-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 archives 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 finding 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 song 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 room 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 phrase "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 people
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 touch 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 tour 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 little 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 were 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 fraternities
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.