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  • -Let's talk about "Welcome to the Vault."

  • Why now? Why this box set now?

  • -Well, you know, I had --

  • had to put all of my archives in a database.

  • -Yeah.

  • -And I'd been putting it off for 50 years.

  • You'll find this out later, you know?

  • -Oh, really? -"Remember that show you did?"

  • Stuff like that. So, my wife, Janice, and I

  • started, like, creating this big database of stuff,

  • and we started going through it.

  • And then, you know, people said, "Well, you ought to..."

  • -Put this thing on it. -...put something together,

  • and we just started finding all these different things.

  • We found, like, recordings with Les Paul...

  • -Yeah. -...T-Bone Walker,

  • and television shows from the '70s

  • before "The Joker" was a hit,

  • and started just finding all this fun stuff.

  • -When you recorded "The Joker,"

  • did you know that that was gonna be a hit song?

  • -Absolutely not. No.

  • -Really? -No, I didn't have a clue.

  • And I had finished the record.

  • I did it in about 15 days.

  • And "The Joker" was just a song I had written that I liked.

  • You know?

  • And I was just doing whatever I wanted to do,

  • and I turned it in to the record company,

  • and one of the kids in the room said, "Well, you know,

  • I think that 'Joker' is really good tune."

  • And I said, you know, "Listen.

  • I'm just starting a 60-city tour.

  • Just have the records in the towns where I'm playing.

  • That'll be enough." You know?

  • And we left and went to Florida, and 60 cities later,

  • we got back, and it was number 1 all over the place.

  • I finally had a hit record, a real one.

  • -That's right. -You know?

  • And so that was a big breakthrough.

  • [ Cheers and applause ]

  • -That was the one. -Yeah, yeah.

  • That started it off. Yeah.

  • -That started it all.

  • And you came up with the phrase "Pompatus of love."

  • -Well, that was an old doo-wop song. You know?

  • And it was like, "Come closer, darling.

  • I want to speak to you about the pompatus of love."

  • -Yeah. -Except I think it was

  • a different term, and I had misunderstood it,

  • so I made up the word "pompatus."

  • [ Laughter ] -Wow.

  • -And the funny thing about that...

  • [ Laughter ]

  • ...was for years after that, I would get letters from people

  • going, "Steve, what does 'the pompatus of love' mean?"

  • -Yeah. -You know?

  • And I had no answer. [ Laughter ]

  • -"I have no idea." -"I don't know.

  • I have no idea. It's just a song."

  • -Yeah. -Yeah.

  • -Putting this together, though, you must be --

  • I mean, all the great photos.

  • I love the guitar picks, by the way.

  • I think that's a cool touch right there.

  • -Yeah. Oh, and there's a -- Wait a minute.

  • There's a -- There's a -- a pass.

  • These are real passes. -Oh, really?

  • -Not that. That's something else.

  • I can't... It's stuck.

  • Yeah, all right. This one is --

  • This is from the world tour of 2012.

  • -Hey, look at that. These are real backstage passes.

  • -Those are real ones, left over, yeah.

  • -They come with the thing. How rad.

  • -They're in the boxes.

  • So we put all sorts of little stuff in it to make it fun.

  • -Do you remember the early gigs? Do you --

  • Do you like those ones when you were like in

  • a little band in high school, or...?

  • -Yeah, I remember everything. You know?

  • I can almost remember the weather, you know?

  • It's like, I love to play music,

  • and I remember when we first started out.

  • When I started my first band, I was 12.

  • It was 1956, and there were no rock 'n' roll bands.

  • So, I had a friend in the seventh grade

  • who had been taking drum lessons since he was 5,

  • and he was a great drummer.

  • He was really a pro. You know?

  • -Yeah. -So, we had a good little band.

  • Boz Scaggs was in that band. -Boz Scaggs was in the band?

  • -Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we mimeographed a letter

  • and sent it to all the sororities and fraternities

  • at SMU in Dallas and all the synagogues

  • and churches and country clubs and any place

  • that had live music, which was all over Dallas.

  • And so we had a rock band,

  • but we didn't tell them how old we were.

  • [ Laughter ]

  • -'Cause you didn't think they'd book you?

  • -Yeah. So, I had to go to bed at 10:00 at night 'cause I was 12.

  • [ Laughter ]

  • But I was doing all this phone work, you know?

  • -Yeah. -In about three weeks,

  • I had the band booked for the entire school year.

  • And I was telling my mom, "You don't understand.

  • I got a gig on Friday night." [ Laughter ]

  • -"Mom, you have no idea. I'm Steve Miller."

  • -So we started wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses,

  • 'cause we thought that made us look older.

  • And we had these little seersucker suits.

  • -Oh, my God. -Then, you know, we walk in.

  • We were about 5'3", 5'4", you know, and show up.

  • But we played blues, and we played rhythm and blues.

  • That's the music that I had grown up learning.

  • -Do you remember your first song

  • that you could really jam out to?

  • -Well, yeah. It's the "Gangster of Love."

  • -That was it? -I started that when I was 11.

  • -Wow. -It was Frank James,

  • Jesse James, Billy the Kid and all the rest.

  • You know? -Wow.

-Let's talk about "Welcome to the Vault."

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