Steve Miller Band – Fly Like An Eagle (Live 1973)

The Night They Played A Hit That Didn’t Exist Yet

What you’re watching is a ghost of a song — “Fly Like an Eagle” caught on tape in 1973, four years before it became a record. This performance on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert captures Steve Miller and the band working through a sprawling, psychedelic version of a song that had no studio release, no chart position, and no fixed identity yet. Just a riff, a groove, and something clearly worth holding onto.

By the time the finished version finally peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 12, 1977, Miller had been performing the song live for nearly four years. The album Fly Like an Eagle went four-times platinum and Rolling Stone voted it the best album of 1976. But that journey from this raw Don Kirshner performance to the polished funk-rock single is exactly the story worth telling.

The song’s riff had been hiding in plain sight since 1969. Miller had used a similar motif on “My Dark Hour,” a track from Brave New World, co-written during a single chaotic session with a musician credited only as “Paul Ramone.” That was Paul McCartney, who had wandered into the studio after a blazing argument with the other Beatles. McCartney played bass, drums, guitar, and sang backing vocals under the hotel alias he regularly used for anonymity — an alias that would later inspire The Ramones to choose their name. So the DNA of what you’re hearing in this 1973 performance quietly connects Steve Miller to both Paul McCartney and punk rock.

Getting the studio version right took years and no small amount of stubbornness. Miller spent thousands on an early session he ultimately scrapped. The breakthrough came at Pacific Union Studios in San Francisco, where he cut the basic track live in just three takes with drummer Gary Mallaber, bassist Gerald Johnson, and Hammond B3 player Joachim Young. The iconic synth intro came from a cheap keyboard Miller bought from a local shop — one so basic that it “really hurt” his regular keyboard player to be seen near it. Then during the final mix, a partially erased tape left behind a mysterious repeating beep. Miller and mastering engineer Jim Gains kept it. It became the outro.

Fly Like an Eagle was the band’s ninth studio album and a deliberate reinvention. Miller and the band recorded over 25 tracks in eleven days, splitting them across two albums — the rest went to Book of Dreams, held back a full year. The original version carried more overtly political lyrics about Native American reservations, stripped back for the funkier album cut, which paid subtle homage to War’s “Slippin’ into Darkness.”

The song’s afterlife has been remarkable. Seal recorded it for the Space Jam soundtrack in 1996, reaching number ten in the US and weaving in lines from his own “Crazy.” The US Postal Service used it in national TV commercials in 1998. And in 2025, the album was inducted into the Library of Congress National Recording Registry as a work of cultural significance.

Miller reflected on the song in 2022 with characteristic clarity: “It was a time when I really matured as a writer and I started writing much better songs. ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ is a combination of electronic music and a really funky groove — I put in some socially conscious lyrics and an inspirational message.” Watch this 1973 Don Kirshner performance and you can hear exactly where that journey started — rough, alive, and not yet finished. Sometimes the best songs take a while to know what they want to be.