Steve Miller reveals the secrets behind the rock classic ‘The Joker’

nypost.com:

“The Joker” — his No. 1 single with his namesake band — it was decades before marijuana would become legal anywhere.“Ooh, hush hush — that was, like, secret talk in 1973,” Miller, 79, told The Post with a laugh. “Nudge nudge, wink wink.”Long before Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix turned the Batman villain into a screen icon, Miller created “The Joker” to bring some lighting-up levity to turbulent times.“Vietnam [the war] wasn’t over; there was just always shit going on with [then-President] Nixon; there’d been riots all over the country,” he said. “The country was in a mess.

And I just wanted to, you know, not sing about all the negative shit but try and do something positive.”Recorded in August 1973 and released two months later in October, “The Joker” — sure to be a crowd favorite when Steve Miller Band plays Northwell Health at Jones Beach Theater on Saturday — became a character immortalized in classic-rock history.“It was just a song about this Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer kind of character — a rascally kind of guy who’s just out and about having fun and not taking anything too seriously,” said Miller.

But the singer-guitarist has been serious business about his legendary music career since forming his blues-rock band in 1966 in San Francisco.

After the AM radio breakthrough of “The Joker,” the group went on to rack up more seminal ’70s hits, including “Take the Money and Run,” “Rock’n Me” and “Fly Like an Eagle.” That led their “Greatest Hits 1974-78” album to sell over 15 million copies.SMB’s success streak — which continued with the No.