One of music's most interesting and prolific artists, Steve Miller (b. Oct. 5, 1943, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) has been making records of nearly every genre since 1968. A well-traveled blues guitarist who arrived in San Francisco in 1966, just one year prior to that city's fabled Summer Of Love, Miller signed a lucrative deal with Capitol Records that resulted in some of the most substantial, texturally interesting music of the era. In the course of 20 years at Capitol, Miller and a varying cast of musicians--always billed as the Steve Miller Band--would produce music that was alternately psychedelic, bluesy, R&B-inspired, country-tinged, gorgeously poppy, discofied, highly synthetic, and straight-out jazzy. Even more remarkable than that variety was his ability to perform skillfully in those modes without submerging the core of his sound or his own personality. In short, Steve Miller's 17 albums sound nothing alike--but always very much like the work of Steve Miller.

The son of a music-loving physician, Miller had a childhood that any musician would envy: world-class instrumentalists such as Les Paul, Red Norvo,Tal Farlow and Charlie Mingus would often drop by to visit his father while performing in the Milwaukee area. "[They'd] just come and eat and hang out on a Sunday afternoon," Miller has said, "I saw the respect my dad had for them, and it seemed like musicians were just the neatest people of all." By the time he was 12, his family had moved to Dallas and Miller had formed his first blues band, the Marksmen Combo, soon to include later Miller Band stalwart Boz Scaggs. The pair continued to be bandmates while attending college at the University of Wisconsin, where Miller led local blues-rock combo the Ardells in the early '60s. Following a brief period as a student at the University of Copenhagen, Miller returned to the States and moved to Chicago, where he spent nearly three years playing blues guitar and jamming with some of the Windy City's superlative blues talent. He briefly formed a group with keyboardist Barry Goldberg, later of the Electric Flag.

Upon Miller's 1966 arrival in San Francisco, he put together the Steve Miller Blues Band, whose earliest work can be heard backing Chuck Berry on his 1967 Live At The Fillmore album; additionally, the band supplied three songs to the soundtrack of the 1967 film Revolution. By the time the Steve Miller Band flew to England to record their memorable 1968 debut Children Of The Future, the group consisted of Miller, Scaggs, drummer Tim Davis, bassist Lonnie Turner, and organist Jim Peterman. That version of the band lasted long enough to record both Children and its remarkable follow-up Sailor; Scaggs then left to begin his solo career and Peterman also departed. True '60s classics, both albums in retrospect functioned as samplers of the directions Miller would be following as his career unfolded. They contained blues covers ("Key To The Highway"), ethereal, pre-new age instrumentals ("Song For Our Ancestors"), simple pop ("You've Got The Power"), psychedelic rock ("The Beauty Of Time Is That It's Snowing"), and raving rock 'n' roll ("Living In The U.S.A.").