by Kevin Burton
One night a jock on my go-to FM radio station, WNCI in Columbus, said “I think this is everyone’s favorite song right now.”
He was speaking of “Rock’N Me,” by the Steve Miller band, which was number one on the Hot 100, 50 years ago today.
I nodded in agreement when the DJ said that. And the song has my body in motion to this day. Most of the time in that 1976 heyday, my fellow teenagers and I cranked it up to maximum volume.
Steve Miller doesn’t show up on anybody’s list of top-10 lyricists (pompetus of love anyone?), but he sure knows how to craft hit songs.
Rock’N Me is exactly the kind of song record company executives are looking for when they listen to new material and want to “hear a hit.” But it almost didn’t see the light of day.
It was “originally a throw-away tune, composed for an isolated appearance at a British pop festival,” wrote Fred Bronson in the Billboard Book of Number One Hits.
“I went to London and played with Pink Floyd. It was a big, huge outdoor show so we needed a big rock and roll number that was really going to excite everybody,” Miller said. “I just put it together and didn’t think much about it, but they loved it. It knocked them out so we recorded it.”
“Written by Miller, Rock’N Me has the clever wordplay and catchy-as-hell guitar riffs that made him a star in the ’70s,” Songfacts wrote.
“With a melodic rock sound that played well across a variety of radio formats, Miller tells a story about a guy who is down on his luck, trying to convince his girl that it will all work out in the end, “Songfacts wrote. “He’s a slick talker who apparently gets around (Phoenix, Arizona all the way to Tacoma), but now he swears that all his travels are so he can be with his baby, who he keeps reminding is also his friend (“Babe, you know you are a friend of mine”). Will she fall for it? Hard to tell, but he spits a good game.”
“Miller had road trip radio in mind when he wrote this song. A big fan of upbeat rockers that go great with driving, he knew “Rock ‘N Me” would play well on FM radio, which was supplanting AM as the format of choice, especially in cars,” Songfacts wrote.
“In accordance with many famous traveling songs, this one mentions a bunch of places: Phoenix, Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Northern California.”
“Radio airplay for Rock’n Me was extensive throughout the fall of 1976, and the song’s unpretentious, driving energy made it a natural fit for the rock and AOR (album-oriented rock) radio formats that were becoming increasingly dominant in American radio programming,” Wikihits wrote. “The track exemplified qualities that AOR programmers valued: a strong opening hook, a consistent tempo, and a vocal style that communicated directness without abrasiveness.”
It also didn’t hurt that the song’s opening guitar riff had already been on a top-ten hit.
“Any similarity between the introduction of this song and the intro of Free’s “All Right Now” (played by Paul Kossoff) was intentional. Miller copped to lifting the guitar riff,” SongFacts wrote.
“Rock ‘N’ Me” was the second of three chart-toppers by the Steve Miller Band, after “The Joker” (1973) and before “Abracadabra (1982).”
Rock’N Me was everybody’s favorite song by the way, until such time as it wasn’t. It spent just one week at number one before giving way to “Tonight’s The Night,” by Rod Stewart, which topped the charts for eight weeks.
Rock’N Me is a better tune by every measure that I care about. But whereas Miller was talking about trying to find a job, Stewart was talking about trying to get laid. You do the math.
