The Steve Miller Band takes the Basie boards Tuesday. (Click to enlarge.)
Though he’s not generally associated with the flowering music scene of late-1960s San Francisco, rocker Steve Miller was very much in it as far back as 1966, when he supported Chuck Berry on a live album recorded at the Fillmore Auditorium. It was one stop in a career that’s also been steeped in the blues scenes of Dallas and Chicago enroute to some chartbusting pop success.
Listen for hints of all that when Miller, still rocking at 73, brings his band to Red Bank’s Count Basie Theatre Tuesday night for its only Garden State appearance of his current tour.
His own early LPs, packed with blues-basted psychedelia (and the odd FM pull like “Livin’ in the USA”), set the stage for a mind-boggling mainstream dash-for-the-cash that started in earnest with 1973’s “The Joker” and received platinum-plated affirmation via such radio rocker evergreens as “”Fly Like An Eagle,” “Rock’n Me,” “Jet Airliner,” and the early-80s curio “Abracadabra.”
His mega-platinum Greatest Hits album from the late 70s inspired a flurry of international touring that arguably hasn’t wound down yet. For the Basie show, expect a decades-spanning retrospective from the occasionally acerbic classic-rock favorite (whose elevation to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame earlier this year was marked by behavior regarded by some as insufficiently respectful of the august institution): a mix of the requisite crowd-pleasers with the odd chestnut, deep-dish album cuts, and piously performed blues standards from his more recent run of releases.
Take it here for tickets ($45 – $119) to the 8 p.m. show, for which Pennsylvania-based Americana pop-folkers Porter & Sayles serve up the opening volley.
