Dumb Songs of Classic Rock

Posted on Comments

When I’m in the car, I like to listen to the “Classic Hits” radio station — basically, rock-and-roll from the 1970s, which was the pinnacle, as far as I’m concerned. Amid all the great music from that great era, however, there are some songs that make you scratch your head in mystification: “How did that lame crap ever become a hit?”

But hey, it was the ’70s and we were all high, y’know.

Nobody had more lame-crap hits than Steve Miller Band, and don’t get me wrong: I liked Steve Miller back in the day, and still enjoy listening to his hits, but from the standpoint of songcraft, the guy sucked. The closest he ever got to writing lyrics that made any sense at all was “Take the Money and Run,” but that song is a celebration of murder and robbery, so it kind of proves the point.

Here’s the way I figure Steve Miller operated as a songwriter: He would come up with a nifty little guitar riff, and then a catch-phrase to be repeated in the chorus. Once he had the guitar riff and the chorus, he would be like, “Yeah, OK, gotta write some verses now.”

This is where the whole thing always went to hell. You can go through the song catalog of the Steve Miller Band and good luck finding more than one or two songs where the lyrics of the verses have a damn thing to do with the chorus — or with anything else, really.

Even in his biggest hit, “The Joker,” the lyrics are total nonsense, and don’t even get me started on “Jungle Love.” The guy obviously wasn’t even trying to write lyrics. He just sang whatever the hell came into his head — any words that rhymed would do — and nobody seemed to care, because the albums kept selling.

While it’s hard to say that there was ever a worse song than “Jungle Love,” however, the prototypical stupid Steve Miller Band hit, which actually made it to No. 1 in 1976, was “Rock’n Me”:

Well I’ve been lookin’ real hard
And I’m tryin’ to find a job
But it just keeps gettin’ tougher every day
But I got to do my part cause I know in my heart
I got to please my sweet baby, yeah

Well, I ain’t superstitious
And I don’t get suspicious
But my woman is a friend of mine
And I know that it’s true that all the things that I do
Will come back to me in my sweet time

So keep on rockin’ me baby
Keep on a rockin’ me baby
Keep on a rockin’ me baby
Keep on a rockin’ me baby

I went from Phoenix, Arizona
All the way to Tacoma
Philadelphia, Atlanta, L.A.
Northern California where the girls are warm
So I could be with my sweet baby, yeah

Keep on a rockin’ me baby . . .

Et cetera. I mean, c’mon: “Northern California where the girls are warm”? What the hell does that even mean, Steve? But from such ridiculous nothingness, the man crafted a career!

And just in case you’re wondering, the B-side of the single of “Rock’n Me” was a song entitled, “Shu Ba Da Du Ma Ma Ma Ma.”

 

189 comments

  10. No, that’s just the point: We weren’t listening to the lyrics. it’s only now, long after the drugs wore off, that the awfulness becomes obvious.

  11. I never thought much of that band. Probably nice guys and all, but I always thought it was the musical equivalent of a Ronco commercial.

    A more striking Cog/Diz between hook and lyric was everything done by “The Guess Who.” Fantastic hooks, killin’ vibe, totally captured the day, and then the lyrics always contained at least one major, turd-in-punchbowl moment. TCoB is about the only tune where they avoided doing so, and those lyrics are not really about “taking care of business” at all.

  15. There is a reason most of the great show tune teams are teams. Rogers and Hart. Rogers and Hammerstein. Lehner and Lowe. Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

    Now occasionally you get a great talent that can do both: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. But that is rare.

    In rock, you also have song writing teams too. John and Taupin.

    While they supposedly wrote their own songs–clearly Lennon and McCarthy benefited from collaboration.

    Bono and the Edge, Page and Plant.

  22. I was always a Yes fan. So here it is 40 years down the road, and I STILL don’t have any idea what those lyrics are about. Something about God and the universe… or something?

    When I want lyrics I go to Al Stewart: poet extraordinaire!

    Check out “Roads To Moscow” if you have 8 minutes to spare.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_ZG6tRGMYk

  23. For at least a decade Steve Miller did serious music [which is pretty good], was hailed by critics, and made no money.

    In the mid-1970’s he said ‘Screw It!’, went Pop, and raked in the big bucks.

    Can’t blame him, Stacy.

  26. The early Miller stuff was pretty good — “Living in the USA,” “Space Cowboy.” The older he got, the worser he got.

  30. I think John Paul Jones and Plant did a whole lot of song writing. Page was doing a lot of smack.

  31. I think Tyler did the bulk of Aerosmith’s songs. He is in a class by himself as a lyricist.

  32. When you think about it there was a lot of jibberish in Pink Floyd. Barrett was crazy and when you were really stoned you thought you knew what it was about. It made you feel, if that makes sense. The stabbing precision of Gilmour, versus the assault of players like Page, seemed to elicit feelings. You didn’t think about the song, you felt it.

  33. Yep. Another quote of his is that the song brought him two things: fame and fortune.

  34. Although Judas Priest was around then, they were not played on the radio. Indeed people were smoking …….

  35. Roger Waters was a great songwriter when he had the rest of Pink Floyd to blunt his edge a bit. Once he went off on his own, it just wasn’t the same.

    If you haven’t heard it before, try listening to the Pink Floyd song “If”, from the Atom Heart Mother album. It’s arguably the simplest song they ever did yet it’s so striking.

  36. I tried to post this comment earlier, but it didn’t post for some reason. So I’ll try again.
    In the 80’s Joe Walsh, of the Eagles, DJ’d a week long stint at an Albuquerque rock station. Every day he let it be known that he didn’t have much respect for Steve Miller. That was a hilarious week.

  37. I saw an interview with Steve Miller, and he said that he’s been asked many times what the pompitous of love is. (paraphrased) “I thought about it for a while, and I finally decided that *I* am the pompitous of love.”

  38. Ahh, fun with mondegreens.

    “Don’t go out tonight, for it’s bound to take your life, there’s a bathroom on the right”

Comments are closed.