← Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Behind The Song: Classic Rock Chronicles
Steve Miller Band, The Joker, and the "pompatous" of love
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97.1Fm the drive presents the behind the Song podcast, taking you deeper into classic rock's most timeless tunes. Here's your host, Janda it's the song.
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That put the word pompitas into our collective consciousness. A made up word that was actually a mishearing of another made up word. But it sounds great in the Joker, proving once again that in rock and roll, if it sounds good, no one will bat an eyelash to question it. In fact, the Joker was the Steve Miller Band's first number one hit on the Billboard singles chart and we've been singing along to it since 1973. Let's get into the story of this ever popular song in this episode of the behind the Song podcast. If you like it, give it a thumbs up and hit. Subscribe and let us know in the comments. By the time the Steve Miller Band released the Joker, their eighth album, the band and their namesake frontman had covered a lot of ground, both literally and musically. Miller was born in Milwaukee, the son of who he describes as a hipster doctor and music enthusiast who also dabbled in recording. Miller's dad was close friends with guitar innovator Les Paul while in Milwaukee, an early influence on Miller. In fact, he was his godfather. When the family moved to Dallas. Miller's dad recorded with T Bone Walker and Charles Mingus and others, so it was a unique upbringing for a boy who'd become interested in playing guitar himself, able to soak up being around these real musical luminaries who are visiting his house. In the early 60s, Steve Miller returned to Wisconsin to pursue a literary degree in Madison and spent time in Copenhagen, Denmark as a student before returning to the US and heading to Chicago with the goal of playing with the blues greats Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf, which he did. He even got signed to a label deal, went to New York to play a residency in clubs, and then moved to Austin, Texas to finish up his college degree. He was six credits shy of completion when he decided that music was what he really wanted to pursue and he took off in a Volkswagen bus for San Francisco. He formed the Steve Miller band there in 1966 and started releasing albums in 1968. At one time his band included Boz Skaggs, who he had played with since they were kids, off and on until until Skaggs left to go solo. Those early Steve Miller Band albums were tripped out psychedelic blues rockers that reflected the music scene and the city they were in and don't really sound anything much like the albums that came after the Joker 1973 was a turning point musically with songs like the title track that would combine the blues and pop in a wonderful way and get played on the radio over and over again. The Joker is interesting because it contains several callbacks to Miller's earlier albums, and the famous word pompitas actually means nothing at all. It's what you call a nonce word, a word made up for one thing only. Actually, two things, because Miller used the word pompitas in the Joker and in the song Enter Maurice from the previous album Recall the A Journey From Eden. That's where the character Maurice was first introduced, called back in the lyrics of the Joker. The gangster of love in the lyrics is also the title character in an earlier Steve Miller Band song from the Sailor album released back in 1968. And the space Cowboy, well, that's the title character in a song on the 1969 Steve Miller Band album Brave New World. As an aside, Paul McCartney appeared on the Brave New World album on the song My Dark Hour. That came about because the album was produced by Glenn Johns partly at Olympic Studios in London. Johns was also working with the Beatles there at the time, and the rest of the Beatles walked out of work one day after a fight over making Allen Klein their financial manager. So Johns encouraged McCartney to work with Miller to make use of the studio time that day, and the song was basically a jam they recorded together in one sitting. McCartney is credited on it under his sometimes used secret name, Paul Ramone. He played the drums, guitar and bass, and sings the backing vocals. Miller's main guitar riff on that song, My Dark Hour, also appears later in his own work. He undeniably uses it again in his 1976 hit Fly Like An Eagle. Anyway, back to pompitas. The word traces back to a 1950s doo wop group called the Medallions. In their song the Letter, the word puppetoots is sung. Puppetoots is another nonce word made up to combine puppets and prostitutes by Vernon Green from the Medallions to mean a secret fantasy paper doll. When Steve Miller heard it, he misheard puppetoots as pompitus and just went with that. And when the Joker became the enigmatic hit that it poppitus became part of our pop culture. Steve Miller says he has never had any idea what the word actually means, but it hints at something cool that works in the context of the song as a whole. The lyrics in the Joker aren't sung so much as spoken, and the first verse goes like, some people call me the space cowboy, some call me the gangster of love. Some people call me Maurice because I speak of the pompous of love in those first four opening lines. You have those three callbacks to characters in his own earlier songs, which does a cool inside baseball job of self referencing that must have delighted Steve Miller Band fans who already knew those songs. Plus of course that made up word pompitas that would capture the imaginations of fans new and old in the best way. The song goes on with the verse about how people are talking about this space cowboy gangster of love Maurice character saying that he's doing wrong but not to worry because he's right here at home. And then comes the sing along part of the song with a space cowboy telling you what he is. A picker, a grinner, a a lover and a sinner. He plays his music in the sun He's a joker, a smoker, a midnight toker and he sure don't want to hurt no one but he gets his lovin on the run did you know that Steve Miller isn't credited as the sole songwriter on the Joker? Well, that's because of the last verse, which goes like this. You are the cutest thing that I ever did see I really love your peaches Want to shake your tree Lovey dovey all the time Ooey baby I'll sure show you a good time this part of the song is lifted from the Clover's Lovey Dovey, another R&B hit from the 50s. So much so that it required a co writing credit for the Joker to be given to the songwriters of the Clover's hit, a songwriter named Eddie Curtis and someone you may have heard of, Atlantic Records co founder Amit Erdogan, who was a songwriter himself in the 50s, sometimes spelling his name backwards as a pseudonym. So to recap, what you have with the Steve Miller Band's first hit single is basically a lyrical Stew. Characters from three of Miller's own earlier works and parts of two R&B hits from the 50s boiled together and put to that plodding beat, peppered with Miller's always tasty guitar ribs, and the song became a game changer for his musical career. The Joker album was released in the fall of 1973. The Steve Miller Band went on a 60s city tour and by the time they were done, the title track was number one everywhere. The next year, in 1974, the Guess who included it in their Clap for the Wolfman, an homage to legendary DJ Wolfman Jack, who talks during the song and refers to himself as the Pompetus of Love. The Joker went on to be the subject of a movie, too. In 1996, Jon Cryer starred in a film named the Pompitis of Love, a comedy about four guys discussing what exactly the word meant in 2016, Steve Miller was inducted as a solo artist in the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. He was not given the choice to include the members of the band who had been a part of his music all along the way. He was upset with that and with his perception that the Rock hall were not inclusive enough of female musical artists and that they didn't do enough to support music education, two points that he mentioned in his brief acceptance speech 50 years after the Joker was released. It's as comforting as a warm blanket to listen to a laid back anthem. And it's also a really good example of the humor you find in Steve Miller's songs always there. Like when he sings about giving the gift of a crate of papaya in Jungle Love, or when he rhymes reach out and grab ya with abracadabra in that song. Sometimes for great guitar players like Steve Miller, the lyrics aren't typically front and center, but yet somehow they don't really take a back seat either. Everything works together in a way that just sounds great every time. Guitar oriented pop songs with a nonsense word here and there and a twinge of the psychedelic where needed. I mean, he is the space cowboy after all. So what other songs can you think of that have made up words in them like the Joker? There's a few. Something to think about. Until next time. I'm Janda and this has been behind the song. If you like this episode, give it a like and subscribe to the channel and check it out on TikTok too. Special thanks as always to Christian Lane for the music you hear on these podcast episodes. You can find me on the air at 97.1 FM the Drive in Chicago and at wdrv.com on the way. Much more classic rock and roll.