Posted on 01/13/2026 11:25:05 PM PST by nickcarraway
It was the song that upgraded the band from album radio staples to simultaneous Top 40 stars.
Have you heard the one about the absolute rock classic that became the 353rd No.1 single in U.S. chart history in January 1974 – then took 16 years to become the 650th in the U.K.? Even more bizarrely, another 11 years, the song was sampled on another British No.1. It’s the funny story of the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker.”
The classic single, written and produced by guitar hero and self-appointed “space cowboy” Miller himself, transformed the career of the Milwaukee-born guitar-slinger and his group, more than five years after they had made their LP debut with the psych-blues statement Children of the Future. Known and admired by an album audience for that set and subsequent released such as Sailor and Your Saving Grace, “The Joker” single would now upgrade them from album radio staples to simultaneous Top 40 stars.
The song was recorded in the summer of 1973 as sessions continued for the album of the same name at Capitol Studios. The creative development of the full-length is extensively and fascinatingly charted on the 50th anniversary 3LP + 7″ box and 2CD boxed sets J50: The Evolution of The Joker. The set presents the original album tracks chronologically positioned and contextualized among 27 previously unissued recordings from Miller’s personal archive.
His creation of the self-assured and enigmatic titular character and his mesmeric guitar features, along with the catchy “lovey-dovey” lyrical hooks and the inscrutable references to the “pompatus of love,” proved an irresistible combination to the band’s new and existing fans. Miller’s quotations from the Clovers’ “Lovey Dovey,” which spent five weeks at No.2 on the U.S. R&B chart in 1954, when he was 11 years old, were specific enough to require a co-writing credit on his own song with the writers of the earlier one, Eddie Curtis and Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun.
As for that mysterious word “pompatus”? It was a bastardization of the word “puppetutes.” which itself had been coined by Vernon Green, leader of the R&B group the Medallions, in their charming harmony ballad “The Letter,” in that same year of 1954. The quartet recorded for the notable Los Angeles doo-wop label Dootone.
“The Joker” entered the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of October 20, 1973 at No.86, in the week that the Rolling Stones flew to the chart summit with “Angie.” The SMB single built steadily in sales and airplay, hitting the Top 10 for the first time in mid-December and, on January 12, spending a week at No.1. The self-produced album spent a week at No.2 in a 38-week chart run, soon going gold and advancing to platinum in 1987.
“I never thought ‘The Joker’ was going to be a hit,” Miller said later. “I always wanted to make singles, I like singles. So I just started taking that two-and-a-half minute thing and started looking for sounds that record well.” For the first time, the guitarist-writer-frontman and his compadres had what he would call “a real, no kidding, non-stop hit.”
He achieved that with such dexterity that from then on, the band would be on the singles radar as well as an album act, although it was on their next LP, 1976’s Fly Like An Eagle, that they really came into their own as a crossover group. Strangely, for all of its airplay in the UK on BBC Radio 1 and elsewhere, “The Joker” failed to hit there, and the band’s only singles chart appearance of the 1970s came on their No.11 hit “Rock’n Me.”
Fast forward 16 years…
The story of the song then goes fast-forward 16 years, to the period when TV and cinema commercials for Levis 501 jeans had the power to create new hits with catalog material. It had worked especially well for old soul staples such as Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” and Percy Sledge’s “When A Man Loves A Woman,” among others.
Now it was Steve Miller’s turn. A new Levi’s ad directed by Hugh Johnson turned a whole new audience on to “The Joker,” which began a reemergence that took it to No.1 in the U.K. on September 15, 1990, and on to the Top 10 all over Europe. It was the longest-ever gap between transatlantic chart-toppers.
Another 11 years on, the song made an appearance on another U.K. bestseller, when Jamaican rapper-singer Shaggy sampled it, along with Merilee Rush’s “Angel Of The Morning,” on his fourth No.1, “Angel,” which topped the charts in June 2001. In 2004, a club-friendly update by British “superstar DJ” Fatboy Slim became a Top 40 UK single from his Palookaville album. By the time of the 50th anniversary album anthology, Miller’s career record sales had advanced to some 75 million, and more than five billion streams of his, and the band’s, perennial songbook.
Miller was certainly pumped about the band’s new momentum when he spoke to Circus Raves early in 1974. “I love working on records, especially when they’re going right,” he said. “That and being onstage are my favorite parts of the business, and they both turn me on.”
He knew that the groundwork for the new success with The Joker album had been carefully laid. “We played about 90 cities before we released it, 45 last year, and 45 during the spring and summer,” he said. “They were super-successful dates, and people were just sitting there waiting for us to put a record out.”
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Great song, great album. I always wondered what happened to him. Just sort of fell off the Earth.
some people call me Maurice...
Great band... The Joker, Jungle Love, Take the Money & Run, Fly Like an Eagle, Rockin’ Me, Abracadabra, and more...
One of the legends of early rock / R&B doing a live performance from 1954 for the syndicated series "Showtime At The Apollo".THE CLOVERS. Lovey Dovey. Live 1954 Appearance.
Great Doo-Wop / R&B Vocal | 3:02
Default Name | 26.4K subscribers | 35,023 views | September 23, 2013(Miller also covered "Cash Ain't Nothin' But Trash" by The Clovers)
The Medallions “The Letter’ (DooTone 347-B - 1954)
2:50
Perry Amberson
1.61K subscribers
619 views
June 21, 2021
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyjzNjztKM4
B-side of their debut 45 and 78 “59 Buick,” a summer of 1954 release. The song features some masterful gibberish from the Los Angeles-based group’s lead singer (and talker) Vernon Green. At the time he wrote and recorded the song he was a 14-year-old runaway who walked with the aid of crutches: “Let me whisper sweet words of pismotality and discuss the puppetutes of love”
Pompatus is the best made up word in rock and roll, nothing else comes close.
I’ve seen him at least 5-6 times over the years, including in the last 10. Always did a great job.
He was Les Paul’s godson. That helps get you on the road to guitar great from a young age.
Steve Miller Age 5 Talking To His Godfather Les Paul (Remastered 2017)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuHVDGIEwB8
I have seen the Medallions in concert a couple times. “Buick ‘59” concludes with the line, “oh, no, I done run out of gas,” but when they performed it, Vernon announced, “I’m not going to say, ‘I done run out of gas,” because we ain’t never going to run out of gas.”
Vernon walked with a cane because he was a polio victim during his childhood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCThaB6iV_s&t=3s My favorite song. Great guitar playing in the long version. Check it out if you’ve never heard.
Disagree.
'In-a-gadda-da-vida' is a close second.
I heard he got sober and is basically a dynamo. His godfather: Les Paul.
Simpleton rock. Music for the non-thinker. It’s no wonder Boz Skaggs left him behind in Texas.
“I speak with the pompousness of love” why is that line so hard for everyone to understand?
Damn herky jerky article. Weird prose. And I’m partial to the Homer Simpson version of The Joker.
Disagree. 'In-a-gadda-da-vida' is a close second.
I nominate goo goo g'joob
That may be true, but I saw his albums at more homes than any other artist of the 1970s. He also gets extra credit for standing up against the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame's usual extortion scheme to formally recognize people.
I had no idea.
I always thought it was “cuckoo-catchu”
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