THE ALCHEMIST
“GAD, I WAS SO UPTIGHT when I was making this stuff. I should have been a lot more relaxed,” Steve Miller says with a chuckle when discussing his new release, Welcome to the Vault. The 52-song box set features 38 previously unreleased tracks along with a DVD containing 21 live performances. Taken together, they provide an unprecedented look into Miller’s creative processes via song demos, live cuts, outtakes and rehearsals.
“Most of the stuff on this album I didn’t release myself,” Miller continues. “It took someone else, my wife Janice in particular, who would listen to these other versions of tunes and say that we should release them. As you grow older, you realize you’re kind of a perfectionist about your own work, and it gets kind of silly, but it is truly difficult to let your rough ideas out there.”
Being able to watch the great Les Paul work in his home studio and growing up in a family that enjoyed the company of top blues and jazz artists of the 1950s certainly gave Steve Miller a good start. But it was his talents as a guitar player and songwriter, coupled with his sheer ambition, fearlessness and drive for perfection, that allowed him to evolve, in a relatively short amount of time, from a hard-hitting blues rocker to a performer of experimental music to a megastar whose parade of hits in the 1970s carried him on a tidal wave of popularity that the established forces in the radio and record industries simply couldn’t control. A true force of nature, Steve Miller made music on his own terms, and his stories about how he did it are inspiring.
“FLY LIKE AN EAGLE” FLY LIKE AN EAGLE (1976)
What led you to use synth sounds when this record was being conceived?
I was always interested in electronic music and had been listening to [] La Monte Young and Stockhausen in the early ’60s, before I even got my recording contract. I was ping-ponging with tape recorders and doing reverb things and stuff like that, and
