-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 archive
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 findin
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 son
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 roo
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 phras
"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 peopl
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 touc
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 tou
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 littl
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 wer
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 fraternitie
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.
