important work in yellow
1968:
Children of the Future * Sailor. 1969: Brave New World * Your Saving Grace. 1970: Number 5. 1971: Rock Love. 1972: Recall
the Beginning ... Journey to Eden * Anthology. 1973: The Joker *
Steve Miller Live. 1976: Fly Like an Eagle. 1977: Book of Dreams.
1981: Circle of Love. 1982: Abracadabra. 1984: Italian X-Rays.
1986: Living in the 20th Century. 1988: Born 2 B Blue. 1993: Wild
River.
Were critics ever kinder to a more mediocre artist than Miller? Children
of the Future and Sailor, released in 1968,
displayed a level of incompetence found only among the lowliest
amateurs of hippie rock and roll (Fever Tree, early New York Rock
and Roll Ensemble, The Paupers). Everything after 1973's The
Joker was an attempt to keep the money coming in, which has
resulted in mannerism and mass-audience pandering of an
embarrassing nature. The three albums showing Miller at his best
- Brave New World, Your Saving Grace, and Number
5 - promised pop fun of a not-too-smart, but at least
competent, variety; and the social turbulence of the
sixties/early seventies provided Miller with some thematic
gravity; but the success of the inferior albums that followed
seems to have tainted everything Miller's touched since then.
With each new Steve Miller album, you can almost sense him up on
his Idaho ranch praying for a hit. What's worse, despite a
propensity for turning out cotton-candyass tunes, Miller has a
perplexing fondness for the blues. It's a strange case of a
musician hankering for a black soul, when he hasn't proven he has
a white one.
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