Song of the Day 4/1: Steve Miller Band, “The Joker”

The No. 1 hit that made Steve Miller a star is, in a way, the first song that owes its existence to sampling. Miller assembled it in large part from lines and riffs borrowed from earlier works, and not just his own.

Everyone knows the first-verse lyrics quote tracks he recorded with earlier, bluesier incarnations of his band — “Space Cowboy” and “Gangster of Love” were at the time two of his best-known songs. But the appropriations go far beyond that.

Consider the basic groove. Miller nicked it from a 1972 tune by Allen Toussaint, “Soul Sister.”

The second verse was lifted wholesale from a 1954 hit by the Clovers, “Lovey Dovey,” which resulted in the composers of that song, Eddie Curtis and Ahmet Ertegun, receiving co-writing credit on “The Joker” (“Nuggy” was the writing credit Ertegun used because he also produced the record).

And of course Miller also borrowed what he thought was the “pompatus” of love, from another 1954 record, “The Letter” by Vernon Green and the Medallions. You can hear it at 1:52 of the video.

The mystery of the word and its meaning was solved more than 25 years ago, when the actor Jon Cryer was doing publicity for a 1995 movie he wrote called “The Pompatus of Love.” Cryer mentioned “The Letter” and Green in a TV interview. Green heard his name and got in touch, and Cryer learned that Green had never heard “The Joker.” When he played it for him, Cryer told the Straight Dope some years back, “He laughed his ass off.”

Turns out Green, who died in 2000, wasn’t saying “pompatus” but “puppetutes,” which he explained was “a term I coined to mean a secret paper-doll fantasy figure [thus ‘puppet’], who would be my everything.” Miller also quoted the word in his earlier song “Enter Maurice,” and thus was also quoting himself when he used it in “The Joker.”

Given this history, it’s entirely fitting that Miller’s official video for the song is pieced together from various performances. It reached No. 1 in early 1974.

“The Joker” is a tough song to cover — you don’t notice how slow and subdued it sounds until someone like Keith Urban tries doing it in concert and the audience’s attention noticeably wanders. The only credible reworking I could find was by Fatboy Slim, who tapped Bootsy Collins for the vocals. This version made it to No. 35 in the UK.