Kingsport's Connection to The Steve Miller Band -

My Biology Lab Partner Johnny King

(Johnny King on album jacket for "The Steve Miller Band - King Biscuit Flower Hour)

One of the lead stories in the Arts section of Sunday’s Washington Post (click for story) is about rock and roller Steve Miller and his career long fight with the powers that be at his record companies.

Miller always had one eye on his recording contract as he wrote and recorded such hits as “The Joker” and “Take the Money and Run” during the seventies.

That business focus extended to the members of the Steve Miller Band. They were under contract to Miller.

One of his drummers was Kingsport native and D-B grad Johnny King (’65).

Johnny was a friend of mine from high school and when I moved back to Kingsport in 2002, he called me and we got together for lunch to swap tales from our careers.

Johnny told me how he was walking through the Fort Henry Mall one day when he heard a familiar sound.

It was the distinctive drum opening to “The Joker” as the song was playing over the mall’s public address system.

(You can listen to that drum opening here.)

Johnny knew the rat-a-tat-tat well. He created it.

He was the drummer for the Steve Miller Band when the group recorded the song in 1973.

John told me that when they went in the studio Steve Miller had the entire song blocked out…except the opening. Finally the producer said to Johnny, “Why don’t you kick it off?”

Johnny reached into his drummer’s bag of tricks and came up with the drum opening for one of the most recognized songs in the rock and roll canon, a song that has become such a standard that you hear it playing, well, even in the mall.

Johnny died in 2010 way too young, at age 63. But his wasn’t the usual rock and roll life: live fast, love hard, die young and leave a beautiful memory. He didn’t live fast; he didn’t do drugs. All he did was die young and leave a beautiful memory.

Because he didn’t do drugs, in an era when drugs were de rigueur for every rock and roll band, and especially for the drummer, Johnny could remember everything about every concert, every recording session. And because he was a well-regarded musician in San Francisco at a time when San Francisco was one of the hubs of rock music world, he was a participant in many famous shows, concerts, recordings. He played at the Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, the Matrix, landmarks on the San Francisco music scene.

Name a big name from the seventies and Johnny probably worked with them: Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys. Want more names? Deep Purple, Blue Oyster Cult, the Doobie Brothers, ZZ Top, Boz Scaggs, Chick Corea, Humble Pie, Peter Frampton, Jim Croce, Roxy Music, Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

(Johnny King as a sophomore at D-B - the year he was my biology lab partner)

Johnny and I were lab partners in biology our sophomore year at D-B. We were both nerds, trying to impress girls, but he was the better nerd because he was a drummer in the D-B band and even a nerd drummer is cool.

We shared a lab table with the two cutest girls in our Biology class, Laura Crawford and Cheryl Smith, and we were always trying to impress them. Which brings me to that C minus I got one six weeks. It was the six weeks of the Frog. We were dissecting frogs that term and Johnny and I were desperate to impress Laura and Cheryl. So Johnny took our frog, stuck a probe in it and twirled the instrument around. It squished up all the innards and we both thought that was cool. I don’t think Laura and Cheryl agreed.

It was cool…till the test when we had to identify all the parts of a frog’s digestive system. Neither of us could identify a single part because everything inside our frog was mush.

(The drum section of the D-B band in 1963 - Johnny King is 3rd from right)

Johnny went to college at the University of North Texas, one of the most respected music schools in the country. He moved to San Francisco to be a part of the music scene and it was there where he met Steve Miller and signed on to Miller’s band.

The key words are “signed on.”

As Johnny explained it to me, the Steve Miller Band was more like the Steve Miller Band, Inc. Johnny was paid by the concert and by the recording session. No royalties.

So if you buy a copy of “The Joker” from Apple Music not a penny will go to Johnny’s estate.

Johnny moved back to Kingsport when his children were getting ready to go to high school, to keep them away from the west coast gang culture.

I talked to Johnny back in 1993 for a story I was writing for the New York Daily News. A new Jon Cryer movie was hitting theaters, “The Pompatus of Love,” which took its title from a lyric in the Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker,” the song Johnny played drums on. The lyric goes: “Some people call me the Space Cowboy, some call me the gangster of love, some people call me Maurice, ‘cause I sing of the Pompatus of Love.”

I wanted to explain to my readers what a Pompatus was.

Johnny told me it didn’t mean anything. “Steve used to make up words all the time.”

Johnny played with pretty much every big-time musician of his era except one, the one he really wanted to play with, one of his heroes, the guitar wizard Jimi Hendrix.

Not that he didn’t have the chance. Johnny was playing in a club in Texas when Jimi walked in. Jimi sat down and listened. After his set Johnny left and was getting ready to get into a car when Jimi stopped him and asked Johnny to come back inside and play a set with him.

Johnny, who was only 19 at the time, told me he was just too intimidated and turned Jimi Hendrix down. He never had another chance to play with Jimi Hendrix. Jimi died two years later, also way too young.