Steve Miller has gotten a few headlines in recent weeks, though not necessarily for the reasons he might’ve wished. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in April, a capstone moment for the blues rocker whose multimillion-selling albums dominated ’70s radio, but much of the attention was directed at his negative comments about the hall in his induction speech and at a conference afterward.
His criticisms ranged from what he viewed as the narrow scope of the induction process to the “disrespectful” way inductees are treated. “It was a lazy kind of night with a bunch of fat cats at the dinner table,” he said. “It’s not a real pleasant experience.”
The Rock Hall didn’t respond directly to Miller’s numerous criticisms but did issue a statement that said in part, “Rock and roll can ignite many opinions. It’s what makes it so great. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame was honored to induct Steve Miller last night.”
When reached on his tour bus recently, Miller is in an affable mood and says he hopes some positives will come out of all the commotion he stirred up. “I want to put pressure on them to do the right thing and make it a great institution,” the guitarist says. The people who run the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation “are living in a bubble in New York City. Step outside of it, and the Rock Hall of Fame is a beacon for music education. There are people working there who do care about it, and realize it should be the center of the universe when it comes to fighting for musicians’ rights, music education, musicians’ health care. But right now it’s a private little group in New York calling all the shots, guys who consider themselves the elite experts of what is or is not important. They’re more worried about making a TV show (of the induction ceremony) than they are of taking care of the people they induct.”
Miller has long been an outspoken critic of the music industry. He was a guitar prodigy who was tutored by Les Paul and T-Bone Walker while growing up in Milwaukee and Dallas, and apprenticed with the masters in the hardscrabble Chicago blues scene of the ’60s after attending the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
“First time I went to the West Side to see Howlin’ Wolf, it was at Silvio’s underneath the ‘L’ tracks,” Miller says. “Wolf is in a chair playing harmonica, and me and my tenor sax player walk in and find ourselves next to him on stage. He would walk on his knees from the stage and onto the tabletops of the people in front, and sing right at them. He had these big wide eyes and moved like a cat — he was quite a character. We were really self-conscious and slinked to the back. After the song is over, Wolf says, ‘I want you all to be nice to my little white friends out there.’ He saved us. He was a gentleman. Otis Rush was the same way. I’d come to his club, and he’d hand me his guitar and let me finish his set while he went to the bar to have a drink.”
After a couple years of playing on the scene with Paul Butterfield, Wolf, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, Miller migrated to San Francisco in search of new challenges. He made a series of recordings that were FM radio hits and had the good sense to retain publishing on all of his original songs.
“People say I was some sort of genius for doing that, but hell, it was my money,” he says. “I didn’t want to give it to some guy in a suit. Doing my first commercial recordings with (keyboardist) Barry Goldberg, the record company guys were just gangsters. I learned from that experience that I needed complete artistic control over my recording and songwriting, and I had to have my publishing. To me that was basic common sense. I had been running a band since I was 12. I was charging frats $150 to bring me and Boz Scaggs and two other guys to a gig at their frats in (Dallas). I worked nightclubs in Chicago, went to California (in the late ’60s) and landed in the middle of a feeding frenzy for new rock bands. There were 14 labels trying to sign me. I had a friend who was a prosecuting attorney and I told him they will try to steal from me just like everybody else, and I told him I need complete control over publishing and music. After nine months of negotiating, I got it and have had it ever since.”
In the mid-’70s he enjoyed a string of commercial successes, starting with “The Joker.” His two biggest-selling albums, “Fly Like an Eagle” and “Book of Dreams,” were recorded at the same marathon session and released a year apart. The hits from those two albums have sustained Miller ever since and enabled him to continue playing 70 shows a year with his crack touring band.
“I had met the Beatles in 1969 and recorded with Paul McCartney and watched him record,” Miller says. “They had 45 songs in the can and I thought, that’s how you do it. You write a lot of great stuff, and when the iron gets hot, you’re ready to strike. My goal was to have two albums in the can after ‘The Joker’ became a hit. I wanted to make albums they couldn’t take off FM radio. I took 18 months off the road to write and record and revamp my organization, and was working on 25, 30 songs. Instead of feeling you had to do 12 hits, I had 24 in a pile. Do I put all the best ones on the first album, or do I make some space, float in a hit, do some electronic stuff, some blues? So I spaced them out over two albums. Now I wish I had three, because once those albums took off, I never had that kind of time in my career again.”
In recent years he found new inspiration working with artists such as Wynton Marsalis and other jazz musicians as part of his work at Lincoln Center in New York.
