Steve Miller Band: Sailor : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

The Steve Miller Band made an impressive debut with Children of the Future. Sailor, their new LP, is a most worthy successor. While their first album had a very strong blues flavor (especially on side two), Sailor has more of a rock and roll feeling.

"Song For Our Ancestors," which opens the album, tastefully blends ocean sound effects with an instrumental background. This cut is much more successful than the Miller Band's previous attempt at a sound montage ("Psychedelic B.B.") which got a bit boring. "Dear Mary" is a very soft and slow ballad which makes me think about dancing close in the eighth grade when the lights were turned off. Miller sings the sentimental lyrics in an inoffensive falsetto.

The next tune is "My Friend," and it really rocks. The production is incredibly clean throughout the album, but this cut is the most outstanding. The arrangement is solid, with a good use of a sound effect simulating brass, in fact, the song has a strong feeling of Sly and the Family Stone.

"Living In The USA" starts off appropriately enough with drag strip sound effects. The song is a commentary on the US scene, but unfortunately some of the lyrics are rather weak. A good editor could have really perfected the words. The song is a real rocker though, and one cool moment occurs at the beginning of the fade out when Miller yells desperately, "Somebody get me a cheeseburger!" That line captures everything.

Side two begins with "Quicksilver Girl." This is a very commercial type of candy-rock song, and although it's pretty it is also quite ignorable. I like the line "She spreads her wings and she's free," but maybe I'm reading too much B. B. King into it.

"Lucky Man," features a very tasty acoustical guitar intro. It fades into the next cut, Johnny Guitar Watson's revived "Gangster of Love," which is a talking song in which the vocalist expounds his prowess as a lover ("Hey, Mr. Sheriff, that's your wife on the back of my horse"). This cut is pretty funny for a few times, but it tends to get old and "cute" pretty quickly. It is only a minute and a half long.

Following "Gangster" is a Jimmy Reed tune, "You're So Fine," which is the only straight blues cut on the album. It features some very good harp work. The song comes in heavy, but goes out weakly, and is thus not as successful as their earlier blues work. "Overdrive" is a strong Bo Diddley-type number, featuring a bottlenecked electric guitar. The lyrics are a bit "Oh wow, heavy!" but they don't get in the way. The guitar break is a bit disappointing however.

"Dime-A-Dance Romance" is really solid rock and roll. The bass line is nearly right out of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and the whole song is really alive and exciting. The lyrics are excellent and blend well with the mood of the song. Both in its various parts and also as a whole, The song is perfectly constructed. This cut is the high point of the album.

The Miller Band is really together. If you like good solid rock-blues, they can really lay it down. They also can handle ballads with remarkable success. The production is superb, the performances are always high level. Though a few of the songs have rather mediocre lyrics, they are never obnoxious or pretentious. The only other fault in the album is that the guitar work as a whole is disappointing. None of the solos are up to par with either their first album or their better live performances. But this is not to say that they aren't good. Because they are quite good. Taste is evident throughout this LP.

In a sense this album is also disappointing. Harmonies (as on "Quicksilver Girl") are oftentimes sloppy and corny; cuts such as "Lucky Man" and "She's Fine" being straight blues in a rock and roll setting are ultimately weak. Despite these kinds of faults, faults of imperfection and unevenness, so much of this album is so well done that it is a fine record. "Dime-A-Dance Romance" is all one could ever expect or want in the way of a rock and roll song.

Buy this album if you liked the first one. If you haven't heard either, buy them both. The Steve Miller Band can be justly proud of Sailor. They are one of the two or three San Francisco bands which really deserve the praise which S.F. bands seem to receive in such bulk. No shit!

It's a pity that Sailor is being promoted as a psychedelic item, because in contrast to the excess of that genre, this is in every sense a musical album. It is also a pity that the group is breaking up — and the tensions are evident in the construction of the album, so many fragments — because the best was still yet to come.