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Miller Keeps On Rockin' Us, Baby

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By CURTIS ROSS

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 22, 2008

Absence makes the heart grow fonder - and, sometimes, the catalog more lucrative.

After several albums and innumerable touring miles logged, the Steve Miller Band broke through from underground sensation to the Top 40 with 1973's "The Joker."

After another round of rigorous touring, Miller had had enough.

"We were burned out," Miller recalls by telephone from his home in Ketchum, Idaho.

"We were doing 60-city tours three times a year," Miller says. "Then we get a hit and the record company wants us back in the studio. I said, 'Sorry, I'm taking a break.'

"I called my agent and said, 'You know, I'm not gonna tour for the next year. I'm going to rest for a while, relax and try to write.'"

Miller rested, recuperated and then got to work. He set up his own studio and recorded two albums worth of tracks.

Those tracks became "Fly Like an Eagle" (1976) and "Book of Dreams" (1977), the albums that made Miller a superstar.

It wasn't the first time a break had helped Miller find focus.

He played rock and R&B in bands around Dallas as a teen before heading to the University of Wisconsin after high school.

Music wasn't a career option at the time.

"I wanted to be a writer," Miller says, "I imagined myself teaching comparative literature."

While studying abroad, Miller realized his true calling.

"I spent a semester in Denmark at the University of Copenhagen and I didn't have a band," Miller says. "I was miserable."

"I came back and did my last semester at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and went to Chicago," Miller says. "That's really what I had to do."

Chicago, where Miller hustled for gigs alongside blues legends such as Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy, provided an essential part of his musical education, which began at age 4 and featured an all-star cast of teachers.

Les Paul, T-Bone Walker and Charles Mingus, friends of Miller's music-loving father, all visited the family's Dallas home.

"I was surrounded by people singing and playing music," Miller says. "I had an uncle who was a guitarist and another who played violin in Paul Whiteman's Orchestra."

He got a guitar at 4 and a lesson from Paul at 5. By 12 he had his first band, and had backed blues great Jimmy Reed by 14.

"He was very popular in Texas," Miller says. "Before radio became homogenized there, Jimmy Reed and Little Walter and Bobby Blue Bland were having hits. That was what you had to play at high school or frat parties."

That background served him well in the Chicago blues clubs, but when the San Francisco scene began to grow, Miller was ready to go west.

"You'd play from 9 until 4 in the morning," Miller says of the Windy City venues. "You had a lot of drunks, people getting beat up or shot, the cops or Mafia guys shaking people down."

San Francisco offered bigger venues, more peaceful crowds and a chance to expand his music while remaining rooted in the blues, as he did on discs such as 1968 debut "Children of the Future."

"It was a very creative time," Miller recalls. "Everything was being invented, new stage light shows, posters, newspapers."

Soon, Miller was an FM radio staple and a near-constant road presence, playing, he says, "every psychedelic dungeon" in the United States and later Europe.

Now, he's content to tour less frequently.

"It's important to take time off, get perspective and refresh yourself," Miller says. "And do some writing."

ON TOUR

Steve Miller Band

WITH: Joe Cocker

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: Ford Amphitheatre, 4802 U.S. 301 N., Tampa; (813) 740-2446

COST: $20, $27.50, $45 and $75

Curtis Ross can be reached at (813) 259-7568 or cross@tampatrib.com.

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