Growing Up With Steve Miller

[Killed_by_Death]

14-Jul-87

Steve gets a star on the Walk of Fame:

 

[jdthebassman]

I always liked steve miller fly like an eagle was a great album after that he got to mushy for me abracadabra later stuff was pretty lame.

 

[Michedelic]

I read one of the reasons Graham liked have jazz groups on the bill is that he hated rock drum solos of the day and wanted to show people what a jazz drummer sounded like.

Not only that, he wanted to expose the typical Fillmore audience to everything out there, and pull them out of their rockist comfort zone.

 

[Michedelic]

Miles Davis had a few things to say about Steve Miller in his autobiography. They got booked to play together at the Fillmore East when Miles went electric with Bitches Brew.

“I remember one time - it might have been a couple times - at the Fillmore East in 1970, I was opening for this sorry-*** cat named Steve Miller. Steve Miller didn't have his **** going for him, so I'm pissed because I got to open for this non-playing mother****er just because he had one or two sorry-*** records out. So I would come late and he would have to go on first and then we got there we smoked the mother****ing place, everybody dug it.”

I’m with Team Miles on that one. Miller seemed to be over-impressed with himself(I recall a quote from him back in the day, I think it was in Hit Parader or Circus, one of those early rock rags, where he boasted that he could wipe the floor with Clapton), and while you could say that about Miles, he could back it up. I too ‘grew up’ with Miller, I thought he was good but not amazing, I liked the first two albums, wore out Brave New World, Your Saving Grace was steady, but then it was diminishing returns; Rock Love was lame, awful really, then he disappeared for a while. At that point I’ll bet Capitol told him to get a hit, or they were done. When I heard “The Joker” for the first time, my first reaction was ‘what is this crap?’, but I had an idea of what was going on. There were a few passable tracks on that album, but it just kept getting worse and more dumbed down from from there, as he got ‘bigger’. I found all his 70’s stuff annoying, just musical junk food, and you just couldn’t get away from it.

 

[keyboardguy]

Always love watching this: "A FENDER ?"

 

[BassBrass]

Miles looked at him and hissed "I never liked you."

first of all, using "hissed" as a descriptive of Miles' voice is prejudicial and highly unfair, your honor, because it is well known that Miles has a unique tone for speaking, a disability as a matter of fact. Secondly, Miles' honesty was revolutionary. I suppose he would have to be reeducated today, and certainly his obsessive drawing was therapeutic. He did often apologize the next day for when he got obsessively annoyed, which certainly did happen.

 

[b/o 402]

Exactly. Les Paul’s contribution is pretty much limited to licensing his name to Gibson. Gibson was all about hollow body guitars created by skilled luthiers and didn’t see why anyone would want a solid body guitar.......... until they took note of the sales of solid body electric guitars from that guy called Leo on the west coast.

You need to educate yourself, my friend.
Not only was Paul a phenomenal player, he basically invented looping, i.e. overdubs on multi-track recording, building and modding existing (fairly primitive) recording equipment - starting out on wax discs, later tape recorders - to be able to do it.

And he had hits with the results. In the 1950s.
And a hit TV show.

So maybe it's a stretch to say he "invented" the solid body electric.
What other pioneers were more successful musically, and equally influential?



This is from 1953:

 

[keyboardguy]

You need to educate yourself, my friend.
Not only was Paul a phenomenal player, he basically invented looping, i.e. overdubs on multi-track recording, building and modding existing (fairly primitive) recording equipment - starting out on wax discs, later tape recorders - to be able to do it.

And he had hits with the results. In the 1950s.
And a hit TV show.

So maybe it's a stretch to say he "invented" the solid body electric.
What other pioneers were more successful musically, and equally influential?



This is from 1953:

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Here's Les and his wife doing their big hit; quite cool....