MUSIC

MUSIC Hitmaker Steve Miller kept the barn door open

by Steve Newton

As a youngster, Steve Miller had the best music teachers you could ever ask for. I mean, Les Paul and T-Bone Walker? Are you kidding? That’s like the ultimate fairy tale for a guitar-crazed kid in the 20th century.

“I grew up in a family where music was on all the time,” the 78-year-old rocker emphasizes on the phone from his home in the Hudson Valley, about 90 minutes north of New York City. “My mother was a singer, her brothers were jazz violinists, and Les Paul was my godfather—so I was surrounded by music and thrilled and fascinated by it, and that’s all I ever wanted to do. Once I saw Les Paul play, I was hooked.”

Paul taught Miller his first chord, and Walker showed him how to play guitar behind his head and do the splits at the same time, which, as Miller quips, “is a very handy thing to know if you’re gonna be in show business”. Walker was a family friend of the Millers who used to come over to their house and play.

“T-Bone was the bridge between blues and jazz,” Miller notes. “B.B. King and Freddie King and Albert King and everybody that plays guitar listened to T-Bone. He was the guy who set the basics for playing lead guitar—he and Charlie Christian. So it was really just unbelievably lucky that I was around all these people. And it made a huge difference in my life.”

During the early part of his career, in the 1960s, Miller wholeheartedly embraced the blues world that Walker had turned him on to. But by the mid-’70s, he turned more to rock, releasing two albums—1976’s Fly Like an Eagle and 1977’s Book of Dreams—that would certify him as a genuine music legend. Between the two of them, those discs would spawn the singles “Take the Money and Run”, “Rock’n Me”, “Fly Like an Eagle”, “Serenade”, “Jet Airliner”, “Jungle Love”, and “Swingtown”. One might be tempted to ask Miller if the switch from blues to rock was a natural progression for him or whether he was consciously trying to get hit songs. “Well, a little bit of all of it,” he replies. “I grew up playing blues in Texas; that was pop music in Texas when I was a kid. I had a blues band when I went to college, and then when I went to Chicago I was playing blues with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and Buddy Guy. Played rhythm guitar for Buddy Guy for a while; did all of that. “And then I got a chance to get a recording contract in California, and that was a completely different world. When I went out to California, I just wanted to write my own music, you know. Now, Les Paul had, I think, 25 top-10 singles or something, so I knew what a hit single was, and I knew what radio airplay was, and I knew about all that. I wanted to make a really great album, and I also wanted to make really great singles, so I wanted to do it all.” One of the more interesting facts about the Steve Miller Band’s windfall of mid’70s radio hits is that all the songs from both albums were created at the same time. “Basically, what happened was we recorded all the basic tracks with the three of us—with [bassist] Lonnie Turner and [drummer] Gary Mallaber. We went to a studio, and in about eleven days or so we cut 21, 22, 23, 24 songs, and then I took those tapes to where I had my own eight-track tape recorder, in my living room, and started working on my lyrics and my arrangements and my vocal parts and all that stuff. “And then somebody else would come into town, like [keyboardist] Joachim Young showed up, and I said, ‘Man, would you come over and play B3 [organ] on ‘Fly Like an Eagle’”? He was such a great, great player, you know. And he said, ‘Sure’, so he came over and did a session, and every now and then there’d be different people that would come in and do session parts and pieces. I was working on about 25 songs, and I worked on it for about 18 months, so I had different people over that time.”

Of course, with all that material in hand, it would have been entirely possible for Miller to release both Fly Like an Eagle and Book of Dreams as a double LP—one huge, hit-packed monster of an album—but he’d learned a thing or two from the Beatles about not blowing your creative wad.

“I had spent some time in London, and I had got to be in the studio with them while they were recording,” he explains, “and I was absolutely amazed to see that they probably had 40 songs in the can that were mixed. I had never run into anybody that was that far ahead of the game, and up to that point it had always been kind of a world where you’d work really hard to make an album, and then you’d go out and tour—and be exhausted—and then you’d come back and go in the studio and make another album.

“It was a very hard way to work,” Miller adds, “and I quickly realized after meeting the Beatles and watching them work that it was much smarter to take some time off and get ahead of the game and have something in the can that worked a lot better on many levels. You were ready to release your next song when the market was ready for it, not when you were ready for it. You know, it used to be like, ‘Well, the boys just had a huge hit and they’ve been in the studio for two years and they’re trying really hard to follow it up.’ I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to just be releasing material. Once I got the barn door open, I wanted to keep it open.” g

Steve Miller (centre) learned how to play guitar from Les Paul and T-Bone Walker, and those skills served him well when it came to crafting his stunning array of rock hits in the 1970s.

Harry

Manx

Liveat the Centennial

Th eatre

Sept 16

“Manx’s real talent lies in creating a place where Blues and Indian Classical are a seamless fi t” ~ Downbeat Magazine. “Canada’s most expressive Blues player” ~ Billboard Magazine.

Tickets: https://tickets.centennialtheatre.com/ TheatreManager/1/online?performance=2940 The Steve Miller Band performs at the PNE Amphitheatre on Tuesday (August 30) as part of the PNE Summer Night Concerts series.

MUSIC / SAVAGE LOVE Ben Harper takes over the bass to handle grief

by Steve Newton

The cover of Ben Harper’s new album, Bloodline Maintenance, appears to be a photo of a little kid poking the relaxed, shadeswearing Harper in the chest with a blue toy shovel. But when Harper calls in for an interview from Paris, France, where he’s just finished a seven-week European tour, he quickly points out that things are not always as they seem.

“That’s actually me poking my father,” he explains. “Many have made that mistake, but I am the current spitting image of my father.”

It turns out that Harper’s dad was the inspiration for much of the lyrical content of Bloodline Maintenance.

“This album represents picking up a conversation with my dad that I should have done long ago but had been thinking about and really didn’t have,” Harper says. “I did my best to transform a mirror into an open window, lyrically, once and for all, and this pandemic really put that mirror in front of me as far as never having processed the loss of my dad. That was one of the many things I ended up sitting with in solitude during the pandemic, writing my way out of.”

The notion of loss, and coming to terms with it, was not just confined to thoughts of the elder Harper, though. The album was actually dedicated to the memory of Juan Nelson, Ben Harper’s longtime bassist and collaborator, who died last year at the age of 62. One of the ways he’s keeping Nelson’s memory alive for himself—besides putting “a lot of Juan” in songs like “Smile at the Mention”—was to play all of the bass guitar on the album, including mostly acoustic standup bass.

“I just felt that that was the right thing to do,” Harper notes, “and it actually connected me to his memory in a very specific and special way. Special to me, I should say. Loss is such a huge, unfillable void that I found playing his instrument helped fill that in just a little bit.”

It’s not the first time the singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist has handled the bottom end, however. He grew up in a music store, where knowing your way around a four-string came in mighty handy.

“You have to learn to play bass because someone always shows up that doesn’t play bass,” he says. “You know, everyone’s always showin’ up with a handful of songs, and they’re usually playing a guitar or piano, so bass is the fallback in a small setting. And growing up in retail music has never been harder than it is now, but back then, you know, one of my grandfather’s sales tactics was that if you could play a couple of songs on every instrument in the shop, you were sure to sell it. So that lent itself towards me learning upright bass at a young age. And I’ve always loved it.

“Juan actually played upright bass every so often,” he adds, “but I just needed to play bass—electric, upright, whatever. I needed to feel that rumbling low end of Juan Nelson so I could actually somehow grieve..”

As well as all the bass, Harper also played drums, lap steel guitar, regular guitar, and a lot of keyboards on Bloodline Maintenance. So does he prefer taking the DIY approach when it comes to making records, or would he rather have a full band along for the ride?

“I do like ’em both,” he says. “It’s great to have people to feed off of in the room. I think that can bring out exciting things in a novel way, where other people are throwing ideas into the pot and helping me stir. The challenge is in the mix, because everyone always wants their instrument turned up. By the time everyone’s instrument’s turned up, you have a very nondynamic mix. So then it’s nice to just be able to put the instruments where you want them in the mix at all times. And to take away the crutch—walk on your own, as far as what you want.”

Harper was definitely walking on his own with his previous album, 2020’s Winter Is for Lovers, an instrumental outing that was just him playing his Monteleone lap steel guitar. Each track was named for one of his favourite places in the world, and Toronto and Montreal both made the cut. So should Vancouverites feel snubbed?

“Oh, you know, I’m so embarrassed because there’s a Toronto and no Vancouver,” he says half-jokingly. “That’ll be for my next instrumental record. Because, I’ll tell you, I have as fond memories of walking through Stanley Park as anywhere in this world.”

There will be no sauntering in Vancouver’s prized park when Harper makes his next visit to B.C. however, as he’s booked to play the four-day Rifflandia Festival in Victoria. He has only performed in the Garden City once before, at “a very small club a long time ago”, so islanders who’ve been waiting to see him in their neck of the woods will finally get their chance.

His current band includes two of the original Innocent Criminals members, drummer Oliver Charles and percussionist Leon Mobley, who’ve been with him for 30 years, and three new guys: bassist Darwin Johnson, second guitarist Alex Painter, and keyboardist Chris Joyner. They’ll be topping a bill that includes Bikini Kill, Pussy Riot, Cat Power, Bran Van 3000, Art d’Ecco, Gold & Youth, and the Choirs YYJ.

Harper’s travels will continue this fall with a tour—opening for Harry Styles—that runs from October 23 to November 15. So does he expect that the more pop-oriented Styles fans—not to mention the followers of Styles’s former boy band, One Direction— will embrace Harper’s deeply sensitive songwriting approach and give him a fair listen?

“Well, we’re gonna find out aren’t we?” he replies. “I mean, really, it’s songcraft. He’s a master songsmith and a deeply important artist that’s just scratched the surface on his genius. And hopefully his fans will recognize some type of through line, lyrically, between what Harry does and what I do.” g

On his latest album, Bloodline Maintenance, Ben Harper played all the bass as a way to help deal with the death last year of his longtime bassist, Juan Nelson. Photo by Michael Halsband.

Ben Harper performs at the Rifflandia Festival in Victoria on Friday, September 16.

Can “high standards” mask a desire for solitude? by Dan Savage

T

his is a preview of this week’s Savage Love. The full version is now exclusively available on Dan’s website Savage.Love.

b I’M A 40-YEAR-OLD female, cis-het. I have very discerning tastes in men and always end up alone. Any way to be more open without sacrificing my standards?

You’ve either had a terrible run of bad luck—assuming you’ve dated more than 10 men—or you’ve set your standards impossibly high. Some food for thought: perhaps you think you want a long-term relationship because you were told that’s what you’re supposed to want—you were told that’s what all good people want—but you actually don’t want a long-term relationship. They don’t make you happy.

But instead of telling yourself that you’re a good person who prefers short-term relationships and/or being alone, you’ve set your standards so high—you’ve dialled them up to sabotage—because you want to be alone. And instead of owning that about yourself, you find fault in the men you date.

PS: There’s no settling down without