“The ultimate graduate school”: Steve Miller’s surprising roots in the 1960s Chicago blues scene
Often dismissed as “dad rock” even a couple decades before the phrase entered mainstream use, the Steve Miller Band had an undeniably impressive run during their peak years from 1973 to 1983.
The San Francisco outfit that began as a psychedelic blues band found far greater success as something more akin to the Eagles with a sense of humour. Starting with the single ‘The Joker’, which went to number one in both the US and the UK in ‘73, Miller rallied off a string of hits including ‘Take the Money and Run’, ‘Rock’n Me’, ‘Fly Like an Eagle’, and the recently Eminem-sampled ‘Abracadabra’.
It’s hard to say the Steve Miller Band has gone entirely unappreciated in more recent years: they were inducted into the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame in 2016. As a singer, songwriter, and guitarist, though, Steve Miller himself has rarely captivated critics (including Miles Davis, for that matter), nor has he seemed to earn the devotion of younger listeners this century in quite the way that, say, Fleetwood Mac or Tom Petty managed to. If anything, the “feel good” vibe of a lot of Miller’s hits has shuffled him more into the category of a Jimmy Buffett than a Bob Seger.
Before Steve Miller was a West Coast ‘Space Cowboy’ and MOR star, however, he actually paid his dues playing in the Chicago blues scene of the mid-1960s, sharing stages and rubbing shoulders with the realest cats in the game.
“It was the first time that I wasn’t surrounded by a bunch of punk kids trying to be goofy rock and rollers,” Miller recalled to the Chicago Tribune in 1986, describing his arrival in Chicago as a 20-year-old in 1964. “I was living and working with adult men who were playing a real art form.”
Unlike a lot of young white kids who only got turned on to the blues once The Rolling Stones and other British acts re-interpreted it and imported it back to the States, Miller was an early convert, often covering the songs of bluesmen like Jimmy Reed with his high school garage band.
After studying at the University of Wisconsin, Miller eventually made the relatively short journey to Chicago to immerse himself in the scene, just at the moment when many of the city’s legendary blues artists were starting to get their long-overdue recognition from growing audiences.
“It was just amazing,” Miller said. “Better than any corny movie could make it seem. Muddy Waters was happening. Howlin’ Wolf was in full force. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells were just coming in. And we all got recording contracts. We all went off and toured the world, and we all played until we dropped… I’m one of only maybe 50 people left who went through that Chicago blues ‘college’. It was like the ultimate graduate school, and there never has been a scene like it since.”
The first few Steve Miller Band records in the late 1960s, which were much more clearly tied to that Chicago blues rock template, were quite well received by critics. As such, Miller got the impression that the negative reviews he received later in his career were really a consequence of evolving beyond those roots and embracing pop music, a supposed no-no among the devout community of blues purists.
“The press has accused me of releasing slop and being a dinosaur or something,” he told the Tribune in 1986, concluding, “People liked to say, ‘Oh, Steve Miller, he was great in the 1960s, but when is he going to quit doing pop music and make another real blues album?’ Well, those blues albums that I made in the 1960s only sold around 100,000 copies. And I like to make hit singles. I’ve been trying to make them all my life.”
