Scott Miller – A separate peace
The first song he remembers responding to was B.J. Thomas’ “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”. Not too much later, he got curious about making music himself.
“I tried band, but I hated it,” he says of his grade-school days. “Then my brother came home from college and he picked up guitar, like a lot of hippies did back then. He could just read those chord charts, little dot things. He had this book, a Reader’s Digest compilation songbook. I would just play those things for hours. ‘Cause there wasn’t much else to do.”
If his Virginia upbringing figures explicitly in the new album — its title is the state’s motto — Miller’s adopted home is nearly as present by implication. He followed a girlfriend to Knoxville in 1990, fresh out of college and determined to make a career in music. His orientation at the time was folky singer-songwriter stuff with an acid comic bite, and he started a regular solo gig at a University of Tennessee hangout called Hawkeye’s. Those sets and the songs that went with them have assumed legendary status in Knoxville, and tapes still circulate of tunes such as “Jacki With An Eye” and “Feminist Nightmare”.
Local music godfather Todd Steed, whose band Apelife has opened some shows for Miller on his current tour, remembers the first time he heard the new kid in town. “I saw him playing at Hawkeye’s,” he says. “I thought it sounded like a sick John Prine — a mentally and spiritually sick John Prine. I thought he’d be good to play with us. After the show, I left a card for him to call me. And he didn’t.”
Steed and Miller eventually shared plenty of stages. They even formed a side-project together, a goof-off called Run, Jump And Throw Like A Girl that included future V-roy Jeff Bills on drums. Miller has mixed feelings about those early years.
“It about put me in a nervous breakdown, tell you the truth,” he says. “I was busting my ass, playing every chance I got. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, so I had all the energy in the world. I could work a 10-hour day, drive up to Lexington, play a show, come back, be back in time for work that next day and keep going.”
Around 1994, he connected with another young countryish songwriter named John Paul Keith. With Bills and bass player Paxton Sellers, they formed the first version of the Viceroys (the name eventually got abbreviated when they discovered a reggae band owned the Viceroys copyright). Keith left for Nashville the next year, and Bills’ old friend Mic Harrison joined the lineup. Their crackling rock and country lilt caught the ear of the recently rehabilitated Steve Earle, who added them to the roster of E-Squared, the label he’d just launched with Jack Emerson. Earle and his producing partner Ray Kennedy produced the V-roys’ 1996 debut Just Add Ice, and also All Around Town two years later.
With their trademark black suits and Beatles boots, the V-roys were an unlikely and irresistible mixture of honky-tonk, rock and Merseybeat pop. They would pull off the unlikely feat of convincingly covering Hank Williams and Judas Priest in the same set.
But a couple of years on the road and sales in the low thousands had predictable enervating effects. There were also rumors of discord between the band and Earle, about which Miller says, “It was a business and a friendship and a fucked-up family. That label was a family in some ways. I wish him really well. I always have respect for him as a songwriter. And I think he does for me too. He’s a complex character.”
The band’s breakup didn’t surprise anyone. “There’s never a good reason,” Miller says, getting up to rearrange his shooting targets. “Man, it was just time. We’d kind of reached our peak. They’re good guys.” He still hangs out with Harrison, who’s now leading his own band, the Faults. They’ve even spent some hours writing together in an open-air treehouse behind Miller’s home.
Miller didn’t pause for breath once the V-roys were officially history. He immediately secured a publishing deal with the Welk Music Group in Nashville and started organizing regular singer-songwriter nights at clubs in Knoxville. At first, it seemed likely he’d head in the folkier direction indicated by later V-roys songs such as “Mary” and “Virginia Way”, which had featured members of bluegrasser Del McCoury’s band. There was talk of a Virginia concept album, a song-cycle about the state and the war and Miller’s relationship to both.
That’s not quite how it turned out.
Miller had met producer R.S. Field while he was still in the V-roys. Field, best known for his long association with Webb Wilder, approached Miller after a gig and told him he thought “Goodnight Loser” was a classic song. They got to be friends, and over Memorial Day weekend of 2000, they went into the studio with a group of veteran Nashville players to record four songs. What came out — “Across The Line”, “Yes I Won’t”, “Loving That Girl”, and a cover of the Brogues’ lost garage classic “Miracle Man” — was undeniably rock ‘n’ roll, more Crazy Horse than “Muleskinner Blues”.
“My main reference point was the Faces, Who’s Next, the Glyn Johns sort of school of recording,” Field says. “We were going for a full-bodied sound, without trying to just ape yesterday. Obviously Neil Young, obviously [Tom] Petty, and then some of the British stuff too.”