Steve Miller Band — J50: The Evolution of The Joker (Deluxe)
Qobuz archival release review (Sept. 2023)
Steve Miller’s segue from the late ’60s cosmic blues of Sailor and Children of the Future into his new role as a “space cowboy” was a gradual one that took place mostly out of the public eye and over a half dozen albums that would be largely unrecognizable to many of Miller’s latest fans. Recall the Beginning…A Journey from Eden, Your Saving Grace, and Rock Love were weedy, ramshackle affairs that sound as unfocused as they do uncommercial but they were also where he worked out the foundational compositional approaches that would define his sound throughout the ’70s.
You can hear the transformation on this J50 set, and the “early” version of “Mary Lou” may be the very point at which things pivoted. In this studio rehearsal take, the song sounds like a clanking, loose-limbed blues-raver (much like many of the tracks that Miller recorded a couple years previously), with banging percussion, warbly keyboard lines, and vocals that are high on vibe and low on precision. This set immediately sequences the album version of “Mary Lou” after the rehearsal, so you can easily hear that it’s the same song. Whereas the rehearsal version wouldn’t have been out of place on Rock Love, the album version — with all the same component parts, just rendered in a distinctly more thoughtful manner — is an absolutely new sound for the Steve Miller Band, the one that would make him one of the biggest stars of the decade.
Of course, J50 also provides similar revelatory insights into other aspects of this classic album: an acoustic demo, “Travelin’,” is subtitled “Looking for a chorus for the Joker” and we also get five (yes, five!) versions of “Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma.” The approach is similar to the one taken on Big Star’s Complete Third, where the evolution of the album, rather than the album-plus-some-outtakes, is the focus. The flow of the classic album is substituted for works-in-progress next to their finished versions, live tunes that showed where the band was at before they even started writing the album, and even interstitials of Miller talking. It’s a beautifully contrarian way to celebrate a classic album since it has no pretense of replacing The Joker, but instead provides a deep, complementary look at it.
