Superlatives
A Vulture series in which artists judge the best and worst of their own careers.
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Even when hes singing aboutrobbing castlesorsinning,Steve Millers songscontain a sense of meticulous control.
Maybe its due to the harmonies.
Or how tight the guitars are.
To study the scope of Millers impact is to study his geographical footprint.
Ive somehow managed to do that, and I want to share that information with all these kids.
It would be Fly Like an Eagle.
It was a time when I really matured as a writer and I started writing much better songs.
I was developing my music.
Things that I had been working on for a long period all came together.
Fly Like an Eagle is a combination of electronic music and a really funky groove.
Im thinking in terms of culmination.
I started playing professionally when I was 12 years old.
I was in a real band and we were playing all the time.
At that point, it was kind of three chords and some blues songs.
I grew up in Texas.
It was all pretty simple and straightforward.
I also spent some time in San Francisco, and that was a very experimental time.
You could do anything you wanted to do.Anything.
That was the goal.
It took some convincing and some work with the engineers and the record company.
There were two or three different versions of it along the way.
Old dance halls, old theaters, stuff like that.
There would be a mirrorball in the ceiling with a spotlight on it.
That was about it for the light show.
Nerdiest song for gearheads
Thats a funny question.
I wish I had a list of all my songs in front of me.
We started working withGlyn Johns.
It was later when I started engineering my own stuff that I got much more relaxed.
So, lets say anything fromSailor.Heres a story for you.
Theres a song called Song for Our Ancestors that opens the album.
We wanted to have whats now known as the loop but back then there wasnt the name for it.
I wanted a vocal chorus in the background.
I sang it, we took it, and we actually turned it into a physical loop.
I was about 20 feet away from the tape recorder holding a pencil.
That was about as far out as it got.
That kept the sound going.
Of course, it was a little wobbly, but we thought it was great at the time.
But it wasnt good enough to patent!
It started as an instrumental, gypsy-blues kind of tune.
I wrote this really bad set of lyrics and recorded it.
Wait, take that off.
It can be a lot better.
So we took it off.
They rhymed terribly and they were just engraved in my brain.
I didHullabaloo,which was a big national TV show, and the Supremes were also on it.
I had seen them in person then.
Ive never had a chance to see Diana since then.
I loved Motown, of course.
I could see the Supremes doing Abracadabra very easily.
They all seem to be part of the work I normally do.
Songs have different purposes.
I always liked the idea of making singles.
Singles are like a puzzle that you put together and they need to have five elements.
You have to get out of sleep.
The competition was brutal.
How do you have a great chorus?
You got to have a quick story thats easy to understand.
You got to have a really great opening.
You got to have some sort of musical hook.
The Joker was my first really successful No.
There was no doubt about it.
It had that funny opening with the slide guitar part.
It had a chorus that everybody could sing.
Its got the story, its got the character.
That would be a good example of that pop in of song; the puzzle is finished.
I always wanted my albums to be hard to take off.
Once you put them on, I want you to enjoy everything.
There would be other pieces of music that would make the singles stand out.
They would be almost like segues.
Thats where a lot of my segue work and my electronic ideas came into play.
Threshold is the intro to Jet Airliner and enhances it.
Things that set up songs that were singles so that you had a variety of music on a record.
It wasnt just 12 singles in a row, kind of like one, two, three.
The musical horizon would be expanded, so it was really wide and interesting.
Then something would come up that would capture your fantasy.
That was sort of the ideal.
Most impulsive song
Oh, gosh.
Maybe Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma.
No, its Space Cowboy.
That was a really quick one.
That was a song I just made up.
We did it really, really quickly in the studio.
I didnt want to put it on the album.
I wanted to take it off.
Everybody while we were mixing told me, Are you crazy?
You want to toss it off?
And here I am, 55 years later, still a space cowboy.
I thought it sounded a lot like Lady Madonna.
It just sounded kind of familiar.
We were just jamming and goofing around.
It was something that I never really gave much thought to, lets say.
For me, those were songs that I just loved instinctively as a child.
Then I started playing Jimmy Reed tunes and actually backed him up when I was 14 years old.
I was playing musicthat I loved.
He affected everybody all over the world.
He doesnt get the credit that he deserves.
Now, Im singing Jimmy Reed lyrics on top of jazz arrangements.
When I think of my music process, it has a lot of different elements.
It has a lot of jazz.
It has a lot of blues.
It has lots of four-part harmonies.
It has a lot of guitar work in it.
So there are different sections, selections, parts, and pieces.
I want to teach musicians how to perform.
Most underrated album
Most of them.
It might beNumber 5, which was kind of a country-music album that I did in Nashville.
It was fun and different, but it was still pretty successful.
It sold around 400,000 copies.
Thats a pretty good batch of records back in the day.
Actually, a great record thats even more underrated isItalian X Rays.
I forgot about it.
That was the very beginning of digital recording.
We were the first group at Capitol Records to use the digital tape recorder.
It was a very experimental kind of record.
That one came out and just sort of disappeared.
But its got some great songs on it.
I wrote more No.
1 hits later, butthat was a batch.
That was about 25 really good songs that lasted forever.
My process is that it usually starts with a guitar and Ill have a musical idea.
I love to play guitar I could sit and play guitar for two hours every day.
What is this about?
She would be like, Oh, come on.
When it came time to put something out, I took the best that I had.
If I didnt put it out, I dont particularly want to go back and listen to it.
Yet, my mind has been consistently blown with what weve found and listened to.
It puts things into perspective.
For example, my wife found a whole lot of recordings from the early 70s that are just amazing.
We were playing so well and I had no idea.
One of the things that she found was another studio version of a song called Industrial Military Complex Hex.
We just love it.
We recorded it too soon, you know?
This one really got better later.
When my wife found it I went, Wow, who is that?
She said, Well, honey, I mean, thats you.
Ive had a lifetime of playing music.
I actually have recordings of mine from 1957 and 1958.
Thats a large body of music.
The magnificence of it all is really great.
We were bad to the bone in the early 70s.
One guy had a pile, one-foot high, of documentation about the Hall of Fame.
I looked at it.
I think the Hall of Fame is getting a little bit better.
Its very different for every year that they put the ceremony together.
It was really not a pleasant experience.
Thats why I was fairly upset with the stuff that I went through with them.
We werent even introduced to each other, the inductees.
They never got us together.
They never asked us to help them do anything or mentioned any of their programs.
Go sit in that room on that metal chair, well call you when we want you up.
If youre not on, youre off.
It was unbelievably rude and uncharacteristically cold.
I felt really bad.
I feltbad for everybodythat was inducted that night.
But when you saw the show, it just looked like everybody had a great time.
They were really good at cutting and editing.
But I think its getting better.
I think theyre growing up a little bit.
They could do a lot more teaching; they could do a lot more work.
I never heard from anyone at the Hall after that.
It was just like,next.I wouldnt be interested in working with them.
A perfect example would be to compare it with Jazz at Lincoln Center.
One has taught 40,000 students.
I would love to have seen the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame do something like that.
But, yeah, Ive pretty much moved on.
I have other things to do.
The meaning is up to the user.
Theres no actual definition.
Can I even define it myself?
I always think of something funny when pompatus comes up.
I was talking to Paul McCartney one time about writing.
Hes such a great writer.
He told me, If it rhymes and if it works, it works.
Dont worry about it.
It was kind of a relief to hear that it didnt all have to be absolutely brilliant.
It was just something that popped up.
Its one of those things.
What the hell does it mean?
The fact that nobody really knows what it means makes everybody curious about it.
Good luck trying to find out.
