![]() The kind of music that Miller is playing on “Bingo!,” his first album in 17 years - released in June - is the kind of “grown-up” music Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters would approve of. Muddy and Howlin’ Wolf taught me music is serious stuff, and I wanted to be a grown-up musician like them.” It isn’t about kids playing crappy three-chord rock badly. “Those two guys taught me music is a mature man’s game. “Wolf was a sweetheart and a gentleman, and Muddy was more aloof and dignified but had a beautiful soul,” Miller says. I had to teach my older brother how to play bass so he could drive me to gigs.” Miller still brags “I was making 300 bucks a month and I wasn’t even a teenager yet.”Īfter college, in 1967, Miller headed to Chicago - the hotbed of American electric blues - and was befriended by two more legends: Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters. I had my first band when I was 12, and you might think that’s silly, but we played fraternity parties and were booked every Friday and Saturday night. I hit the ground running and never stopped. ![]() “T-Bone was the guy who taught me about melody and how to play a guitar lead,” he says. ![]() Blues great T-Bone Walker (who wrote “Stormy Monday”), another one of his dad’s friends, took 9-year-old Miller under his wing. He also made everyone in the audience feel like they were his best friend.”īut the music lessons didn’t stop with Paul. “He was a phenomenal musician to the end and he always shared his stage with other musicians. “At every show he ever played he was funny as all hell,” Miller says. With fondness, Miller recalls his lifelong friendship with Paul, who died in August last year at 94. (Sonny Miller, Steve’s father, was a doctor and amateur recording engineer, who met many musicians through his hobby.) In addition to teaching Miller how to hold the guitar correctly and pick the strings, “Paul taught me music is about sharing,” says Miller. Remarkably, Miller’s tale starts at age 5, when his dad’s pal - inventor and guitarist extraordinaire Les Paul - gave young Steve his first guitar lesson at the Miller home in Milwaukee. More easily explained is his standing as one of pop music’s movers and shakers and his lofty status among guitar pickers. “Pompatus is a made-up word - it sounds really grand, and like it might have something to do with hair,” he says. So important, that Miller, 67, continues to get mail asking what the line means. “Nearly 40 years later, I step on the stage and say it, and the place goes wild like I said something important.” ![]() The line about the Pompatus was something I tossed off, goofing around,” Miller tells The Post from his ranch in Idaho, where he was rehearsing for his current tour, which plays the Beacon Theatre on Sunday. “Things happen when you’re writing songs. The debate even spawned the 1996 movie “The Pompatus of Love,” and, if you Google the phrase ‘Pompatus of Love,’ you get 15,000 hits.īesides being one of the greatest blues-rock guitarists of his generation, like the song says, Miller is sometimes a joker. Smokers, jokers and midnight tokers have goofily wondered whether it’s a title, a person or a phantom alter ego of Miller. The “Pompatus of Love,” mentioned just once in the 1973 Steve Miller hit “The Joker,” endures as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s great mysteries.
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