Thank God for the budget compilation. Finding a collection of Steve Miller’s best songs pre-1976’s Fly Like an Eagle, which transformed him from psychedelic blues-rock gadfly to bona fide platinum-selling mainstreamer, seemed an impossible task until I happened upon 1990’s CEMA Special Markets collection Living in the U.S.A. Just further proof that if you want something done right, leave it to the hacks and quick-buck artists.
Living in the U.S.A. does something none of Miller’s other anthologies do—it collects such classics as “Living in the U.S.A.,” “Space Cowboy,” “The Joker,” and “The Gangster of Love” under the same roof. While saving us from having to listen to the so-so songs included on the only other compilation from the period, 1972’s mediocrity-larded double album, Anthology. Which doesn’t even include 1973’s “The Joker.”
And what comes through is a true oddball. Before he finally figured out how to dazzle the masses with pop-rockers like “Fly Like an Eagle,” “Jungle Love,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Swingtown,” and “Abracadabra,” Miller was a hippie shapeshifter and master of personae, as he famously described in “The Joker.”
His bread and butter may have been the blues, but his best songs were surpassingly strange—just check out his short and jazzy “throwaway” cover of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s hard blues classic “Gangster of Love.” It isn’t your blues fan’s blues song, seeing as how it comes complete with a Cheech and Chong sample and is so laid back weird that the boys in the band can’t suppress their laughter.
Miller was hardly the best blues musician around—Robert Christgau famously wrote, “As a blues singer, he’s incompetent (I wouldn’t come on in his kitchen for a glass of water). But as a purveyor of spacey pop-rock blues, he has his virtues.”
And the chief benefit of this compilation, which includes songs Miller recorded from 1968–1973—during which the Steve Miller Band released eight LPs, from 1968 debut Children of the Future to 1973’s The Joker, is that it focuses not on Miller the bluesman but on Miller the likable eccentric.
If it’s spacy pop-rock blues you seek, you need look no further than the Steve Miller Band’s psychedelic arrangement of the traditional blues standard “Motherless Children,” on which Miller sounds nothing like any blues singer I’ve ever heard. Meanwhile, he plays freaky no-Muddy-Waters-in-the-vicinity guitar, and three different guys play electronics while someone else plays harpsichord.
Just as unconventional is “Don’t Let Nobody Turn You Around,” which Miller could have played as a straight-up blues but instead turned into a cool high-velocity boogie shuffle with layered vocals and a guitar solo that rips it up and tears it up.
“Quicksilver Girl” is one of the coolest Beach Boys songs never written by the Beach Boys—it’s slow and includes some of the lushest vocals you’ll ever hear, especially (but not exclusively) on the chorus. Miller provides simple electric guitar accompaniment, and overall, this one would do Brian Wilson proud. It just goes to show you how eclectic Miller has always been, and how playing a conventional blues musician would have never moved his career forward.
It’s hard to believe the seminal “Living in the U.S.A.” barely cracked the Top 100 back in 1968—from its dragster-sample opener to the repeated chant of “Stand back, stand back!” to Miller’s extended harmonica and soulful vocals, the song’s an upbeat shuffle rocker that stands as one the era’s catchiest critiques of the American way of life, right down to Miller’s sarcastic cry, “Somebody give me a cheeseburger!”
The following year’s “Space Cowboy” put Miller in the vanguard—it was one of the very first songs to capture the zeitgeist surrounding the moon landing. (I’m not a historian, but the only space-related song that came before it was the Bonzo Dog Band’s 1968 hit “I’m the Urban Spaceman.”) And one of the best too—Miller’s spacey vocals (“I’m a space cowboy/Bet you weren’t ready for that”) are perfect, he begins the song the same way he does “The Joker” (“I told you ’bout living in the US of A/Don’t you know that I’m a gangster of love?”). And the long guitar solo is every bit as cool as Miller’s synthesizer, which proved he was up on his space-age technology.
1973’s laid-back pop soul classic “The Joker” is a stroke of genius. When Miller isn’t adding huh?-worthy new words (“pompatus”) to the dictionary (although he first used the word in “Enter Maurice” from the previous year’s Recall the Beginning…A Journey from Eden), borrowing from The Clovers’ 1954 hit “Lovey Dovey” (“You’re the cutest thing/That I ever did see/I really love your peaches/Wanna shake your tree”) or doing yet another rundown of his numerous personae, he’s basically establishing himself as one of the friendliest (and chillest) individuals on the planet (“I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker”). And one of the most likable, as well—you basically have to be David Lee Roth to be any more pompatus, whatever pompatus means.
Is this anthology perfect? No. I’d have swapped out the mediocre blues “The Lovin’ Cup” with the electrifying swamp pop number “Kow Kow Calqulator,” and Miller’s disappointingly slick version of Young Jessie’s wonderful 1955 R&B classic “Mary Lou” (a story song that comes complete with some of the best backing vocals you’ll ever hear, as well as a meaty sax solo and great honky tonk piano) with “Stepping Stone,” an up-tempo blues number that was penned and sung by Boz Scaggs and appeared on Children of the Future.
If you’re looking for a disc that sums up the early best of an artist who—like Bob Seger or early Steve Miller Band bandmate Boz Scaggs—seemed destined to eternal journeyman status but ultimately broke through to the big time, Living in the U.S.A. is your best bet by far. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive like Anthology, and that’s where it wins out—what you get on Living in the U.S.A. is a short list of the best songs by a true psychedelic child of the Haight-Ashbury hippie scene.
With the exception of “Living in the U.S.A.” Steve Miller showed little interest in writing the kinds of conventional rock songs that would make him a star—like the Grateful Dead, the early Miller was too busy letting his freak flag fly. And while he never achieved the cultural cachet the Grateful Dead did, the closest they ever got to being Space Cowboys was “Drums” and “Space.”
And there’s zero pompatus in that.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
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