“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.
Score: 5
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I’d never heard that Groove Is In The Heart story before! I quite like this, although it’s tied in with its time as one of the few songs it was socially acceptable to sing in the playground. The word ‘smoker’ might have helped.
I should have said “is best known AMONG THE NERDS” I think.
http://www.everyhit.com/number1quirks.html “Eager to deflect the flack which flew when this came to light, the chart compilers subsequently announced that “The Joker” had, in fact, on review of the figures, sold eight more copies than “Groove Is In The Heart.”
So there you go.
when I heard this again recently I was reminded what an odd song this is to get to number one in the UK. It lurches along amiably while ‘Steve’ apparently makes up a lyric in his sleep. If he wasn’t such a diehard Creedence fan I can imagine The Dude listening to this in the bath – pre-marmot visitation.
I have to report that this was hugely popular in Crown Woods School sixth form circles, more so than anything contemporary. Eltham kids considered it to be ‘proper geezer music’ – i.e. non-weird melodic rock, while Lewisham kids heard the lines “I’m a smoker – I’m a mignight toker!” with tremendous approval, frequently singing them when toking themselves (“Skin oop!”)
I absolutely *despised* this single at the time, Steve Miller seeming to be the embodiment of every winking-“Chill out mate”-unfunny-‘laidback’-although-actually-very-manipulative-unthinking-inconsiderate-lad-geezer-JackDaniels-stoner-wanker that I’d ever met.
I’ve just heard it again. Jesus God, that bit where he makes the guitar wolf whistle is grotesque.
Yuck.
I quite like ‘Abracadabra’, though.
Wow. I am gobsmacked that this made number one. Being, as I was, in my ZX Spectrum is better than pop music phase at the time.
I just assumed that this was one of the tracks that had sort of fallen into Radio 2. Ummmm – it’s reasonably amiable. The wolf whistle is – erm – well, it’s probably nothing that a million other male guitar player led bands hadn’t done.
I have nothing against this particular song. But nothing for it either. Taking a step back, it’s memorable – choosing it for an ad was a good move, probably. But give me the Bellamy Brothers any time.
I was worried the Groove effect was going to lead to you going unduly harsh on it, but I reckon 5 is a fair summation – I bought it off The Internet recently and it got dull quickly but I enjoy humming it to myself.
How delightful incidentally to note that your last.fm profile currently reads “Steve Miller Band – Deee-Lite – Half Man Half Biscuit”.
EDIT: Oh! Speaking of Spectra and video game consoles and whatnot, Wiki tells the story of how Lady Miss Kier sued Sega because she thought they’d stolen her likeness for Ulula in Space Channel 5. A pleasing intersection.
So, erm, what happened in the second half of 1990 to make the number 1s suddenly go back in time? We’ve had a Stock/Aitken/Waterman throwback cover from Mr Mallett, now a re-issue, and it’s not the only one to come this year. Just a few months earlier we had the likes of Snap, Adamski and Madonna with tracks as up-to-date as you could imagine for 1990, but they’re not bothering the top spot anymore.
I like The Joker. It’s ridiculous in a good way, especially the ever-welcome “WAHP-WOAWW” bits (including the one right just before the fade out, which catches you off guard and is hilarious). But it sounds as out of place in 1990 as if, say, New Kids On The Block suddenly got to number 1 again now, it’s almost the same time length away as 1973 was then.
Dee-Lite would have been a much more deserving #1 had the UK 7″/radio edit not ridiculously edited out Q-Tip’s rap, which is my favourite part of the song. God knows why, probably same reasons as 2 Unlmited…
There is one thing, and one thing only, that saves this record’s reputation: and that’s its use on The Simpsons.
That’s odd because Q-Tip is present in the video version as played on TOTP). I give GIITH a 9 (tho it is surely one of the five most beloved floor-fillers of the decade)), The Joker a dismal 3 – always found it way too corny.
For me the next chart-topper is worse tho so am torn between wanting it out of the way ASAP or delaying the pain as much as possible (fortunately not my decision…). The second half of 1990 really did feel like a retro relapse and the revenge of the “golden” oldies (Bobby Vinton, er, one or two others…that said I do prefer these to ‘The Joker’).
I am utterly incapable of being objective with this one. I HATE IT.
Seriously, seriously hate it with every fibre of my being.
Nothing to do with the ‘Groove’ injustice, though that was an infinitely more deserving #1.
I just find every second of this hideous, hideous record completely unbearable.
Glad to get that out of my system. *exhales*
I don’t love Groove is in the Heart as much as a lot of other people seem to. It’s good and fun and everything but it’s one of those records that contributed to the overbearing haughtiness of a lot of the dance scene in the nineties. Not that Dee-Lite can be held accountable. The actual vibe of their record made for an endearing fantasy.
No such fantasy is discernable on The Joker. An unwanted arm around the shoulder and a dodgy chat-up line at the Grafton on a Saturday evening. It’s a smarmy record and the sound effects/double entendes just make it twice as tacky.
I can’t find it in myself to hate The Joker, as much as I’d prefer GIITH to have got there instead. If I had a time machine I’d probably pop back to 1990 and buy 10 copies anyway though.
I love both songs equally, though given my historical fetish for keeping everything in its place I would have vastly preferred to read about Deee-Lite in this spot.
Very odd to think of “The Joker” having any traction in the UK at all; its arrhythmic Deep-South-by-way-of-San-Francisco vibe is I would have thought one of the more quintessentially American sounds, a genial album-rock goof that became an unexpected (but by my lights deserving) sleeper hit thanks to a clever combination of old blues tropes and Miller recycling the least sensical bits of his own old songs, and that wolf-whistle guitar scratch standing in for a hook until they thought of something better. Lazy is right, and all the more lovable for it.
Can I be the first in with the “fact” that Steve Miller Band is in fact the father of David and Ed, notable Labour politicians?
This was number one in the States in January 1974, and it got a fair amount of airplay over here around that time, especially on Radio Luxembourg.
Although it certainly doesn’t sound like it now, it was probably originally a little ahead of its time, as far as the UK was concerned. Songs like this and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils’ “Jackie Blue” would probably have been hits if they had been released in 75 or 76, once the wider public had been more exposed to the likes of the Eagles et al.
I enjoyed it the first time round, and I still like it now, but I too was surprise it did quite so well in 1990, even with the help of the Levi’s ad.
#15, vg
#2 Isn’t the “sold 8 more copies” justification likely to be a load of rubbish though? My understanding of how the chart worked is that, effectively, it was a survey. A sample of record stores around the country – the chart return stores – would have their sales data collected and run through a data entry processor and the chart would be complied from that – this seems to be supported by the pages in England’s Dreaming by Jon Savage dealing with the GSTQ issue. As such, the data is dependent on the sample used and is not a full scale audit of all the sales in any given week from all the shops selling singles. Unless the sample was absolutely huge, 8 copies must easily be within the margin of error, surely? (And, yes, I won’t call you Shirley – that joke works so much better out loud than on the page). And if within the margin of error, you can’t really say that it definitely sold 8 more copies.
Does anyone know better and can correct me? Logisitics of the compliation of the chart not necessarily being my strong suit.
On chart return stores as well, I heard a few tales of people finding out where the chart return stores were (which should have been kept a secret to stop chart rigging) and going and buying masses of copies from them (although not necessarily in this case). Is this true?
The song. Meh. Dad liked it and it was on in the car a lot. Can’t say I hate it but it’s hardly outstanding. 5 seems about right – though from the comments above it seems, that for the people who have replied thus far at least, it’s a lot more polarising than I would have thought.
I would tend to agree with the last poster that it is hard to believe that the difference between the top 2 records was really 8 sales.
I don’t think it makes much sense to talk of a ‘notorious injustice’. Would you say it was a notorious injustice if the chart positions had been reversed? I think that this mixes up two things: your feelings about a track, and its commercial performance – which in most cases are understood to be unrelated. If you mix them up then you have to start granting statements like “it’s a notorious injustice that 69 Love Songs wasn’t the biggest selling LP of 1999-2000”.
But I then agree with most of what the article says about the record – the observation of tone is finely judged.
I didn’t like the record, really – not because it wasn’t futuristic but because it was bland, creepy, insidious. I think the two little things I slightly like about it are the rising acoustic guitars and harmonies in the chorus.
#18 Well I guess the chart return shop system meant the charts were full of statistically insignificant differences which nonetheless determined position. The 8 sales thing still smells like bullshit – we did a recount and look! our rule got the right answer after all. And it was unnecessary: if you’re going to disallow ties, highest climber seems a fair way to do it. They were fools not to have gone for the extra column inches a tied number one would have generated.
As for chart return shops, their identity certainly wasn’t a secret, even if it was meant to be. I was talking last year to a guy who was running a record shop in the late 70s, and one week he suddenly started getting a load of pluggers in offering him free stock, displays, posters etc. He asked one of them what was going on and the plugger said oh, you’re chart return mate. He said, no I’m not, and the guy said, well you’re about to be. And he got the letter a few days later saying do you want to be part of our sample etc etc. So the PR people had the information before the actual shops! That said I think full-scale buy-ups of singles was relatively rare (but not unknown) – part of the data cleaning process was to check for unnatural clumps of sales. Certainly though as a chart return shop you would get a ton more attention from the record companies.
#19 Mea culpa Pinefox, I originally wrote “notorious perceived injustice” but didn’t like the pile-up of polysyllables.
Tho the injustice isn’t “The Joker” getting to #1, it’s “Groove Is In The Heart” NOT getting there – since in the Steve Miller Band’s second week it outsold “Groove”, it’s the difference between 2 weeks for this and 1 week each: “Joker” would have been a #1 whichever.
Well, for what it’s worth I like it. I seem to catch a taste of sour grapes in this thread. It’s a very acceptable piece of country rock (you couldn’t imagine a British band doing it at any time). 5 is harsh. 6 from me, 7 on a good day. I’ve been called reactionary lately – well if this is reactionary so be it.
I never liked ‘groove is in the heart’ myself (so would never be troubled to see it failing to achieve something) – though over time, somehow, I think I softened towards it and started to think it had *something*. That thing might well be the melody of the line ‘I couldn’t dance with another’.
I also may have been a bit swayed by Billy Bragg’s band’s surprisingly competent live cover of it, at least after I’d taped it off the radio and heard it a few times.
I think you were on quite a good point in saying that the two records’ japey moods might be quite similar.
Re 20: Agreed, Tom, that highest climber seemed the fairest tie-breaker rather than “greater sales increase” – I’m still not entirely sure what that means. More shop orders is a given – it was the number one record in the bleedin’ country! Seeing as The Joker had already been number one, you think they’d give the new kid in town the benefit of the doubt. Also, GiitH must surely have had more sales in specialist shops than The Joker?
Re: chart return shops. By the mid 80s they had a little black box on the counter into which the sales were fed, so no great secret there. Even though I worked in the Peterborough branch of Virgin in 1985 I can’t remember how we fed the the info in – barcode, I imagine.
Having seen (and done) it, large-scale buy-ups of singles – ten in one hit, anyway – did happen!
#21 Isn’t there the possibility that “Groove” being named #1 in the first week would have given it enough momentum and publicity to outsell “Joker” in the second week?
I agree that your fantasy of one week for each of them would have been a nice one however.
#15 afraid not given we first had it back in the Soul II Soul thread!
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.