His serious success began with The Joker. As Steve Miller celebrates that classic album’s 50th anniversary with an expansive new box set, he reflects back on how it all began with a challenge to his record label.
BY ALAN PAUL
STEVE MILLER BEAMED as he introduced Christone “Kingfish” Ingram to the audience at a sold-out Jazz at Lincoln Center performance last winter. It was Miller’s seventh annual JALC blues concert, where he presents various aspects of the music’s glorious heritage. This year’s show focused on the Future of the Blues in the person of Kingfish, and Miller was thrilled to help the 24-year-old Mississippi native expand his reach — and just to jam with him.
Miller might seem an odd choice for a blues show. He became known as the King of Classic Rock with a string of mid-’70s hits that dominated FM radio in that decade and again when the classic rock radio format became a force to be reckoned with more than a decade later. But before “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Rock’n Me” or “Take the Money and Run,” he was a serious blues aficionado playing harmonica and guitar.
Miller left the University of Wisconsin a semester shy of a degree and in 1965 moved to Chicago, where he began playing with the music’s masters — including Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Otis Rush — and with other young white practitioners, like Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield. He also learned to be a pro there, playing six nights a week.
But Miller’s real success came when he moved to San Francisco in 1966 and started recording for Capitol Records. He thought he had hit the big time when Paul McCartney played bass and drums and sang backup on his 1969 single “My Dark Hour.” That went nowhere, and by the time Miller entered the studio to record the last album of his Capitol deal in 1973, he was furious at the label for not doing more for him. “I was so angry at Capitol Records for lack of support or having a clue,” he says.
But Miller soon got the satisfaction he deserved. He recorded his 1973 hit “The Joker” — the title track to his album of that same year — in 30 minutes, and it became his first number-one single. With it, Miller established a new paradigm, displaying the wit of a comparative literature major, the soul of a blues man and the pop sensibility and studio savvy of Les Paul and Mary Ford, who were not only studio pioneers but also Miller family friends.
Miller followed up The Jokerwith two more massive albums, 1976’s Fly Like an Eagleand 1977’s Book of Dr
