It’s Miller time

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/04/2018 (2888 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sixty million albums sold worldwide; 11 Top-40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including three that went all the way to No. 1; a 50-year recording career that culminated with an induction into the Rock and Roll of Fame in 2016.

When you’re examining the life and times of Steve Miller, who will perform live at Bell MTS Place tonight as part of a double-bill with fellow ‘70s guitar god Peter Frampton, one of the most efficient ways to do so is by the numbers.

Take for instance Oct. 5, the day the Milwaukee native turns 75. Or the fact 34 different musicians have been a member of the Steve Miller Band, since its inception as the Steve Miller Blues Band in 1966. Consider also his compilation album Greatest Hits 1974-78, which, with sales of 15 million copies in North America alone, is the 37th biggest selling record, all-time, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Or, closer to home, there’s July 27, 1978, the day more than 27,000 people packed Assiniboia Downs to watch the Steve Miller Band co-headline an outdoor show with the Eagles. (Music nerds will happily point out a photo taken that night, with the racetrack’s grandstand clearly visible in the background, graces the inside sleeve of Miller’s aforementioned greatest hits album.)

To prepare concert-goers for this evening’s performance, which will mark the second time the Space Cowboy — others call him the Gangster of Love — has appeared at the downtown rink in the last four years, we decided to take a numerical look back at the ageless axeman’s rock and roll legacy. Here’s a bit of what we turned up…

1968: year Miller recorded and released his debut album, Children of the Future. Named to a Rolling Stone magazine list entitled, “20 Albums Rolling Stone Loved in the Sixties That You’ve Never Heard,” Children of the Future contains tracks Miller largely wrote in the early 1960s, when he toiled as a janitor at a recording studio.

Zero: amount, in dollars, Miller paid Paul Ramon to play drums and bass guitar on his 1969 album, Brave New World. What did you say? Who’s Paul Ramon? That’s the alias Paul McCartney routinely used when he checked into hotels while on tour with the Beatles (perhaps you’ve heard of them).

14: not counting double or triple-word scores, the number of points you’d be awarded in the board game Scrabble for spelling pompatus, except you’d have to give ‘em all back, as it’s not a real word. “Some people call me Maurice, cause I speak of the pompatus of love,” Miller sang, on the title track of his 1973 hit album, The Joker. Pompatus, a term Miller admits to fabricating, has taken on a life of its own since The Joker made its way to the top of the pop charts. Exhibit A: in the 1996 film The Pompatus of Love, the protagonists spend an inordinate amount of time discussing their individual relationships, as well as the meaning of the word pompatus.

25 to life: in years, length of the prison sentence you’re likely to receive if you’re found guilty of armed robbery in Texas. In Take the Money and Run, the first single from Miller’s multi-platinum album Fly Like an Eagle, Billie Joe and Bobbie Sue shoot an El Paso resident “while robbing his castle,” then hit the road, doing their best to elude a detective named Billy Mack. If the pair is still on the lam, as the last line of the song “and they’re still running today,” seems to indicate, they can come out of hiding any time soon. The statute of limitations for robbery offenses in Texas is five years.

4,500: altitude, in metres, bald eagles are reportedly capable of flying Miller wrote Fly Like an Eagle, one of his signature tunes, in 1973, but didn’t get around to recording it until three years later. The song was famously covered by Seal for the soundtrack to the 1996 movie Space Jam. Miller apparently called Seal after hearing the finished version, declaring it the “best cover” of the song he had ever heard.

12,226: distance, in kilometres, traveled by Miller in the lyrics of his No. 1 hit Rock’n Me. Talk about a roundabout route: in Rock’n Me, Miller sings of going from “Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A…” Although he doesn’t specify where in northern California (“where the girls are warm”) he winds up at song’s end, we took that to mean San Francisco, where the Steve Miller Band was born, for the sake of our calculations.

19: years Tarzan and Jane would have maintained a relationship, based on a complicated formula created by a dating app called lunchclick. Originally written by Miller’s bass player for Dave Mason, ex- of the rock band Traffic, Jungle Love, a tune that climbed to No. 23 on the charts, was presented to Miller after Mason said thanks, but no thanks. Miller reportedly recorded it in a blazing 30 minutes, on his final day in the studio for 1977’s Book of Dreams.

213: “likes” Swingtown, a Steve Miller tribute act based in Pensacola, Fla. has received to date, on its Facebook page Swingtown was the third and final single released from Book of Dreams. The song’s slow build of an intro, punctuated by Miller trilling “Ooo oooohhhh Ooo oooohhhh” over and over, was later featured in a TV commercial advertising the 1979 Ford Mustang.

60,173: in dollars, the average annual salary of a Las Vegas-based magician Abracadabra, the title track from Miller’s 1982 smash, was his last No. 1 single in Canada and the U.S. The five-minute, eight-second-long track, which magically rhymes “abracadabra” with “grab ya,” also ascended to the top of the charts in Australia, Austria, Switzerland and Sweden.

1: number of solo albums Miller has under his belt In 1988, Miller offered up Born 2 B Blue, a 10-track collection of jazz covers originally recorded by the likes of Billie Holiday, Mel Torme and Lionel Hampton. While Born 2 B Blue resonated with music critics — one online review describes it as “charmingly laid-back” and “pleasant as can be” — it wasn’t a commercial success, by any stretch, peaking at No. 108 on Billboard’s weekly album chart.

17: how many years passed between Miller’s 1993 release Wide River, and it’s follow-up Bingo!, which came out in 2010 Miller didn’t waste time issuing his next work: Let Your Hair Down, his last studio album, hit store shelves in April 2011, 10 months after the release of Bingo!.

22: according to advance reports, amount of songs concert-goers can expect Miller to perform this evening, including a few blues standards when he’ll be accompanied on stage by Frampton. Despite what it says on his birth certificate, Miller, 74, continues to log close to two hours on stage, an average 50 nights per year. A 2019 world tour is said to be in the works plus there are also whispers of a new studio album in the offing. Both of which mean if you weren’t able to snag tickets to tonight’s show, you probably won’t have to wait too long until your next opportunity to see him live rolls around.

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca