Abracadabra: the situation goes round and round

Music, memory, and the spell a single song can cast — from childhood tours with Steve Miller to reclaiming “Abracadabra” decades later

With members of the Steve Miller Band at Capitol Studios in 1986 (L to R) Byron Alred, Norton Buffalo, Tim Davis, Jerold Johnson, Steve Miller, Kenny Lee Lewis, Lonnie Turner, Ben Sidran, Gary Mallaber and me.

The first time I remember meeting Steve Miller was in 1985 or ’86. I was about 10 years old, visiting Seattle with my parents. Steve was living in a big house on Lake Washington and invited us out on his yacht, which he had named The Abracadabra, after his 1982 hit.

Even then, it struck me that songs aren’t just expressions or entertainment, they’re vehicles. They move through the world on their own terms, traveling far beyond the musical circumstances that launch them. “Abracadabra” had done that for Steve. It was more than a hit; it was a floating talisman.

Steve had made the basic track in the late 70s while experimenting with a new synthesizer driven sound. But it would be a few years before he came up with the hook and the lyrical concept. He says he almost released it with an alternate set of lyrics but at the last minute he decided to wait until he found the right approach. He knew there was magic in the track, but he had to find the right words to conjure it.

Somewhat incredibly, it was Diana Ross who cracked the code for him. “One day when I was out skiing, I saw Diana Ross out on the mountain and later in another room at a resort eating lunch,” he told Vulture in 2022. “I sat down and I started thinking about the Supremes… So I sat down after skiing, thought of the Supremes, and came up with the new lyrics in 12 minutes.”

Steve often wrote songs that way - waiting for magic to strike, and tuning into his own intuition. Many of his hits had been created in stages, with the basic backing tracks recorded before the lyrics, or even the melodies, were written.

Steve was like a big kid, so we got along. He loved Pee-wee Herman, professional wrestling, and goofy toys. I was growing up in a post-60s haze on the East side of Madison, Wisconsin, and while I’d had plenty of privileges — including tagging along with my parents around the world — Steve was probably the first truly rich person I’d ever met. His house had a full recording studio and an indoor swimming pool where we raced (he always won).

At the time, he was in an in-between place. After a nearly decade-long run of chart-topping singles — from “The Joker” in 1973 to “Abracadabra” in 1982 — he had entered a kind of early retirement. At 40, he put away his guitar and he seemed unsure whether he still wanted to be a rock star. He was in search of a new concept, a creative direction. And I think maybe more than anything at that time, he needed a friend.

My dad, Ben Sidran, and Steve met as teenagers at the University of Wisconsin in the early ’60s. They played in a college band called The Ardells (Boz Scaggs was also in the band), which eventually became the Steve Miller Band. Their friendship, always anchored by music, grew into something like brotherhood. In 1969, they even had a double wedding in San Francisco. It was the first of several weddings for Steve; the only one for my dad (he’s still married to my mom 56 years later).

After my dad left the band in the early ’70s to pursue jazz, they drifted apart. That Seattle visit marked a period of reconnection.

1987 in Madison (L to R) Bob Malach, Gordy Knudtson, me, Ben, Janis Siegel, Billy Peterson, Richie Cole, Richard Davis (holding Persia Davis), Steve Miller

Steve started showing up more in our lives. He came to Madison to play a show with my dad, Richard Davis, Richie Cole and Janis Siegel. Then he appeared on Ben’s 1987 album On The Live Side, reprising “Space Cowboy,” a song they’d written together in the ’60s in just minutes — one that, my dad says, paid for his graduate education.

Around that same time, I remember driving with Steve and Ben to visit Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys for a songwriting session outside Boulder, Colorado. I set up the keyboard, then sat back and watched as three middle-aged men struggled to pull a song out of thin air. That was when I realized that knowing how to say “abracadabra” doesn’t guarantee the spell will always work.

Even though I was a kid among adults, I didn’t feel a huge distance between myself and Steve. He didn’t have children of his own — maybe because, on some level, he still was one.

Eventually, Steve asked my dad to produce a jazz standards album for him called Born 2 B Blue. I was in sixth grade when it came out in 1988. Ben went on tour with Steve, joined by the mostly Minneapolis-based musicians Ben been working with throughout the ’80s: the Peterson brothers, Gordy Knudtson on drums, and saxophonist Bob Malach.

They played mid-sized theaters, wearing dark suits, performing standards like “When Sunny Gets Blue” alongside a few of Steve’s hits. When Ben came back from rehearsals, I asked him to show me the keyboard part to “Abracadabra.” It was the first time he was playing music I’d actually heard on the radio.

But as soon as they hit the road, they discovered the audience wasn’t all middle-aged jazz fans, it was also teenagers like me, newly converted by Steve’s Greatest Hits CD (which was one of the first CDs to be sold at a discount). Out went the suits, in came jeans and a cowbell for the sax player.

The following summer, I tagged along as the now newly reformed Steve Miller Band crisscrossed the country in a tour bus, playing iconic venues like Red Rocks, Alpine Valley, and Jones Beach. Steve even took me to Manny’s Music in Midtown Manhattan and helped me pick out my first guitar — a Hohner headless electric, a knockoff of the Steinberger model he played. Peak ’80s.

My job on tour was to mix my dad’s in-ear monitors. I stood next to the monitor engineer every night and created a custom mix for an audience of one. In retrospect, I think my dad found it exasperating. Over time, he began to disengage. By the end of the tour, he’d stopped listening to the headphones altogether. The original idea — to play jazz and R&B and have fun with his band and his old friend — was slipping away, replaced by routine.

But I soaked it up like a sponge. I learned how pop songs operate by watching Steve play his hits every night for two months.

I started writing songs in earnest. At home, we had a four-track cassette recorder, a synthesizer, a drum machine, and now, my Hohner. I recorded obsessively in our attic music room and sent everything to Steve.

Playing the soundcheck with my dad in 1990.

For the next few summers, Ben went back on tour with Steve, and I tagged along, finding little jobs to do and continuing to write my songs. I would spend one month of summer vacation at “rock and roll camp”, and one month at Jewish sleep-away camp. Then, in 1991, Steve had a portable recording studio installed on one of the tour buses: a Tascam 8-track cassette recorder, a Yamaha digital mixer, some preamps and effects. I quickly became the only one who used it. In fact, I was the only one who knew how to fire it up. If Steve wanted to record, he needed me to engineer. Mostly, though, I used it myself.

Later that same summer, I was pulled out of summer camp and flown to L.A. to watch Steve and the band record a handful of my songs at Ocean Way Studios. I sat behind the console, 14 years old, listening to Steve sing my songs and chiming in with occasional feedback. When I returned to camp, I played the rough mixes for a girl I had a crush on. She said, “I don’t think he’s using the equipment correctly. That doesn’t sound very good.”

Harsh. And in the end, Steve didn’t release those sessions. But when the tour ended, a semi-truck pulled up in front of our house in Madison. Two roadies carried Steve’s portable studio into our home. “Steve says to keep writing songs,” they told me.

So I did. I kept sending him demos. Eventually, Steve picked four of my songs — including one I wrote at camp called “Lost In Your Eyes” — for his next album. The recording sessions took place in his home studio in Ketchum, Idaho. I was 16. My mom was at a wedding in San Francisco and my dad was producing an album for Diana Ross in New York so I went alone and the band members looked after me.

Again with the Diana Ross? Yes.

Steve asked me to recreate my demos in his studio. I rebuilt the songs, part by part. Then the band added new elements on top. That’s how I ended up writing four songs and playing keys and guitar on Steve’s album Wide River, which came out in 1993.

My dad had left the band the year before. In hindsight, it seems like he stuck around as long as he did because he knew Steve was going to record my songs. Once that happened, he was out. And with that, a 30-year friendship came to an end.

They’ve barely spoken since.

Part of it, I think, is that Steve demanded the publishing rights to my songs in a way my dad found unforgivable. But the truth is that their relationship had become transactional and unbalanced already. If Steve had once needed a friend, he now needed something else. Something Ben couldn’t be.

My feelings about it all remain unresolved. Steve did demand my publishing, and he was aggressive about it, considering I was still a kid. But maybe that was his way of validating me — not cheating a kid, but dealing with a songwriter. The music business is full of contradictions like that. Steve was welcoming me to the business.

When Wide River came out, I was interviewed on a local radio station in Madison. I said, “I don’t think this is something I’ll be talking about 20 years from now.” But of course I did. For a while, it defined me. Writing songs for Steve Miller in high school is a tough first act to follow. Over time, though, it became just one more stop on the ride. And I am grateful: Steve took me seriously, saw value in my work, encouraged me, and gave me an early, unvarnished education in the music business.

The last time I saw him was at a University of Wisconsin fundraiser in New York a few years ago. He seemed stunned to see me — I was now a man several years older than he had been when we first met. He was kind and curious. I was genuinely happy to see him.

In 1998, I released my first solo album, Leo and the Depleting Moral Legacy. I included two of the songs Steve had recorded as a way of reclaiming them. I’ve kept writing, producing and recording ever since, often exploring bilingual songs and drawing on influences from Spain and South America. One of those songs, “Al otro lado del río,” eventually took me from Madison to New York. A vehicle for my own transportation.

Years later in Brooklyn, I met composer Michael Hearst. We hit it off musically and personally. I played drums for him, he played theremin on my song “Hanging By A Thread”, I interviewed him for The Third Story, we joined a songwriting club together. A few of my more recent songs, including “1982” (built entirely from song titles released that year, including “Abracadabra”) came out of the song club.

Michael, like me, is an unashamed ’80s music enthusiast. Last year, he asked me to sing “Abracadabra” for his 80 from the 80s project, a reimagining of 80 classic ’80s songs with a rotating cast of guest vocalists, including Stephin Merritt, Eli “Paperboy” Reed (both of whom have been guests of The Third Story), and John Cameron Mitchell (who I would love to interview for The Third Story).

At first I shuddered when he asked me to do it. The song is charged for me. It was the beginning of so much, and also the beginning of the end of so much. But that’s why I said yes. If songs really are vehicles, they can carry us places we never expected, forward, backward, inward. You have to take the ride. This time, “Abracadabra” carried me out of the swamp of memory and into a new relationship with my own story.

You can hear it today on bandcamp or anywhere you stream music: Michael Hearst’s rendition of “Abracadabra,” featuring me. The situation goes round and round.