Last night's Steve Miller Band concert in Leede Arena was the best of the year. Period.
Miller and his five-member band proved that they can still rock and roll as they played to a mixed crowd of college students, bikers, high school students and middle-aged adults who were trying to relive their past.
"Guitar," as he is referred to, came out immediately and responded to yesterday's preview article in The Dartmouth.
"Don't you worry, we are going to play all those songs and more tonight," he said.
He opened up with several ballads including "Country Girl" and "Goin' to the Country," but the crowd was waiting for him to break into something to which they could sing along.
They received their wish when the band played "Dance, Dance, Dance" which included a beautiful trio between Miller, his pianist and Norton Buffalo on the harmonica.
The crowd was jumping by that point but when they immediately launched into "Swingtown," the atmosphere was upgraded to absolutely electric.
Miller and his band are on the sixth date on their Space Cowboy tour in between their stops in New York and Boston.
"Living in the USA," in the words of one onlooker, was "nasty." The guitar rifts were wonderful and the harmonies were still sound after all these years.
After a 15-minute intermission, Miller returned to his roots and played three blues tunes which is how he began his career.
They returned back to some of their more popular songs with very upbeat renditions of "Abracadabra" and "Serenade." It became glaringly apparent that the lyrics "Abracadabra, I wanna reach out and grab ya" are just about the best that he ever wrote.
Miller and the other five closed the second half of the concert with the geographically witty "Rock 'N Me" and the wind machine-filled "Jet Airliner."
Even though they are in thirtieth year together, they looked fresh enough to be in their first, and all of the true Miller fans in the audience knew what would follow in the band's encore.
"Take the Money and Run" was as fast as ever performed, yet still technically sound. And then "Winter Time" was a slow dreamy ballad that set up Miller's final and most popular song.
"The Joker" was appropriately played rather simple, so that the crowd could hear the song that they have danced to so many times. It seemed apparent in this number and throughout that Miller's falsetto is still with him.
Miller moves on to other college campuses such as the University of Illinois and Pennsylvania State University, but after last night, it appears that Miller and his group are still going strong and should be rocking, hopefully in Hanover, for a long time to come.
