It's Miller Time

Frankie Miller is someone I had always meant to check out. I mean, I was vaguely aware of the man and the musical ballpark that he operated in, but never quite got around to giving him a proper listen. Until recently.

No doubt I saw Frankie Miller on Top Of The Pops back in 1978 when Darlin' hit the UK top ten, but probably found his music a bit grown-up alongside fluffier distractions such as Blondie, Sarah Brightman & Hot Gossip, Queen and Boomtown Rats who all charted at the same time. I next heard Frankie's name around 1984 when I found myself in a recording studio for the first time. It was a tiny, pine-clad space in the converted loft of a terraced house in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The studio owner, a charming gent called Stewart Blandamer, had a clock on the studio wall fashioned from a copy of Miller's Darlin' 7" single. It turned out that Stewart had written the song for Frankie and been rewarded with the financial wherewithal to set up a home studio in which to record talentless local bands such as my own. As a bunch of teenage headbangers we were excited to discover that Stewart was responsible for playing the tenor sax on Status Quo's Hello LP, but the Frankie Miller writing credit was, no doubt, far more lucrative. To his eternal credit, Stewart was patience personified and sent us home, dreaming of stardom, with a tape sufficiently well-recorded to make our numerous deficiencies achingly clear. I would never have knowingly thrown away such an important historical artefact, but my copy does seem to have disappeared. Perhaps a music lover stumbled upon it and decided that the only humane thing to do was to put it out of its misery and have it destroyed. The world will just have to cope without ever hearing High Time For Love or Don't Let It End. An incalculable loss!

Even when not pursuing his solo career Frankie Miller's fingerprints seem to have been all over the music industry. Before setting off on his solo path, Frankie was in a band called Jude with Robin Trower, Jimmy Dewar and Jethro Tull's Clive Bunker, but they never recorded together. What a waste! Having said that, could you realistically have two vocalists of the calibre of Miller and Dewar in the same band? Surely Dewar wouldn't have been content to just play bass? The Live And Dangerous version of Still In Love With You by Thin Lizzy is, quite possibly, my all-time favourite ballad, but for years I was unaware that it is Frankie who duets with Phil Lynott on the studio version of the song. Twenty years after that recording, in 1994, while in the process of putting a band together with Joe Walsh, Nicky Hopkins and Ian Wallace of King Crimson, Miller suffered a brain haemorrhage and fell into a coma. Another of those 'what if?' stories that seem to litter the music industry. Miller's Paul Rodgers / Rod Stewart / Bob Seger-hybrid of a voice fronting that line-up would have been quite something! Most importantly though, Frankie survived.

No doubt discouraged by a more modest level of commercial success than his vocal talents deserved, Miller would often write for others and had the likes of Ray Charles, The Eagles, Rod Stewart and Joe Cocker queuing up to record his songs. Bob Seger covered Miller's Ain't Got No Money on his Stranger In Town album and has cited him as a major influence. Perhaps Miller has a Stranger In Town clock on his wall to remind him who pays his mortgage.

Here's a couple of killer tunes from Miller's The Rock album, complete with one-time McCartney sideman Henry McCullough on lead guitar. Blues-Rock at its best!

Stereo Gold Award Exploito LPs

I was duped into buying one of those Top Of The Pops compilation LPs when I was a kid, not realising that I wasn't getting the original hits. I don't remember much about what was on it, except that there was a cover of the novelty hit Car 67 by Driver 67 complete with poorly executed Brummie accent. Those session guys must have knocked out their turgid cover of an already joyless tune with one eye on the clock, willing the day to end, such is the effort they seem to have put into it. My harrowing Top Of The Pops experience has left me both healthily suspicious of cover tunes and with a slightly masochistic fetish for them.

The Purple Fox (1971)

I have a particular fondness for those exploitation LPs that seemed to appear regularly in the Seventies that, at a glance, might fool the casual music fan into thinking that they were shoddily packaged compilations of original material, but were in fact albums of covers knocked out by respected, albeit usually anonymous, session men who used whatever studio time was left at the end of the recording session to jam a tune or two 'in-the-style-of' whichever artist they were aping. These LPs were often marketed as 'tributes' to great or popular artists, rather than as wilfully misleading albums of covers, in an attempt to give them some credibility. Sometimes it worked and the discs offered up a nugget or two. Sometimes.

A bunch of session heads fronted by a man calling himself The Purple Fox (real name Alex Boggs, if the sleeve notes can be believed, which of course they can't) is responsible for the Tribute To Jimi Hendrix LP which leapt at the chance to cash in on Hendrix's death by hitting Woolworths' racks in a blur of opportunistic haste in 1971. The sincerity of the tribute, or lack thereof, is perhaps betrayed by the mis-spelling of Jimi's name in the title of one of the featured original tracks, Requiem For Jimmy (sic). The LP is on the Stereo Gold Award label which seems to have cornered the market in these tribute-type exploitation LPs. On all of these Stereo Gold Award LPs the name Leo Muller crops up as having written (or at least he's credited with having written) the original tracks that flesh out the albums. The sleeve notes on the Hendrix tribute state that the LP was "Recorded Under Direction of D. L. Miller". I'll go out on a limb here and hypothesise that D. L. Miller and Leo Muller are one and the same. I can imagine Miller / Muller leaving the tape rolling as the session musicians jammed, paying them their Musicians' Union rates at the end of the day, and taking the credit for whatever half-formed song ideas fell into his lap. Or perhaps he was just a prolific songwriter and I'm doing him an injustice.

Amazonas (1973)

Amazonas Play Santana distinguishes itself by having a cover collage that makes some effort to reference Mati Larwein's iconic Abraxas artwork, possibly as a low-rent homage to the original but more likely in an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the unwitting record buyer. The Santana logo looks to have been traced straight off the Abraxas album cover. The man doing a creditable impersonation of Carlos Santana is Zed Evans, guitarist on Gerry Rafferty's debut solo album Can I Have My Money Back?

Santana - Abraxas (1970)

Perhaps the most well known of the Stereo Gold Award LPs is Funky Junction Play A Tribute To Deep Purple. In itself it's a less-than-thrilling set of Deep Purple covers despite the sleeve notes' assertion that "Funky Junction are an exciting new group that has the pulse of today" with "U.K. and world audiences.... acclaiming them for the great group they are". However, what makes the album interesting is that Funky Junction features moonlighting Thin Lizzy members Phil Lynott on bass, Brian Downey on drums and Eric Bell on guitar.

Funky Junction (1973)

Who knows the identity of the hairy geezers pictured on the sleeve (although Purple Records signings Hard Stuff's name has cropped up as a possibility), but I think we can be pretty certain that none of them has ever played on a Stereo Gold Award LP. The photo does give the impression that Funky Junction is a real band, not a studio construct, so job done! True to form, Muller grabs songwriting credits on this LP, having the chutzpah to claim instrumental versions of the evergreen tunes House Of The Rising Sun and  Danny Boy as his intellectual property, retitling them Rising Sun and Dan respectively. Now that's just cheeky! Incidentally, Rising Sun features some fine guitar work from Eric Bell.

A later Stereo Gold Award album which actually claims to be by Gladys Knight & The Pips rather than merely being a tribute to the Soul diva (although I have seen it suggested elsewhere that Ms Knight had no part in the recording), features a guest appearance by Funky Junction. They perform two tracks, both credited to Leo Muller of course, which bear no sonic relation whatsoever to Gladys' portion of the LP. So what the hell are they doing on there?

Gladys Knight (1975)

 
The chances of this incarnation of Funky Junction featuring any of the musicians who recorded A Tribute To Deep Purple are slim to none, but seeing as the group's existence was a figment of Leo Muller's imagination anyway, I don't suppose a line-up change really necessitated a new name. To add to the confusion, one of the Funky Junction tracks on here, Road's End, appears in identical form on the Hendrix tribute album four years earlier under the name Acid Test, supposedly performed by The Purple Fox: same song, same performance, same recording. Baffling!

The thing about these Stereo Gold Award albums is that, exploitative and cynical as they were when released, the intervening years have leant them a modicum of credibility that has seen them become collectors' items in their own right. Here are a selection of the best of the 'original' tracks from these LPs, fuzz guitars to the max! You have to hand it to Mr Muller, he really knew how to capture that dirty, acid fried, porno soundtrack vibe!