Given the fact that the core trio of Miller, Turner and Davis had been together for getting on to three years, you’d expect them to have their act together, and you’d have thought that success was a matter of time, yet, somehow the release of the fourth album Your Saving Grace passed unnoticed.
Arguably, the fourth album is the pick of Miller’s early work. Listening to it again after a gap of a good ten years it’s astounding how good it is. A fair bit of that is the much more prominent role occupied by Hopkins’ piano, but it’s the work of a band that’s really hitting its straps.
And, until a call to the local radio station for some phone-in competition, or whatever, until the source from which my mates and I had picked up a number of very reasonably priced albums, I was completely unaware of its existence.
More than likely it just slipped by under the radar - Miller and Co. never had much of a profile in the U.K. and Rolling Stone, the most likely source through which we’d have been apprised of the album’s existence, was a hit and miss affair in the distribution and circulation departments as far as Queensland was concerned. More than likely the Sunday Truth had detected the presence of long-haired hippie free-love dope-smoking propaganda on the news stands again. They tended to be big on that kind of thing.
In any case I negotiated a reasonable price and a couple of days later found myself sitting down to digest another Steve Miller Band offering. That happened close to forty years ago, so perceptions may have changed over the years, but from the opening Little Girl to the concluding title track it’s definitely up there with the best of the preceding three albums.
Little Girl, while straightforward in the lyrical department is full of instrumental nuances and inflections that are several thousand kilometres removed from Miller’s later more-or-less boogie-by-numbers. Could have been the sort of single that’d add a touch of class to the charts and while you wouldn’t have expected it to sell millions could have added a bit of light and shade to the Top 40. Even better is Just A Passin’ Fancy In A Midnite Dream, a Miller/Sidran composition with a surging beat behind a throaty vocal from Miller.