Rock and roll cringe: The day Steve Miller dismissed Jimi Hendrix as “pathetic”
Steve Miller might have written the timeless 1973 hit ‘The Joker’, a song brimming with classic lines such as “some call me the gangster of love”, but in real life, the American musician has made it clear that he is not one to be taken for a ride, and is not easily fooled.
Interestingly, this spiky element of his character emerged when discussing one of his most eminent peers, the late and very great Jimi Hendrix.
While Hendrix was undoubtedly one of the most influential musicians of all time and delivered many iconic moments amounting to an unsurpassed legacy, according to Steve Miller, one of the most well-known – the moment he set his Fender Stratocaster on fire at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967 – was a “pathetic” move.
To Miller, it was not a mystical showing of genius as the mainstream contends, instead, he deemed it just plain annoying.
At the time, Hendrix had been thinking about ancient rituals that required sacrifices in order to successfully appease the Gods. With that in mind, the guitarist began hunting around backstage during the Grateful Dead’s set for some lighter fluid.
As Hendrix would later explain: “I decided to destroy my guitar at the end of a song as a sacrifice. You sacrifice things you love. I love my guitar.”
Given that Miller fronted one of his era’s most successful acts, The Steve Miller Band, it’s unsurprising that he was present at one of the counterculture’s definitive celebrations and watched on as Hendrix doused his guitar in lighter fluid and set it ablaze.
However, unlike most, Miller was not impressed with the spectacle.
“I thought that was pathetic,” Miller told the Washington Post in 2019. “When I saw Jimi Hendrix stop playing the music he was playing and get down on his knees and pull out a can of lighter fluid and squirt it on the thing and light it, I went, ‘Boy, this really fucking sucks’.”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Miller, an outspoken critic of music industry excess, also recalled how his self-belief stopped him from being undersold by concert promoters who would attempt to talk his price down for shows. Establishing how this attitude comes naturally, Miller confirms he was unyielding even at the age of 12 when he was in his very first band, The Marksman.
“They’d say, ‘Hey, this is Bobby Jones at SAE house, and I understand you’ve got this rock band. How much is it?'” he recalled. “I’d say, ‘It’s $125.’ The guy would go, ‘That’s an awful lot of money.’ I’d say, ‘Thanks for calling, man. If you change your mind, let me know.’ I’d hang up the phone.”
He then said the “phone would ring and they’d book us. I don’t know why I was this way at the age of 12. But I didn’t want to hear your sad story. My price was fair, and it was good, and I had the band booked in three weeks for the whole school year”.
Professionalism of the highest order, there’s no room for histrionics in that business world.
