I can name that tune in three notes. Any tune, on an album like this.
In the realm of classic rock hits collections, the Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 1974-78 album approaches the level of icon. Overloaded with Top Five singles and an entire bait shop of formidably catchy hooks, this 14-track colossus ranks up there with Led Zeppelin IV, Dark Side of the Moon and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack as background music to more dance-floor flirtations, freeway races, make-out sessions and/or inhaling episodes than just about any other album of the late 70s.
The music is a frothy blend of Miller’s classic blues roots, ear for irresistible melodies, and taste for gimmicky but wildly expressive electronic effects. Take the high school dance staple “Jungle Love,” which features a goofy/existential lyric that veers from bringing your lover crates of papayas (after all, “everything’s better when wet”) to observing that “the question to everyone’s answer is usually asked from within,” all the while competing with a central guitar riff infectious enough to send the Centers for Disease Control into a blind panic… not to be outdone by the world premiere of the synthesizer whistle (often admired, never successfully imitated). Cranked up loud, this song still boils over with energy and invention twenty years later.
And it’s only the beginning; still to come are the classic three-chord blues road-movie ditty “Take The Money And Run” (still in the running for the most frequently played song in FM radio history), the rumbly, seductive “Rock N’Me,” complete with its indescribably memorable hitch-in-the-melody air-guitar chorus, and the long distance romance classic “Jet Airliner.”
The fairly lightweight lyrical content of the above shouldn’t be taken to indicate Miller hasn’t been capable of more serious fare; the spacy, effects-laden blues-rock of “Fly Like An Eagle” offers one of his more thoughtful lyrics. More characteristic, though, is the playful self-parody of “The Joker” (philosophers across the globe are still arguing today about what Maurice/Miller had in mind when he first spoke of “the pompatous of love”).
Even lesser Miller hits like “Swingtown,” “True Fine Love” and “Wild Mountain Honey” are instantly familiar to listeners of a certain age today. For many of us, this album will always reverberate with memories. “Come on and dance, come on and dance, let’s make some romance, you know the night is falling and the music’s calling…”
