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VH1 Classic - Fly Like An Eagle Sweepstakes
To mark the fourth decade of the albums original release, Capitol Records releases the deluxe set, Fly Like An Eagle: The 30th Anniversary Edition by the Steve Miller Band, which will not only include the entire original album, but demo recordings for the albums biggest hits, a 5.1 surround sound mix of the album, and a bonus DVD featuring an interview and recent concert performance by the Steve Miller Band.
Filmed in September 2005 at Mountain Views Shoreline Amphitheater, the concert video was taken straight from the live recording made for the giant screen concert close-ups the night of the show by the Shoreline video crew. The result is an undoctored snapshot of the current day Steve Miller Band, with Miller making some of the best music of his life.
After a four-year absence from touring, Miller put his band back together and returned to the stage at the 2004 New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Fair. Although serious neck surgery hampered his initial return, Miller regained full use of his arm and came back with the greatest playing of his career. By the time he pulled into Shoreline, Miller was taking full advantage of his refreshed and broadened perspective.
His hometown guests that night not only included guitar whiz Joe Satriani and rock n rolling George Thorogood, but lesser known musicians such as Paraguayan gypsy fiddler and harpist Carlos Reyes and classical composer Nolan Gasser, who accompanied Miller on piano for the old Nat King Cole hit, Nature Boy, which Miller had performed the night before as guest of the John Handy Quintet at the Monterey Jazz Festival.
All his shows in the Bay Area qualify as something of a homecoming for Miller. Although he was born in Milwaukee, raised in Dallas, went to college in Madison and cut his teeth in the Chicago blues scene, the Steve Miller Band was first formed in the psychedelic era of the San Francisco music scene and he played all his early dates at the Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium before signing with Capitol Records in 1968.
The bands first album, Children Of the Future, was produced by famed British engineer Glyns Johns and recorded at the same London studios where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones recorded. The second album, Sailor, the last album to feature as a member his high school pal Boz Scaggs, included the song, Livin In the U.S.A. The Steve Miller Band became a staple in the burgeoning field of underground FM radio and the group was a solid concert attraction at small halls across the country.
He produced and recorded his 1973 album, The Joker, in nineteen days at Capitol Tower and earned his first No. 1 hit with the title track. But exhausted from years on the road, when Miller arrived home after a years solid touring to chase the albums Top Ten success and found a substantial royalty check waiting in his mailbox, he canceled all his appointments.
Miller bought a new house, high on a hilltop in remote Marin County, and installed a state-of-the-art eight-track recording studio in his living room. In September 1975, with his longtime bassist Lonnie Turner and a drummer he knew from previous sessions, Gary Malaber, who also played on Van Morrisons Moondance, he entered CBS Studios in San Francisco and cut two dozen instrumental tracks in two weeks.
He spent the next six months scrupulously overdubbing the tapes in his living room studio and emerged with enough material for two finished albums. He mixed the first album in two days at Seattles Kay-Smith Studios and delivered the finished master tapes with a slide containing the album cover artwork personally to the president of Capitol Records.
Fly Like an Eagle, which was released in May 1975, went on to produce three hit singles, sell more than four million copies, and send Miller's career spiraling upward. When one year and one day after the release of Fly Like an Eagle, he followed up with Book of Dreams, composed of songs recorded in those same September 1975 sessions, Miller galvanized his position at the top of the rock world of the day.
When tracks from the two albums were collected on a single disc for the album Greatest Hits: 1974-78, the resulting record sold more than 13 million copies and continues to be one of the biggest-selling catalog pieces in the industry to this day. Fly Like An Eagle was not just his best-selling regulation release; it was his franchise album.
Fly Like An Eagle: The 30th Anniversary edition also contains early versions of key songs from the album such as Take the Money and Run, Rockn Me and Fly Like an Eagle. These tapes come from the archival work by former Steve Miller Band guitarist Dave Denny, who has been doing archeology on the Miller tape vaults for some time now and these early sketchbook versions are the first fruits of his labors to reach the public.
Miller spent years working on the song, Fly Like an Eagle. He began performing the number in his concerts as early as 1972 and recorded an early version during The Joker sessions. He played the song in concert for several years, tinkered with it and recorded it a number of times before he came across the burbling synthesizer line that tied the track together. Unlike the customary alternate takes attached to expanded reissues, these draft version recordings offer clear insight into Miller's creative process.
From the very start, when classic rock radio emerged in the late 80s as the most popular music format on the dial, these Steve Miller recordings were cornerstones of the programming. His recordings were freshly introduced to new listeners daily and he barnstormed the country before capacity crowds all through the 90s before disbanding the organization, warehousing the gear and taking a break.
Back in action, with the latest edition of his band playing the song at Shoreline, guest guitarist Joe Satriani and Miller pushing the track beyond the twenty-minute mark, Fly Like an Eagle: The 30th Anniversary shows the song to be a living, thriving, growing piece of music, as vital today as the moment it was first unleashed on the original album.
