Steve Miller Band: Children Of The Future : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

"We are children of the future / Wonder what in this world we are going to do ... When I get high / I can see myself for miles ... Takes a little bit of loving / A little bit of hugging ... And if you don't think that you can find / And if you don't think that it's a piece of mind.'

The question begins with a lightly moving musical statement based primarily on the guitar and resolves into the rocking "takes a little bit of loving" answer. It's an instrumental version of a classic call/response pattern. The toms provide the transition, as well as the transition to "Pushed Me To It," and the transition, moving from the toms to the bass while simultaneously moving from channel to channel, to "You've Got the Power." These latter two are beautifully moving under-a-minute passages, each based on a single repeating pattern. Simple, elegant, and accessible.

Steve Miller Band at its best is, among other things, a super tight and super rhythmic musical unit, creating a fine energy from those two strong points. Without instrumental frills and superfluous solos (which do sometimes regrettably occur in live performance), all of the musical parts become essential, and by definition, important.

Steve Miller Band (nee The Steve Miller Blues Band) has, for a number of different reasons, done a superb job on their first album. It ranks with Moby Grape's first album in terms of economy and with Sgt. Pepper in terms of taste. They begin, in most of the songs, in fact on the first side, with a simple acoustic guitar line and build the whole rock and roll complement around it.

Jim Peterman establishes himself on the album as a musical force equally as dominant as the guitarists. He is excellent both as a soloist and as a rhythm player. His efforts with the instrument are diverse, ranging from straight blues patterns to a little shuffle (with the bass) to very churchy stuff (without becoming at all tedious as so much of this quasi-religious stuff does indeed become). The organ is one of the most enjoyable parts of the entire album. It's precise and heavy, used all over the place without any excess.

"Children of the Future" (the entirety of side one) is constructed like Sgt. Pepper, a coherent whole of individual pieces, with a dominant verbal theme (philosophical without prententiousness) and, unlike the Beatles, recurring musical themes. Side two as well moves from song to song without break, held together solely by unity of concept.

There is a lot of material in the record which lends itself to Top-40 radio play. These include the first three cuts (considered as one) from side one, "Steppin' Stone," "Roll With It," and "Junior Saw It Happen." Even without this kind of radio play, the album should be quite successful, because like all of the best rock and roll it is good music and understandable by children of all ages.

Steve Miller Band demonstrates its ability in all of the current specialties of rock and roll. The crisp engineering and tasty production (done by the band itself with Stones' engineer Glyn Johns) and the eclectic influences make it very Beatle-ish in nature (especially in the vocal work, with the constant use of several voices for harmony and rhythm). If the album can be easily categorized, call it the marriage of the Beatles and the blues.

Like all the best rock and roll, the parts of the album are songs. Unlike most of the amateur efforts predominant today, the tracks here include such things as good vocals (Steve's voice is probably the most commercial and "pretty" blues voice around today), sound and intelligent instrumentation, interior structure and melody, and each one is recognizable by itself. They range from the folksy, to the driving, to the moody to straight blues. One would not characterize the record as being "far out" or revolutionary, but rather as being excellent.