Steve Miller interview

[sam_webmaster]

Excerpt from Gibson.com interview with Steve Miller, with some interested Zep tidbits:

http://www.gibson.co...terview-3-0308/

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We showed up over in London and they loved rock and roll. They were way ahead of the American guys. Jimmy Page and all those guys were hanging around, coming in and going out. Glyn (Johns) had just finished recording The Who and The Rolling Stones. We met all those guys. They were just there at Olympic. We spent, I don't know, six weeks, seven weeks, two months. Something like that.

The Olympic Studios in London, there was so much going on. This was just insane at the time; like when I met the Beatles in '69, I was there recording and I needed a guitar and said, "You guys got anything?" And I ended up with Lennon's Epiphone. And I had Keith Richards' little…he had some tiny little amp that was like they'd just done "Honky Tonk Women" with. Stu, their road guy, said, "Oh, you can have that, mate." "Oh, thank you very much." (laughs) "I'll just take that back home with me." And there were The Beatles were recording over here and the Stones were coming in there, and Jimmy at that time was a session guy. And I was there when Led Zeppelin started doing their very first sessions.

I was there at (Led Zeppelin's) first gig in San Francisco. The English bands were, like, from another planet. We were standing around in t-shirts and we were hippies. And they were like this remarkably professional, beautifully dressed, magnificent — they had these giant Marshall amps. You know, I was playing through my old Bassman that I'd had since 1959. And we were just stunned. First it was Cream. Then it was (Zeppelin) and Hendrix.

But we did all of our stuff at Olympic, and then Wally Heider started building better studios and stuff, and I stayed away from Capitol forever. The next time I went back to Capital was when (I did) "The Joker" and, by that time, I had gotten rid of all the producers. I fought with everybody every step. To make Children of the Future I just had to whack Glyn Johns with a baseball bat. He hated electronics. He hated the idea of hooking everything together. He just thought that was all crazy. Jimmy (Page) sat in the control booth and watched me do all that and thought it was great. So we were on the cutting edge of all that stuff at that time, and then I kept going back and mixing (at Olympic).

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[Deborah J]

Sam, my God what an insight to that time. Thank you for sharing this with us.Now I have to pull the Steve Miller in my collection and listen for a while.

[TonyV]

Very cool! Thanks Sam for the excerpt.

[Stargroves Tangie]

Thanks Sam for posting this- I've been a huge Steve Miller fan for years but had never heard him mention anything about Zeppelin before.

[MJC455]

Steve's Gibson interview part 4

My link

Glyn was kind of a putz. He was like the stiff older brother. And Andy was the young kid who really opened it up. When I first started recording guitar, we were just on the edge. I remember when we were finishing recording Children of the Future, seeing Led Zeppelin setting up their gear and going, “This…hello! This is different!” There was this giant room. And right in the middle of the room there was these three weird amps, I can’t remember what kind of amps they were. I’d never seen them. They weren’t Marshalls; they were something else. These were big, big things. They were just setting up to start. You know, the next day we were gone. And I was just sort of looking in there going, “Well, now that’s different.” Because it just looked so big and powerful.

I see he agrees with Jimmy about Glyn Johns

[gondo]

Thanks for that. Great.

Tom