All Your Love (I Miss Loving)

My September 2012 Song of the Month

All Your Love (I Miss Loving) from Bingo!

I only rarely attend music concerts by pop artists. I’ll drive hours to attend a Pink Martini concert, who often perform with local symphonic groups, but the only time I went to concerts by pop artists was when I worked the concession stands at Oklahoma City venues to earn money for our high school’s Junior Classical League. Soooo nerdy!

But when some friends at work mentioned having tickets to the Steve Miller Band concert at the Hard Rock Casino in Catoosa, I leapt at the opportunity. He had a long string of pop hits in the 1970s and 1980s, with my favorites being Take the Money and Run, Jet Airliner, and The Joker. At the Catoosa concert I would hear all of these and other hits like Abracadabra, Fly Like An Eagle, SwingTown, Rock’nMe, and Jungle Love. Everything was spot-on great. Joseph Wooten really shines on his keyboard solo on Fly Like An Eagle.

The Steve Miller Band of today: Jacob Peterson, Joseph Wooten, Steve Miller, Kenny Lee Lewis, Sonny Charles, & Gordy Knudtson

But Steve also played some lesser-known tracks from various albums and a few blues numbers from his 2010 album Bingo! The song which took me by surprise was All Your Love (I Miss Loving) with Sonny Charles of the Checkmates doing the lead vocal. Steve lauded songwriter and bluesman Otis Rush of Chicago for this song, first recorded in 1958. Steve calls the song a “love rhumba” – he says Otis Rush treated him very well when Steve was very young seeing him in clubs in Chicago, taking off his guitar and handing it to Steve and inviting him to play.

The dark Afro-Cuban sound of the Steve Miller Band’s performance with Sonny Charles made me want to hear that song again, so when I got home I looked it up and found out about the Bingo! album, which came after a 17-year break in studio albums for Steve Miller. All Your Love (I Miss Loving) is the 8th track, featuring Michael Carabello on the congas and Adrian Areas on the timbales with the reverb-laden guitar playing reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix. The 1958 version of the song by Otis Rush was recently inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, and influenced the later Black Magic Woman by Peter Green and made famous by Santana as well as Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ by Bob Dylan.

Steve Miller Band performing at the Hard Rock Casino in Catoosa on September 28, 2012

I also really like some other tracks on Bingo! and bought the whole extended Special Edition of the album. Sonny Charles’s Ooh Poo Pah Doo (YouTube) was fun at the live concert and on the album, and You Got Me Dizzy (YouTube video) is well-placed on the album right after All Your Love (I Miss Loving) as an upbeat contrast.

All Your Love (I Miss Loving)
Cover by Sonny Charles and the Steve Miller Band

All the love pretty baby, I have in store for you.
All the love pretty baby, I have in store for you.
You know I love you baby, I know you love me too.

All your loving, I miss loving.
All your kissing, I miss kissing.
All your loving, I miss loving.
All your kissing, I miss kissing.
Before I met you baby, I didn’t know what I’d been missing.

All the love pretty baby, I have in store for you.
All the love pretty baby, I have in store for you.
You know I love you baby, I know you love me too.

Ohhhhh…..mmmmmmm….
Aw shucks!