FRANKIE MILLER: HE’S ROUGH & HE’S READY

When Paul Simon pays homage to the boxer, "a fighter by his trade," carrying his years with raw honesty, I am reminded of Frankie Miller. It's no coincidence that Simon's pre-"Rocky" hit is set in hostile New York. As Frankie listened to the playback of Double Trouble in the Record Plant's Studio B in the heart of Times Square, he, too, belonged here. Though it's after 4 p.m. on a cold winter weekend, to Miller the time is still morning, and he will drink nothing stronger than orange juice, at least for now. He appears to have drawn a clear line between hanging out in the studio and working there, and as his album nears its completed mix under the production eye of Jack Douglas, Miller's thoughts rest soley with his job.

Jack Douglas' blastomatic rock guidance superimposed on Frankie Miller's Scottish soul comes as a shock, albeit a pleasant one. For the first time in his five albums, Miller has allowed someone else to impose some outside control, and he's delighted with Douglas' decisive hand. "Jack was the most positive producer I met," he said in an accent thick enough to cut glass, "and his whole vibe was right, his whole outlook on music, especially American music. Finally, I've come across on an album as being a full person instead of maybe just a voice over something else. I think probably the songs I write have been the same all the time. But he's pulled them out to where they should be, especially for the many different types of people that like rock 'n' roll. Maybe I've had too much to say in a lot of what I've been doing before. I'd rather have had everyone in the studio and. said, ooooh-kay, letttt's go, ba doop doop [Frankie Miller's wire-tight reflexes will never allow him to accurately parody laid-back, but you get the picture]. If Jack can pull out more aggression than I can and get it out of meself, then I'm a happy man."

"Little Richard... punched me right In the face with the aggression he put out In his voice.-"

By becoming even a tentative link between Miller and his own ultimate aggressive rock success story, Aerosmith, Douglas may be the key factor in bringing Miller's financial career on a par with his critical raves. It certainly won't hurt that Steve Tyler popped in with a few background yowls, and that sundry others of that band sat in at odd moments. However, Douglas's main gifts were finding beauty numbers for Frankie to handle, like Marvin Gaye's "Stubborn Kind Of Fellow," taking away its calculated r 'n' b beat and replacing it with thunderous rock rhythm, forcing Miller to sing with the fury that burns inside him..

If Frankie Miller had grown up in the streets of New York, Detroit or Phila-

delphia, he would have doo-wopped his way into the musician's life. Being raised in the tough urban jungle of Glasgow, young Miller quickly tuned into the active world of the first generation rock 'n' rollers, and went through a convoluted series of semisuccessful skiffle and Motown-oriented bands. "The first thing that ever hit me was rock 'n' roll," he recalled. "Like Little Richard, that was the first guy that ever punched me right in the face with the aggression he put out in his voice.

"Aye, I've always been influenced by American music, apart from the bagpipes. It's the only thing that ever said anything for me, talking about things like going dowrr to the union hall. I never knew what a union hall was until I came here, until I asked somebody, but I'd been singing it all my life. When you come here, you can finally associate the real thing with the words that people use. Although," he grins, "I'm usin' words that are British words, like 'articulated trucks,' because my songs couldn't fit a sayin' like 'U-Haul trailer.' "

"The first thing that ever hit me was rock 'n' roll.

Miller's extreme dislike of musical as well as cultural trendiness kept him off any of the various bandwagons flaming through Britain in the late 60's and early 70's. Only when a more natural scene of American-influenced beat music started churning in little pubs did Miller return to performing. He spent enough time jamming with the primeval pub-rockers in London to enlarge his circle of instrumental colleagues and record Once In A Blue Moon. Miller always has signed the right players to the record, and then worried about their availability on the road. Consequently, though Frankie had enlisted top sidemen like Henry McCulloch and the late Robbie McIntosh for his first album, and got famed Southern funk king Allen Toussaint to produce and play on his second release, Highlife, he wasn't able to utilize them for live shows.

Miller never ceased gathering praise for the gut reality of his recordings, and again created an r 'n' b flavored masterpiece the third time out, called The Rock. At least with this crew, he was able to eke out a very limited West Coast tour over two years ago, including an emotional performance at San Quentin. "I wrote a lot of songs in California, especially in Saulsalito. The Rock' was about Alcatraz. I've always been into prisons and prisoners, 'cause I know a lot of people from a certain place where I come from in Glasgow— a lot of 'em still are in prison and I don't think it was anything to do with them, I think it was to do with their surroundings. And there's hundreds of millions of towns with people not aware of things like that, and maybe, if I can say something through 'The Rock' and make people aware, that's good.

"When we played in San Quentin, it was unbelievable. There'd been so many stabbin's inside the prison that they didn't have any concerts for two years." The Hell's Angels, who are rarely supportive of anybody on the rock scene, believed in Frankie Miller's integrity enough to arrange that appearance.

Miller was at last able to do a proper American tour just one year ago, soon after enlisting ex-Procol Harum lyricist Keith Reid as his manager. The reticent, curly haired, immaculately clothed Reid seems a weird choice to complement Miller's defiant bluntness, but in this case, opposites have attracted, and lifted both sides out of formerly dead-end situations. In 1977, Miller created both a band and an album called Full House, who brought a home grown blues sound to the receptive U.S.A. While Miller would have loved the extra freedom of calling his own shots.on the road, he settled into being an opening act with gusto, and pointedly says, "also it sold a lot of albums for us, in fact ten to fifteen times more albums, it sold.

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"When I come back here in May, there'll be a lot of places where we're supportin'. I don't care where I play as long as the people we're supportin' are in the same kind of mOod or vein. Like the last time, we done a lot of gigs with a band called The Outlaws, which aren?t the same kind of thing I'm into. The audience was,..cowboys. No, they weren't cowboys, but they wore straw hats! They weren't really rude to us, but they came to hear a specific type of music and we were in the wrong place. Where w? done the clubs like the Bottom Line and the Roxy, mainly we were top billin'.

"The thing about this place is if you want to crack it right is to work on the road, and if you're any good at all, people will pick up on it and everything's right about that, nothing's wrong. I know some bands from Britain, they've had good hits and are still supportin' in this country. It's a lot of hard work in this country, that's why I like it, 'cause everybody's workin'. In Britain at the moment people are nonchalant, it's easy come easy go and I don't like that attitude, never have done." He dismisses the current activity at home as "punk shit," reminding all concerned that the word actually derives from American prison lingo and is worth a lot more respect.

The lineup of players on Double Trouble is a diverse mixture of people Miller's worked with before, like bassist Chrissie Stewart, and newcomers such as ex-Procol Harum drummer B.J. Wilson. Former Ace keyboard player Paul Carrack has become a stalwart of Miller's and his songwriting partner. Seven out of the new album's ten tunes were done by Miller or both. With Ray Russell on guitar, Chris Mercer on tenor sax, and Martin Drover on trumpet and flugelhorn, the new and improved Frankie Miller personnel roster could pack a touring punch neatly meshing rock with rhythmic accoutrements. Whatever part of that group can do Frankie's springtour of the U.S. will be just fine by him, and to fill in any gaps, he's confident that the right faces will come along when he needs them.

Frankie Miller's had too many years of knocking around to be naive, too much energy to be pessimistic. Even in England's notoriously fickle music weeklies, he's had the press on his side, boosting, encouraging, propelling. For Frankie Miller, an audience of 200 enthusiasts means more than a crowd of 2,000 indifferents. He lives by necessity in London, but spends his free time back in Glasgow with his family, going down to the local to drink with his mates. He briefly enjoys the superficial glam world the music business throws around, then "moves downtown to see where the real people are.

"I've not done so bad already." I'd swear that the theme from Rocky is warming the evening air.