STEVE MILLER BAND – “The Joker”
“The Joker”‘s quick run at Number One is best known for one of the chart’s notorious injustices – it tied in sales with Deee-Lite’s “Groove Is In The Heart” and took the honours owing to a greater sales increase. Cue a certain amount of outrage and a hurried rewriting of the rules, which naturally have never been needed since. No conspiracy, just rotten luck, and “Groove”‘s status as a nailed-on wedding floorfiller means it’s as inescapable as any early 90s #1 anyway.
Even so it looks like a win for tedious old rock over playful frothy pop. But hold on, because the two songs have more in common than it might appear. At heart, both take a unit-shifting genre and inject it with some likeable silliness: Deee-Lite turned clubbing into a kitschadelic hip-hop party, Steve Miller turned easy 70s AOR into a goofball slacker stroll. And back in ’73, Miller’s silliness might have been the more striking – here’s a seven-album chops-heavy veteran of the psychedelic jam scene making up words and going “Maw-REECE” and digging into nudge-wink 50s innuendo about peaches and trees.
But in 1990? It was just, you know, 70s rock. The Levis ad – of course it was a Levis ad – which brought the song back to consciousness uses the song as a marker of preposterous cool and is hard to work out. It seems pregnant with 90s knowingness, teetering on the point of laughing at itself but not quite willing to play that card when it knows that a hot biker riding rings round the squares will still – just about – sell as that. And the thing about the song is how Miller is having his laidback cake and eating it in a similar way – drawling out the words, wandering round the melody, then rolling into a self-mythologising chorus he must have known was a winner. He’s not taking himself entirely seriously, but seriously enough to sell the song to guys who want to be the joker even if they don’t know what a pompetus is.
At the time, of course I hated it – it was the past and communicated nothing about the now or the future. And it’s part of a wave of covers and revivals that will drown the next year or so. But 90s pop wasn’t going to be as straightforwardly futuristic as I might have liked, and “The Joker” fits into other strands. If Levi’s hadn’t raked it up, it might have ended up on a Tarantino soundtrack. It might even have found a place in The Dude’s 1991 LA. It’s that rarity, a revival that happened too soon.
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Indeed, the gag was rather played out back then, when the Labour leadership campaign was in full swing. Sadly, no mention for the even more neglected fourth Miliband brother, Glenn, who’s been missing for some time now.
I liked “The Joker” a lot when it first came out, although wouldn’t die in a ditch as to its merits (prefer “Rock’n Me” or “Fly Like An Eagle”, the latter of which was to be purloined by a certain white rapper we’re going to meet shortly). “Joker” was a feelgood song, none too serious, and of its time. Would have loved it to be a big hit in 1973, but here it did seem out of place and indicative of the power of the ad campaign rather than the music when, as many here have said, people wanted to get on with the 90s.
Wouldn’t have begrudged GIITH a turn at the top, either. I think DJ Punctum of this parish was well aware of his local chart return shop, if memory serves…
If ‘The Joker’ had come out in 1973, nobody would have noticed!
Much prefer The Joker to GIITH but agree with the general anti-revivalist sentiment many have expressed. The record’ is a 7 in the ’70s but presumably less than that in the ’90s (looking ahead there are some *ace* record revivals coming up that are going to be painful to have to score relatively lowly for lack of timeliness, oh well).
Somewhat related to Tom’s Tarantino point: there was a (rather Apatow-ish/bromantic) 1996 rom com called The Pompatus of Love which featured endless sub-Reservoir Dogs dialogue about The Joker and its famous, silly line.
Well it was the US number one in January 1974, replacing Jim Croce’s gorgeous “Time in a Bottle”, so someone noticed! Whether it had a UK single release in ‘73 I’m not sure.
Wiki notes that the 1990 reissue also reached number one in the Netherlands, New Zealand and Ireland (where it was deposed by the Saw Doctors!)
From reading these pages I get the impression that Mr Billy Smart went to school very near me. The names of the schools clang like old bells in my head.
Some people were into ‘smoking’, but you never heard about ‘toking’.
erithian @ 26
I don’t think lex has caught up yet.
A further thought on retro. Tom is on record as saying he dislikes The Doors (though I don’t recall him saying why). In less than a year from this point in Popular time we’ll be reaching the twentienth anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, marked by Oliver Stone’s tribute film. It isn’t a very good film, but through it many of the young North Kensingtonians I knew at the time, who admittedly may not have been representative of young people in general, discovered the old West Coast sound and saw that it was good, at least the equal of much contemporary music.
There was a lot more of a drug culture in my school than (almost) any group that I’ve known since. Cannabis everywhere and the focal interest of Lewisham kids, some E, but oddly acid still had quite a following at the time (“Ya tripping? Ya tripping?”), which you don’t really think of as being a 1990 London concern. I don’t remember there being any speed, though there was some experimentation with amyl nitrate.
I didn’t really feel a part of any of this, though I was coerced into toking on occasions, always with the abrasive effect of the tobacco far outweighing any mellowing power that the cannabis might contain.
It was a difficult time.
Oddly, my generation weren’t very interested in drinking though, the presence of alcohol being taken as a given, and its effects being seen as much less interesting than drugs.
Re 31. Yes the 1991 revival of ‘Light My Fire’ was also big in sixth form circles, Morrison’s “We couldn’t get much HIGHER!” frequently being sung alongside “I’m a midnight toker”, much to my irritation. “Chill out mate!”
I’m with Ewing on that one – don’t know the Doors that well but they strike me as the worst of the major 1960s bands – if they were indeed a major 1960s band.
This makes me think that I sort of like all 1960s bands except when they’re really psychedelic / prog or something (eg I don’t think I like J Airplane, or Pink Floyd bar the very early songs that everyone knows). Doors had other bad things going on though – vocally, lyrically, bathos, bad in lots of ways, I would think, and not that much to redeem them.
Doors – first successful rock group to have a logo, ergo the beginning of corporate rock.
Lillian Roxon puts up a convincing contemporary love/hate argument for them in her 1969 Rock Encyclopedia.
#18 I imagine you’re right – a lot of “close run things” would have had to be sorted out this way. Speaking as someone who works in data analysis for a media company though, if I turfed up data that was that close my conclusion would not be “this one is higher than that one” but “these are, on the balance of probability the same”. Agreed that basically that this was a failure of imagination on behalf of the charts – they could have run with the story if it were a tie.
Interesting stories on the chart return stores – the leaking of their location must have been people at the relevant research companies taking a back hander to let people know where they were going to be. The PR companies knowing before the shops involved is pretty funny.
Yeah I don’t think I have any very interesting reasons for not liking The Doors – I know almost nobody who likes them and so have perversely tried to get into them but there are still huge barriers. Decent band, TERRIBLE frontman is my not specially original view on them! On something like “The End”, with the “Father I want to kill you / Mother I want to RARURUAURURURR!” bit, I just end up laughing, and I can put my historical hat on and think – yes, this was groundbreaking, nobody had been doing stuff like this before but it’s an innovation that seems immediately clumsy and stupid as soon as it happens.
I do have a kind of guilty pleasure soft spot at the moment for really declarative, yearning rock but I think it’s more likely to end up with me finally liking Van Morrison than finally getting into The Doors.
#28 at least one upcoming revival is a song I couldn’t stand anyway.
Boring, in short. And I am happy to be described, not inaccurately, as a reactionary. “Abracadabra” is miles better…But compared with “The Joker”, Deee-Lite would easily have been the more worthy chart-topper, even if they were a bit overhyped.
(Sure there was a stripped-down dance version of Fly Like An Eagle out around the summer of ’90 – or possibly ’91, but can’t recall who the artiste responsible was)
Funny really, at the time it made No1 in the USA, it was held up as an example of how inferior the UK charts were compared to the US.
I believe it did get released over here. As did a whole bunch of his singles from this point onwards, with plenty of airplay, to no effect until “Rock’n'me” finally crept into the lower reaches…
Do you think “Maurice” refers to the character in Northern Exposure with the unfeasibly young wife? It might explain the wolf whistle, which was put to even better effect on Go Kart Mozart’s Here Is A Song .
I loved Groove is in the Heart and still do, especially its cheeky purloining of that great bass line from, if memory serves, Herbie Hancock’s soundtrack to Blow Up?
And talking of bass lines, The Doors would have benefitted from a bit of bass guitar on their first few albums. Very tinny sounding they are. And not very good really. Part of the problem is they are so precious as musicians, without any of the verve of contempories like Hendrix, the Stones, Zep etc
Quite like bits of Morrison Hotel and LA Woman though – Love Her Madly, Peace Frog, Queen of the Highway
As for The Joker, it bored me. But then I hated the whole Levis ad tie-in thing.
One way of reconciling the two records is “Groove…” for the beans, “The Joker” for the bong. There’s not much more to add really.
Just listened to the next ten songs we have coming up, btw – if there’s a more stylistically diverse (tho hardly always good) run of ten in Popular I dunno where I’d look for it.
I was quite happy for Dee-Lite to fail as I thought they were over-hyped but compared to some of the crap to come “GITH” was brilliant.
You do wonder why people without the slightest interest in 70s stoner rock would nevertheless buy this because it was on a commercial. Was this the high tide of Levis revivals ? – I remember the following year a glam fan at work getting very excited that Marc Bolan was going to get another number one when they used “20th Century Boy” and it didn’t happen. Mind you given the contemporary crap they hoisted to the top we might have been better off with the oldies.
#41 Northern Exposure wasn’t running in 1973. “Maurice” actually refers back to one of his earlier songs.
I think Smash Hits must have run a report on chart return shops, showing a picture of a Dataport (possibly) machine, because we kept trying to lean over the counter in WH Smiths to see if they had one.
They probably didn’t, or Duran Duran would’ve had way more No.1s.
The Joker? I didn’t like it, but I remembered a mid-80s Spandau Ballet interview where Gary Kemp said they had a special dance for it at school.
Miller’s men were played endlessly on the daytime Radio 1 of my youth, in silent reproach at the record buying public for repeatedly, and thoughtlessly, neglecting to put them in the charts where they belonged. 1968′s Sailor was their masterpiece, and one of the first and firmest of stumblings towards that end-of-sixties doped/can’t-find-our-way-home roundelay with its “Song For My Ancestors” and “Dear Mary” and “Quicksilver Girl”…and Miller never quite seems to have found his way out of that particular cloud of smoke.
The Steve Miller Band’s seventies and early eighties output was pretty adventurous in its own ways; in other words, those strange, alien winds at the elongated end of “Swingtown” or the flurries of synth crenellating the beached rock whales of “Fly Like An Eagle” or the fourteen vacant minutes of “Macho City” (the Eagles do Tago Mago?) are residual layers of psychedelia pasted onto formalist seventies stoner AoR, and in their manner antecedents of World Of Twist (whose “The Storm” should perhaps have gone to number one in 1990 rather than “The Joker”).
And what exactly was “The Joker” doing at number one in 1990? Prior to this, the SMB had only racked up two UK Top 40 hits; “Rock ‘N Me” (#11 in 1976) and Squeeze-gone-wrong tribute “Abracadabra,” which rather surprisingly made number two in the declining New Pop midsummer of 1982 despite being represented on TOTP by a magician, clearly recruited from the long-term classified section of The Stage, performing excerpts from The Boys’ Book Of Basic Tricks. So “The Joker,” despite being an American number one and being played to death on 1974 Radio 1 by Noel Edmonds and Johnnie Walker, had not previously been a hit in Britain; but, as ever, the introduction of the word “Levi’s” will explain everything.
By 1990 the Levi’s ad campaign had moved away from Classic Soul towards Classic Rock, and despite the “Joker” ad featuring an intent biker, totally at odds with the song’s subject matter and delivery, it did the trick. It’s still not very clear how it got to number one, however; every atom of “The Joker” seeps stoned 1974 denim from its furtive smoke. The band play the song as slowly and meanderingly as possible such that it distorts into a slight unreality – the original dope beat – while a clearly out-of-his-tree Miller burbles in a Van Morrison “Sweet Thing” fashion (“Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time”) and allows the occasional wolf whistle to escape from his lead guitar. Starting with a quick precis of his works to (1974) date, citing “Space Cowboy,” “Gangster Of Love” and “Little Maurice” (in which latter the phrase “pompitous of love” makes its first appearance in Miller’s work), it then slackens into a rapture of non-committal love (“I’m a midnight toker,” “I’m right here at home”) and slovenly winking double entendres (“Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree”). On the 45 mix the song fades out with gradual slowness and you are left with the impression that it could drawl on forever. Was this a sideways acknowledgement on the part of an astute music consultant of the E’d-out Second Summer Of Love? An odd and rather baffling number one for this age, and in this case not necessarily No Bad Thing. It doesn’t sound much like Glenn Miller either.
Here’s Steve and the latest incarnation of his band playing “The Joker” on Later with Jools last October, with 2010 Poptimist favourites Cee-Lo Green and Janelle Monae appearing to rather enjoy it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bokGbTtJ5Nw
I do love that bass line and the drum sound, though, even if the song isn’t all that great.
Oddly, I can remember exactly what I was doing and where I was the first time I heard The Steve Miller Band. I was eight years old, and listening to the Tuesday afternoon chart run-down on Radio One (I adored that as a kid, and would rush home from school at lunchtimes just to catch it and get the news ahead of Thursday’s “Top of the Pops”). As a treat, my mum had given me a jam doughnut and a plate (“just to catch the mess, you know what you’re like”). Then “Abracadabra” came on the radio, the first I’d ever heard of this mysterious Steve Miller Band who so far hadn’t really been beamed into my boyish world.
My response was immediate and reflexive. I bloody hated it, and remember saying so. “Oh God Mum, this song is boooring”, I whined. The main reason my memory of hearing them is so picture-perfect in my mind is because I couldn’t comprehend why this dirge was so high in the charts and what anyone was getting out of it. It baffled me more than “O Superman”. It was rock, but it was lifeless rock, a lazy, repetitive approximation of what I was used to, and I found its pace and the vocals somehow simultaneously odd and dreary. I suppose I expected some kind of edge and found that there was none there.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge since, but some things remain the same, and I have to confess that even as a grown man, The Steve Miller Band are a total blind spot for me, one of the few bands who genuinely cause me to physically yawn when I hear them (although The Doors would be another, interestingly enough). Both “The Joker” and “Abracadabra” in particular are over-familiar enough to be duller to my ears than any of their other output would seem. I know what they’re driving towards and I suppose I can see the appeal this kind of stoner-rock might have to some, but to me it just sounds bone-idle and smug about its effortlessness. The best stoner music is frequently sonically rich, but SMB just seem to capture the lethargy and tongue-lolling stupidity of that state of mind and nothing else here. Sometimes when I hear “The Joker”, all I can see in my mind’s eye is Dylan off “The Magic Roundabout”.
For all that, I remember a lot of my school friends buying “The Joker” at the time and going on about how great it was. It was definitely one of those rare singles which got a lot of love from the Classic Rock brigade and also a much younger generation, making it a natural number one. Some of this was down to the “toker” line, but clearly others were getting plenty more from it than I ever managed.
I never really noticed this before, but SM sounds VERY like Elvis Costello. Or I guess vice versa.