Steve Miller Band “Italian X Rays”

August 11, 2020 Matty Wishnow

For most of the late 70s and early 80s, I was unsure if Steve Miller was an actual person. Mind you, I was just a kid then. But still. I assumed that “Steve Miller” was merely a persona, like “Space Cowboy,” “Maurice” and “The Joker.” If there was an actual man named Steve Miller performing all of those songs on “The Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974–78,” I had no idea what he looked like or where he came from. The music sounded so much like high end candy or toys made for radio that I naturally assumed that the maker of that music was a factory or a conglomerate rather than a band of men. Steve Miller, I presumed, was like “Calvin Klein.” There was a man named “Calvin Klein,” of course, but, by the 80s his brand had consumed his person. Steve Miller felt similar. To me he was a faceless brand that churned out big guitar hooks, even bigger bass hooks and relaxed, easy to listen to vocals that were piled high so as to sound like pleasant, aseptic harmonies. Like tens of millions of other Americans, I liked listening to and singing along with Steve Miller Band songs. But I never gave them, the band, and certainly not the singer, much thought once the songs ended. That was, I’m sure, no small part of their genius. They went down easily and left you briefly pleased and then were gone, until the radio played them again fifty minutes later.

By the time Steve Miller really found that signature sound in the early 70s -- cool, clean and catchy as fuck -- he was nearly thirty and had traveled a great distance. Born in Wisconsin, his family was very close to Les Paul. Yes -- the Les Paul. Miller picked up guitar early and cut his teeth as a bluesman in Chicago in the 60s until he was lured to San Francisco right before the “Summer of Love.” There, he formed the “Steve Miller Blues Band,” which soon got a record contract and shortened their name to the “Steve Miller Band.” During the late 60s and very early 70s, the “Steve Miller Band” was wrestling with a psychedelic, Blues-inspired flavor of Rock music that sat somewhere between Jefferson Airplane and early Chicago. Under the surface, though, there was a battle going on for Miller’s musical soul. His Blues roots were being pulled up, not merely by Psychedelic Rock but, increasingly by a latent Pop sensibility that was always there but, at the moment, out of vogue. As the decades changed, the hippie hangover began and a lighter, more “middle of the road” brand of music filled the airwaves, Steve Miller let his Pop instincts take over. He focused less on virtuosity and more on hooks and harmonies. He worried less about the meaning of his words and more about the sound of them. He cleaned up the distortion. He removed all vocal strain. And what was left was the almost frictionless, just vaguely psychedelic Pop Rock of “The Joker,” “Fly Like an Eagle,” and “Take the Money and Run.” He had struck Pop gold.

The new sound was decidedly more modern and bluesy than 70s AM radio fare without being as cheeky as E.L.O., Miller’s creative cousins across the pond, who were making immaculate, Beatles-inspired bubblegum hits for adults. In his inarguable Pop prime, though, no American was making more digestible Rock music for radio than Steve Miller. Over thirty official members traveled through the band, but the constant, for roughly a decade, was a profoundly talented musician and songwriter who was getting so efficient with his craft and brand as to sound like a radio hit machine. The better he got, the less you could feel the artistry. The better he got, the less it sounded like a band of men. The better he got, the less anyone seemed to care about Steve Miller, the artist. Though he could not have known it at the time, with each hit record, Steve Miller was feeding the machine while digging his own artistic grave.

The apotheosis was, of course, 1982s smash hit, “Abracadabra” an inane -- and insanely catchy -- five minutes of perfect Pop built around a simple up / down scale, an earworm chorus, and synthesizer bleats and farts. The song dominated the charts during the months before “Thriller” arrived. In retrospect, the popularity of the song also consumed the last remnants of good will that Steve Miller had among Classic Rock songs. “Abracadabra” punctuated a process of listenability optimization that made Steve Miller very successful. And while he was never, in the enduring sense, a Rock star or a Pop star, Miller had learned, quite literally, to game the system. He had figured out the cheat code for radio and for the music industry. For example, he learned to insert minute long (or less) instrumentals on his albums once he understood that he would get paid a “statutory rate” for every song on his albums, regardless of the length of the track. Standalone intros, codas and interstitials became common on Steve Miller Band records because they amounted to an ATM hack that would deliver extra pennies to Miller for each album sold, despite the fact that many of these “songs” were not, in the true sense, songs.

By 1983, the Steve Miller Band was, perhaps unknowingly, a cynical Pop music algorithm. With each record it had become more refined in its cynicism and in the lack of struggle and humanity in the music. While it no doubt took a great deal of work and talent to make the music that Miller made then, none of the grit could be heard. “Abracadabra” was the Steve Miller Band at its most optimized and at its Waterloo. It took a decade for Miller to perfect this craft and, in an instant, tastes turned on him. 1984 was the year of Prince and Bruce Springsteen, artists whose humanity was unmistakable. The Steve Miller Band’s softer, cleaner pop was eschewed for R&B-infected Adult Contemporary from Lionel Richie and Tina Turner. A platinum selling artist just the year before, Miller found himself ignored or resented by listeners and a poor fit for the airwaves and for MTV. In erasing the peculiarity and artistry from his music, America simply, and suddenly, stopped caring about Steve Miller.

It is unclear how much Steve Miller realized this at the time. His follow-up to “Abracadabra” was 1984s “Italian X Rays,” an album that pushed the algorithm so far as to make one wonder if Miller was being ironic or experimental. Poignantly, and paradoxically, most of the songs on the record were written by longtime drummer Tim Miller, who was suffering through a harsh bout with diabetes that would soon take his life. And though it was the drummer that made the album, it is the bizarre “knob turning” and stereo testing instrumentals that most define it.

“Italian X Rays” features thirteen songs, but clocks in at thirty seven minutes. It accomplishes this feat of brevity by including four very short instrumentals that sound designed for 80s audiophiles who really wanted to hear what Steve Miller’s score for the Millennium Falcon was. On top of Moog and synth flute, we get synth honks and moody turns. And for each of these four pieces of space debris, Steve Miller receives nine cents per sale.

Of course, there are actual songs on the album, as well. The better ones even further refined the sound Miller had been perfecting in recent years -- programmed synth hooks, deep and forward but not funky bass lines, vocal tracks piled up to produce harmonies without any inflection variance, and a very cool, very clean mix. Whereas his previous albums had a heavy emphasis on choruses and still plenty of guitar, “Italian X-Ray” is a synthesizer album. It no longer sounds like a man perfecting a musical algorithm. It sounds like the algorithm thinks it’s smart enough to compose its own songs.

The title track, like much of the album, features Miller’s voice, at varying levels, coming at you from both channels. It’s a slinky vocal that sits exactly on a beat, surrounded by lots of “doo dad” effects. Whatever computer made this song was a very high end one in 1984, I bet. However, even at his worse, Miller can make very catchy music, at least for short bursts. Following “Abracadabra,” though, Miller fully surrenders to the notion that the sound of his lyrics are the meaning of his lyrics. He closes the title track with nearly a minute of:

Doo wappa doo wappadoo wappa doot

Ohh woo woo ooh ooh ooh ooh

“Miller the Algorithm” basically makes three versions of songs on “Italian X Rays.” The first are the futuristic “synth-strumentals” for audiophiles. The second are the moody, wind chimes and guitar tracks from a singer with a souped-up Casio. And the third are the bass-led, catchy and funky, but also cold and uninteresting Pop tracks. Of the second variety, not all are terrible and most show Miller’s preternatural knack for hook and melody. “Daybreak” and “One in a Million” sound like the computer generated a talented but stunted, New Age, bald guy with a ponytail from the Berkshires singing about love with his expensive electronic toy. “Who Do You Love” would also fall into this class but the algorithm brings more bubblegum to the song, and that’s a strength of Miller. It’s disposable, 80s New Wave, but it sure is sweet, even in spite of the LGBTQ-unfriendly lyrics:

Whooooo

Ever since time began

Man loves a woman

Woman loves a man

This is the way it was meant to be

Through the pages, through the books

Of our history

You, you, you

Who do you love, who do you love, who do you love, now

Of the “somewhat catchy” and “lightly funky” variety, the standouts are “Golden Opportunity” and “Shangri-La.” The former is one of two tracks that actually sounds like it was made by human beings. And though it features a typically excellent bass hook and some refreshing guitar, its lack of weirdness reminds us that it’s also basically a boring, if catchy, rock song, just one tick better than, say, median Greg Kihn. The latter is an entirely more interesting track, with rubbery bass and an extra helping of cowbell. Miller’s defect-free voice comes at you from all angles, but refuses to feel anything. And yet, the track gets its groove. James Murphy could have a field day remixing this. George Clinton could have really brought the groove to life. It should be a funky, party song except that Miller doesn’t really want to party. He wants to chill and maybe smoke an expensive cigar.

I’ve read some fans, including unsurprisingly Steve Miller himself, try to redeem “Italian X Rays.” If I wanted to get very “meta” about it all, I could suggest that the record presages My Morning Jacket when they were, briefly, experimental. Miller and Jim James have very similar voices, so when MMJ slows down the jam and gets weird, it can sound like 80s Steve Miller. And LCD Soundsystem taps a similar vein when they get a little depressed or a little lazy. I think both of those suggestions are defensible but that in no way redeems the album. “Italian X Rays” is an artifact from an artist whose blessing became his curse and who became so imprisoned with the confirmation bias that comes with success, that he could not see the artistic stop sign.

Steve Miller would make a couple more albums for Capitol Records. He would even have a couple more low-end, charting singles. And then he would mostly walk away from the music industry for over two decades. In 2016, Miller briefly returned to the spotlight when he famously clashed with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the cusp of his own induction. He (rightfully) bemoaned the lack of diversity in the Hall as well as the lack of generosity it showed in extending invitations to inductees, their bandmates and their families. He called the organization “fucking gangsters and crooks,” refused to leave the stage at his induction while in the middle of a tirade, insulted The Black Keys, who were asked to induct him, and then, finally, threatened to sue the Hall for the indignity of it all. The moment had more than a whiff of Past Prime resentment from an artist who had the rug pulled out from under him by the market and the industry at the very moment he perfected his trick of the trade.

It’s hard to not view the breathtaking speed by which Miller was deemed irrelevant as sad and a bit cruel. That said, I assume he did soon recover in his palatial, Sun Valley, Idaho ski-escape-fitness-center-recording-studio, where he could whisper “cha ching” every time a suburban kid paid for one of his greatest hits or for one of those instrumental quickies he made to cheat the mechanical royalty system. Honestly, I don’t begrudge Miller his rancor, if he did, in fact, have any. I don’t begrudge him “Italian X Rays,” either. Steve Miller gave us a lot of joy. He worked hard. He deserved to let the artificial intelligence machine he made take over for a while. That’s what robots are for. Right?

by Matty Wishnow