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When Steve Miller first sang about being “a midnight toker” 50 years ago on “The Joker” — his No. 1 single with his namesake band — it was decades before marijuana would become legal anywhere.
“Ooh, hush hush — that was, like, secret talk in 1973,” Miller, 79, told The Post with a laugh. “Nudge nudge, wink wink.”
Long before Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix turned the Batman villain into a screen icon, Miller created “The Joker” to bring some lighting-up levity to turbulent times.
“Vietnam [the war] wasn’t over; there was just always shit going on with [then-President] Nixon; there’d been riots all over the country,” he said. “The country was in a mess. And I just wanted to, you know, not sing about all the negative shit but try and do something positive.”
Recorded in August 1973 and released two months later in October, “The Joker” — sure to be a crowd favorite when Steve Miller Band plays Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater on Saturday — became a character immortalized in classic-rock history.
“It was just a song about this Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer kind of character — a rascally kind of guy who’s just out and about having fun and not taking anything too seriously,” said Miller.
But the singer-guitarist has been serious business about his legendary music career since forming his blues-rock band in 1966 in San Francisco. After the AM radio breakthrough of “The Joker,” the group went on to rack up more seminal ’70s hits, including “Take the Money and Run,” “Rock’n Me” and “Fly Like an Eagle.” That led their “Greatest Hits 1974-78” album to sell over 15 million copies.
SMB’s success streak — which continued with the No. 1 single “Abracadabra” in 1982 — got Miller inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
as a solo artist in 2016. But the not-so-soft rocker ripped into the venerable institution backstage at the ceremony.
“The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has always been kind of an unpleasant, you’re-in-or-you’re-out kind of world … It’s kind of snotty,” said Miller. “Everybody wants the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame to mean something … but in fact it doesn’t.”
Indeed, Miller is prouder of being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2022. “Yeah, that’s much bigger than the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” he said. “For me, that was really special.”
But despite these lifetime-achievement laurels, the space cowboy is hardly ready to ride off into the sunset. Certainly, getting “a very light case” of COVID while on the road last year hasn’t deterred him from touring.
“You know, I’ve been detoxing my hotel rooms for 30 years,” said Miller. “I check into a hotel room, I take out a bleach wipe, and I clean the [room] down.”
Along with those antibacterial wipes, Miller’s other road essentials these days include “a good book” and, of course, his wife of nine years, music publisher Janice Ginsberg Miller. “She travels with me on the road,” he said. “I have a wonderful marriage, a wonderful wife that really makes life fun.”
And Miller still puts in the work offstage, too. “I practice more now,” he said. “I’m doing my vocal exercises. I hit the treadmill every day. I’ve been singing vocalese while being on the treadmill.”
In fact, Miller shared some of his voice-sustaining secrets with none other than Paul McCartney while he was working on Macca’s 1997 album “Flaming Pie.”
“They were making fun of me for doing my vocal warm-ups,” he recalled. “And I just said, ‘Paul, you know, you really ought to try it. It really helps.’ ”
While Miller believes he has been “lucky and blessed” to still be going strong at 79, he is also reaping the benefits of quitting drinking and smoking when he was 35 — although he still enjoys a cigar or two a day.
“Drinking was easy — I just quit,” he said. “But the smoking was really tough.”
And heading into his 80s, Miller — who is now based in New York City — is giving back: He serves on the visiting committee of the Department of Musical Instruments of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is is a board member of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
“That keeps me intellectually stimulated,” he said.
As for his plans for his milestone birthday on Oct. 5, Miller is keeping it intimate: “Maybe go to the ballet or something with my sweetheart and hold hands.”
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