The Strawberry Man

Steve Miller — "Jungle Love" (1977)

I had a nice dinner with my mom last night. It was our first chance to really catch up since the election, and I was happy to see that we were pretty much on the same page — appalled and disappointed by the results, but utterly unwilling to let the bad news grind us down.

Still, we couldn’t help but voice our mutual disgust over Trump’s recent picks for his incoming administration, including nominations of an alleged pedophile and sex trafficker for Attorney General, an alleged Russian asset for Director of National Intelligence, a man with an admittedly worm-eaten brain for the Department of Health and Human Services, a Fox News host for Defense Secretary, and an End Times cheerleader for US Ambassador to Israel. What could possibly go wrong, right?

“And then there’s Steve Miller,” she grumbled.

“Wait, what?” I replied, momentarily confused.

It took me a second to realize that she was talking about Stephen Miller, Trump’s pick for Deputy Chief of Staff. Yes, I am well aware that Steve is a common contraction of Stephen; but the cosmic gap between the anti-immigration twerp who’s been slavering at the mouth to begin mass deportations and the genially oafish rocker of my 1970s youth is so vast that my brain couldn’t even process it at first.

“Stephen Miller,” I corrected her, feeling the need to say something, lest the aforementioned joker, smoker and/or midnight toker be forever unfairly besmirched by her slip.

---

---

This was actually the second time I’ve had to correct my mom regarding Steve Miller. The first instance remains legendary among my high school friends, but for whatever reason I’ve never gotten around to putting that story in print. The memory of it gave us both a good laugh last night; and since good laughs are at a premium these days, I figured it was high time I shared it with the rest of you…

The music of the Steve Miller Band was a constant presence in my life during the late seventies, as I’m sure it was for anyone else who was glued to AM radio at the time. The guy had five US Top 20 hits in 1976 and 1977, including the #2 smash “Fly Like an Eagle” and the chart-topping “Rock’n Me,” all of which were collected on his 15-times platinum Greatest Hits 1974-1978 album — one of the first ten or so LPs that I ever owned — and all of which seemed to remain in regular rotation on L.A. radio well into 1979.

The Milwaukee-born Miller had started out his career as a blues purist, before moving to San Francisco in the mid-sixties and gradually veering into more psychedelic territory. I know many fans who swear by his adventurous late-sixties albums like Sailor and Brave New World, but it was his dumbed-down classic rock phase — which kicked off with his 1973 Number One “The Joker” — that turned me and millions of other listeners into Steve Miller Band fans.

When I say “dumbed-down,” I mean it as much as a compliment as a dig. Because somewhere along the way, Miller had somehow figured out how to let go of any desire for critical acclaim and give his impressive pop instincts free rein, even while still indulging his more oddball sonic whims. (I’m still obsessed to this day with his weirdly airless vocals, which sound like they were recorded in an iron lung yet somehow mesh perfectly with the music.)

At their mid/late-seventies peak, the Steve Miller Band rocked hard, but not too hard; and aside from “Serenade” — one of my favorite SMB tracks then and now — and “Fly Like an Eagle,” their songs weren’t bringing much in the way of attempted depth to the table, either. It was all good-time rhymes for folks who liked to “get high and watch the tube,” like the young lovers Billy Joe and Bobbie Sue in 1976’s “Take the Money and Run,” and that was totally cool with me; I mean, if I wanted angst and intensity, I could always throw on “A Man I’ll Never Be” from Boston’s Don’t Look Back LP…

As the stadium concert photos on the inner sleeve of Greatest Hits 1974-1978 attested, Miller’s pop transformation had clearly paid off. I used to spend hours examining those pics when I was 13, imagining what it would be like to bask in the hot Arizona afternoon sun with a bunch of stoned babes in halter tops while Miller and his not-particularly-charismatic cluster of dudes boogied merrily away onstage. It sure looked like a damn good time to me.

Still, as much as I enjoyed their poppier fare, my favorite Steve Miller Band song was their fastest and most hard-rocking: “Jungle Love,” which was one of several hits off of 1977’s Book of Dreams, though it had failed to climb any higher than #23 on the Billboard Hot 100. I didn’t know at the time that “Jungle Love” hadn’t actually been written by Miller (SMB members Lonnie Turner and Greg Douglass were the actual co-writers), just as I didn’t really think too much about the song’s lyrics, which seemed kinda like a Penthouse Letters entry that had been sanitized for airplay purposes.

One afternoon in the late spring of 1979, as I was happily jumping up and down on my bed, playing air guitar along to “Jungle Love”’s driving chorus, my mom came into my room carrying some freshly-folded laundry. “This is a really stupid song,” she chuckled, setting a stack of clean shirts down on my dresser.

“Well, Mom, it’s Steve Miller,” I shrugged. “What do you expect?” Even at the tender age of 13, I knew that Miller was no Bob Dylan or Paul Simon. She wasn’t done, though.

“‘Chug-a-lug, the Strawberry Man, he’s making me crazy?’” she marveled. “What’s that even supposed to mean?”

Over the next few years, it would become obvious that my mom had a rare talent for mis-hearing song lyrics, to the point of getting completely grossed out by a David Lee Roth lyric that didn’t actually exist. But this was the first time she’d ever garbled a song’s words in my presence; and I laughed so hard, I thought I was gonna cough up a lung.

“No, Mom,” I corrected her, once I finally caught my breath. “It’s ‘Jungle Love, it’s driving me mad, it’s making me crazy.’”

“Well, it’s still pretty stupid,” she replied.

She certainly had me there.

---