a dozen times at least during the late sixties and he had one of the greatest live blues-oriented bands of the era. This is a genuine side issue as those early great records are in no way an attempt to represent the live performing unit. They are studio jobs in every sense, just like the later stuff,
only ................ really good.
wha-happened?

 

I still remember the 1968 San Francisco record store window display plastered with the first Quicksilver Messenger Service album and Children of the future covers both from Capitol Records

I bought them and played them constantly for months. To this day they are two of my very favorite albums.

 

Well.... yes and no. I loved the original configuration (both live and in the studio) as well. I thought the band was kaput when it split down the middle and Steve's quintet was suddenly a trio (that didn't include Boz)
But surprise, surprise! The next album, Children Of The Future, was absolutely superb AND the performing unit was killer as well!!! And although after that the albums slowly descended into mediocrity, the live unit continued to rule for a number of years after that.

 

Children of the Future was their first album. Sailer was second

 

Good point. It would make almost everything released in the '80's prog!

 

Fans are inherently selfish. We want our favorite artists to repeatedly give us that rush or hit... over & over again, meanwhile treading that impossible ground between inventiveness and not regurgitating their previous album. When any of them; Steve Miller, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, or Journey change their early sound or focus, or follow their own muse(s), theres always that contingent crying sell out. And maybe they do in some respects. But they're not here on earth to fulfill our personal desires.

 

I don't find the first four albums hold up as well as I like to remember them, but that was a good hip band. (I just bought a two-fer of "Sailor" and "Children of the Future" on vinyl.) "Sailor" always my favorite with that great atmospheric beginning. Miller took the money and ran after the hippie era, but perhaps that is the music he truly wanted to make. Top 40.

 

Literally every artist wants their work to become 'popular.' The real issue underlying their desire is defining the numbers, the personality of the desired fan base, and most important of all.....how to label the popularity. Please don't call it Top 40 -- that just causes a ruckus in the fan base and the artist has to pretend thats a bummer.

 

....

The first two came out in one of those weird Capitol doubles, with the purple boarder around the original artwork. The two covers were stuck together with a big sticker.

Original Miller band, the one that did the first two Capitol albums was a very very good band. Steve never let anyone forget they were the tightest of the SF bands. I saw them once in 68, and must say, they nailed it. After that the albums are still good, up to a point, but they start to wander a little. There are some great songs on those albums. I'm no fan of the Joker or Eagle, they were just played to death in the Bay Area. I did see him in 77. My pal Greg Douglass was in the band, as he'd written Jungle Love... That song, the music, had been around for a while. Some claim it goes back to Greg's earlier band Mistress, and written by one of the other guys. I dunno. I did see the first live performance of Jungle Love as you know it, performed by Terry and the Pirates. I also heard a tape of Hot Tuna playing the tune. Greg was in Tuna for a bit.

I can understand why there would be some doubt. I suppose it would be lot Bob Seger for me. It took a friend to make me listen to some early tracks to understand where he came from.

Look for the Chuck Berry at the Fillmore album to hear the earliest version of the Miller band with Curly Cook rather than Boz Scaggs. I think that band is also on the Revolution sound track doing Mercury Blues and Your Old Lady.

 

SMB was part of the psychedelic San Francisco music scene. His first 4 albums are a must for any collection. I still listen to those all the time. As far as his later records, there is good stuff on all of them, but they are not a mind-blowing as their early material. The band with Boz Scaggs, Lonnie Turner, Tim Davis and Jim Peterman is my favorite.

 

I could make a decent cd out of what I consider his best songs. His stuff is mostly radio "hit song" type stuff. Nothing exceptional imo.

 

Oh, I agree. I was just saying that I think that is why someone might say it is "prog-like." I also remember people describing SMB as similar to Pink Floyd back when I was young. I don't necessarily agree with that description, but I remember it being common. I will say that SMB was the soundtrack to the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of high school & will always make me want a can of Busch Beer when I hear it...

 

When I worked at Sony Service Center back in the 1990's (Orange County, CA), Steve Miller brought in one of his stereo's for repair one day. I'm not the person that wrote up the work order, but when it came across my bench and I saw the name I thought, nah - couldn't be. It's a fairly common name, after all.

Later, when I asked our employee that worked on the front counter about it, he said yes, it was "that" Steve Miller. How did he know? Because Steve had asked the counter person "Do you know who I am?" He responded with "no, should I?" Steve says, "I'm a famous musician, you've never heard of me?". I guess it hurt his ego or something that he wasn't recognized. Then he proceeded to try and get a free repair based on the fact that he was "famous". That didn't work, by the way - we charged him.

We used to play a radio all day long in the shop, and for years afterwards, every time a Steve Miller song came on, someone nearby would say "Do you know who I am?"

By the way, the only song I like at all by him is Threshold/Jet Airliner. I'm sick of The Joker and Fly Like An Eagle (since when do eagles fly to the sea, anyway? They're not seagulls!)

 

OOOps! I WAS thinking of the third one, I just wrote the wrong name down. I was referring to the SUPERB Brave New World,
for which they were just a trio (with a little uncredited help from Sir McCartney)

 

How true. I agree absolutely with everyone you've said. As for myself, I'm not sad that they didn't in some sense repeat themselves. Heck even those
first three albums are quite unlike one another. No, I'm merely sad that I don't like the later stuff nearly as much as I do the early stuff. The fact is
"You can't go home again" applies here as much as anywhere. Not only would we not want the Beatles to have endlessly repeated She Loves You -type
stuff, they couldn't even if they wanted to. Moving on is not even a laudable choice, it's an inevitability.

 

By all means get CDs of Fly Like An Eagle and Book of Dreams. Both were cutting edge technology and VERY nicely produced with good musicians and performances.
If you like rock era music with a psychedelic edge those two albums were kind of stragglers to the psychedelic mindset of creativity.
Both sound fantastic in headphones.
See if your local library has a more recent Steve Miller DVD. The guy is very charismatic and talented and puts on a good sho.

 

great band...if you can cue up Serenade on the Steve Miller's Greatest Hits DCC Gold CD...it's amazing compared to the original CD...

 

Yep, that's the one I had. A friend gave it to me, or I traded something for it.