Scott Miller (pop musician)
Scott Warren Miller (April 4, 1960 – April 15, 2013) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist, best known for his work as leader of the 1980s band Game Theory and 1990s band The Loud Family, and as the author of a 2010 book of music criticism.[1] He was described by The New York Times as "a hyperintellectual singer and songwriter who liked to tinker with pop the way a born mathematician tinkers with numbers", having "a shimmery-sweet pop sensibility, in the tradition of Brian Wilson and Alex Chilton."[2]
Scott Miller
Scott Warren Miller
April 4, 1960
Sacramento, California
April 15, 2013 (aged 53)
Pop musician, songwriter, music critic
Guitar, vocals
1979–2013
Rational, Enigma, Alias, 125 Records
A biography of Miller by Brett Milano was published in October 2015, and Miller's posthumously completed final Game Theory album, Supercalifragile, was released in a limited first pressing in August 2017.[3]
In 2014, Omnivore Recordings began releasing a series of reissues of Miller's entire Game Theory catalog, which had for decades been out of print.[4] Omnivore concluded the series in 2020 with Across the Barrier of Sound: PostScript, an album of previously unreleased Game Theory material recorded in 1989 and 1990.
Early life[edit]
Scott Miller was born in Sacramento, California in 1960. He was of Scottish and Irish ancestry, and his mother's family had lived in the Sacramento area since at least the 1850s California Gold Rush.[5]: 89 His father, Vaughn Miller, was an Army veteran of World War II who had a long career working for the state of California.[6]
Miller was an only child[6] whose musical interests began "sometime as a six or seven year old, listening to the Monkees and the Beatles."[7] However, his earliest musical influences were wider-ranging, springing from his father's "immense record collection – lots of Broadway show tunes. But the things I was really interested in were these New York folk scene records ... the Womenfolk being really prototypical. And after that it was the Beatles all the way. They were gods walking the earth to me."[8]
At age nine, while taking folk and classical guitar lessons from Tiny Moore,[9] Miller was writing "little albums' worth" of derivative songs,[10] and started his first band, innocently calling it the Monkees. He later noted, "We were really little kids, and we didn't realize you had to have your own personality... I was Mike Nesmith, of course."[11] By 1971, Miller began to learn rock guitar and "had pretty serious bands from seventh grade on."[7]
While attending Rio Americano High School, Miller and his longtime friend and bandmate Jozef Becker formed bands called Lobster Quadrille, Mantis and Resistance, as well as the first version of Alternate Learning.[7] Miller began recording his music at age 15, when he obtained his first TEAC multitrack recording machine.[9] He reminisced in 1993: "Writing songs like the Beatles and trying to obtain real equipment – that's been my goal in life since I can remember."[8] Some of Miller's early recordings from 1975 to 1979 were released in the 1990s to his fan club as a cassette titled Adolescent Embarrassment-Fest;[12] several others appear as bonus tracks on the 2014 CD reissue of Blaze of Glory (1982).
Another passion of Miller's youth was art. He noted that, until college, "I was extremely serious about being a visual artist, and only so-serious about doing music. I was producing really bad music and really good art."[8]
Cult status and musical legacy[edit]
Critical and commercial reception[edit]
Miller was long described as a cult favorite with little commercial success, resulting in reviews with such superlatives as "critically acclaimed and quite underrated,"[26] "the most criminally unknown songwriter/performer/all-around Rock Genius in America today,"[51] "one of America's most underappreciated songwriters",[20] "the most underrated pop genius in music history,"[52] and "America's most consistently underrated singer-songwriter ... producing album after album of hook-laden and profoundly literate rock-and-roll."[53]
Rolling Stone, in a 1993 review, suggested that "mostly it's because his songs, though insinuatingly tuneful, can be maddeningly oblique, fleshing out each verse with abstruse references to long-forgotten pop songs and TV shows; at times, the results sound like Thomas Pynchon writing for Big Star."[16]
Rock critic Robert Christgau wrote that "Scott Miller was a prototypical '80s rock artist—serious, playful, skillful, obscure, secondhand." Christgau criticized Miller's musical obsessions and literary obscurities as "rendering the ostensibly public essentially private," adding, "Adepts recommend 1987's Lolita Nation, which is said to make sense, though I don't know exactly what sense." He also offered mild praise for Game Theory's "Mitch Easter-produced albums," which he likened to "dreams of the early dB's ... which isn't to say Miller and cohorts didn't also develop a groove as they got older," referring to Two Steps from the Middle Ages as an "excessive" and "funkier" album that "I kinda like".[54]
In a 1993 interview with Miller, Option wrote that success was a touchy subject for him, quoting Miller's joking example of a typical review: "Nothing good ever happens to Scott Miller, but somehow he's managed to drag his broken body into a studio one more time and make another album."[55] Miller continued that he was "past the point of fighting" discussions of how "arty or brainy" he was, but had hoped for greater emphasis "on what the songs are about—be it the boy-girl situation, or being depressed about some key failure I've had, or getting a little bit of understanding about life."[55] In another 1993 interview, Miller mused:
Author
Scott Miller
December 2010
125 Records
Print (trade paperback)
270 pp. (first edition)
Music: What Happened? online
Engineering career[edit]
Miller attended the University of California, Davis, intending to study art. After switching majors, he graduated with a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering[8] and obtained a full-time job in LISP compiler development at Lucid Inc.[51] with several future Loud Family bandmates.[86] Miller stated in an interview that his employers "let me go whenever I have to do band stuff, which is very big of them."[51] Miller described his job situation as "kind of a carrot in front of me and a boot behind me," acknowledging that his engineering work was highly paid and noting his need to make a living.[51]
After Lucid's dissolution in 1994, Miller was a manager and software developer at Objectivity, where he became director of development and technical publications.[87] From 2011 until his death, Miller was a lead engineer at MarkLogic.[21]
U.S. patent 7,761,475 was issued to Miller on July 20, 2010 as the inventor of a technique for object-oriented database management.[88]
Personal life[edit]
Miller lived in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Kristine and their two daughters. On April 15, 2013, Miller committed suicide at the age of 53.[89] In response to Miller's unexpected death, friends and bandmates established a memorial fund for the education of Miller's children.[21]