Steve Miller Band

Few artists of the classic-rock era moved with the times as fluidly and successfully as Steve Miller. A Milwaukee-born, Texas-raised blues devotee who cut his teeth in Chicago before moving on to psychedelic San Francisco (his band’s first recordings were backing Chuck Berry at The Fillmore), Miller’s music reconciled tradition and progress, folk and futurism, yesterday and tomorrow—a balance that would make him one of the most dynamic and commercially indelible artists of the '70s. But for all his popularity, Miller was also quietly unorthodox. Listen to 1976’s Fly Like an Eagle—a spacey marriage of blues riffs, synthesizer blips, country comforts, disco thump, surreal lyrics, and firmly grounded grooves—and you’ll hear a sound that tilted radio rock in adventurous new directions (and provided sample fodder for bona fide hip-hop classics by N.W.A., Biz Markie, and Geto Boys). Not that he ever conceived of his music in such stratospheric terms: Miller once told interviewer Charlie Rose, “Most of my songs are, like, the kind of songs you put on in the car and drive.”