Steve Miller & Jonathan Cain – HuffPost 5.12.14
Mike Ragogna: Steve, what is your advice for new artists?
Steve Miller: My advice for new artists is to forget about all of this and take acting and dancing lessons and become a video star.
MR: [laughs] But what if they’d prefer to play music?
SM: I’ll tell you the truth. When I started playing, the only hope there was, was to work in night clubs. This was before San Francisco. When San Francisco opened up, I left Chicago where I played with Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf and James Cotton and Junior Wells and Buddy Guy and immediately went to San Francisco because it was a chance to play in a ballroom to twelve hundred people instead of a bunch of drunks in a nightclub. It’s sort of like the same world for new artists. It seemed impossible when I was a kid. I never thought that I would be able to make any kind of records and never thought seriously about a musical career because a musical career was being Fabian or Frankie Avalon or something. It didn’t make any sense. There wasn’t any possibility to get into that world.
It’s kind of like that for kids now. I just had an eighteen year-old kid opening for me in Canada a couple weeks ago, Matthew Curry. Wonderful guitar player, great songwriter, in the Stevie Ray Vaughan area of virtuosity and originality. He’s really great. I’m looking at this kid and he’s driving in a van so he can open for us. I brought him up on stage to play with us and I’m sitting there trying to figure out, “How is this kid going to actually make it in this world where it takes five million dollars and a corporate sponsorship from Pepsicola to have a hit record nowadays?” It takes thirty million dollars to sell two million albums; it’s crazy.
I don’t really have any instant advice for these kinds of kids except to be true to yourself. Suffer for your art and hang on and maybe something will change where you actually have a chance. Right now, I don’t think they have much of a chance. I think all this “Get it on the internet!” stuff is BS and nonsense. You have to really connect with people. There aren’t very many clubs, there’s no place for people to develop and play. It’s a bad time right now for young artists. It’s not always about huge, giant commercial success; it’s about art, it’s about creativity, it’s about virtuosity. I worry about that, because it doesn’t look really good, but when I was a kid, it didn’t look good either. Big time success then was to be on a bus with seven other bands doing a gig where you did ninety shows in eighty days. I wasn’t kidding when I said, “Take acting lessons and work on your video,” because without that…
Jonathan Cain: Steve, we can look at a guy like Joe Bonamassa. I wrote a couple of songs on his album and Joe has forged a career out of basically using internet and his live playing and staying current with his fans and has made a career.
SM: Joe’s like me! He’s a guy who won’t be denied. Joe Bonamassa’s been grinding now for twenty years. He plays club by club, small gig by small gig, going to Europe and working and working and working and working and working and people love him and he’s a great guitar player. He should be forty times the size of the artist he is.
JC: Sure, but he’s still surviving in this business. My hat goes off to him.
SM: Oh, me too. My point is he’s tougher than five thousand other guitar players for all those reasons. That’s how hard it is to actually make it. He’s a perfect example of somebody who’s really, really strong and works really hard. He knows who he is and what he’s doing; he’s not some talented little kid with a manager who’s going to make his career. That’s rare…that’s really, really rare. There are a lot of great guitar players that you never get to hear. It’s been that way all my life. You finish doing a gig in front of twenty thousand people and go back to the hotel to The Boom-Boom Room at the top of The Sheraton and there’ll be some guy in there who will blow you away that nobody will ever hear of because they’re not tough enough to win in this gangster world of music, you know?