Steve Miller Band: Circle Of Love : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

While Steve Miller's output in the late Sixties and the Seventies could hardly be described as original, it was usually entertaining. ("A lotta guys are really concerned about their chops on guitar," he told an interviewer in 1977 when discussing his last all-new LP, Book of Dreams. "I haven't learned a new lick in ten years!") Miller's candor on the subject is laudable, and he also deserves praise for the facile ways in which he's melded innumerable familiar rock-guitar hooks, wry blues couplets and popmusic filigrees into bubbly, immaculately produced singles that twinkled over the airwaves like the polished rhinestones they were.

Anyone who's given the Steve Miller Band's Greatest Hits 1974-78 even the most casual listening must concede that Miller's work is wonderfully grandiose borrowing. The crackling good humor and throwaway exuberance of such shamelessly derivative songs as "Swingtown," "Rock N' Me," "Take the Money and Run," "The Joker," "Fly like an Eagle" and "Jet Airliner" represent lightweight radio rock in the most positive sense. But Circle of Love is a disturbingly empty exercise from a semiretired rocker who's been holing up in the wilds of Oregon for too long. Miller's predilections of the last five-odd years have been daydreaming about outer space and slopping the hogs, with rock & roll merely squeezed in as if it were a sip of hard cider or a late breakfast. On Circle of Love, Steve Miller's easy, distracted shrug toward his music becomes a slap in the face.

At least, that's how I felt after I'd listened to the album just once. Indeed, I'd made up my mind to dismiss it as a thin demo of puerile tunes, speciously colored with rudimentary guitar phrases, rollerrink organ playing and flip vocals. Then I played the record again. And again. And something mildly remarkable happened. It began to sound good – or at least the four cuts on the first side did. "Macho City," the dull, masturbatory eighteen-minute collage of gibberish, honks, squeaks and wind-and-rainfall sound effects that takes up all of side two, is nothing but a stupid gyp.

So what we're dealing with is a four-song Steve Miller EP that consists of an unnervingly engaging cycle of pop-rock meanderings that seemingly evokes every imaginable Top Forty hit and snappy AOR fave of the Sixties and Seventies. In short, you have heard it all before.

What are we expected to do with product like this? Well, since this is a slow era for inspiration, perhaps we need a big-time borrower to teach the untempered.

Attention, all you struggling high-school dance bands! Why learn to play the Mel Bay way when you can simply bone up on Circle of Love? Throw away those boring home-instruction manuals, tricky finger-position charts and play-by-number pamphlets, because there isn't a track here ("Heart like a Wheel," "Get on Home," "Baby Wanna Dance," "Circle of Love") that you and your buddies couldn't effectively re-create, after one day's rehearsal, in any gymnasium in the country. Think of it! No complicated lyrics to decipher. The words are sung clearly and don't have enough meaning to overflow a thimble, so there's no danger of a punch-out with some offended oaf in the audience because of content.

Okay, these selections from Steve Miller's vast vault of ingenious splicings may not have all the conviction and bluster of the rest of his catalog, but they're still a hoot to hear. The man himself couldn't have spent more than an hour concocting this collection, yet–sorry, I can't explain it–the LP has a lot of that old appeal.

So rush out, young rock titans of tomorrow! Purchase the overpriced Circle of Love and master the Steve Miller Band's four nifty new numbers in time for your next gig.