Miller: “I’m luckier than most … We have about 300,000 people who come to see us perform every year.”

AP / Mark J. Terrill

It’s been a long time since we heard anything new from Steve Miller, and the memories of hits such as “Fly Like An Eagle,” “Take the Money and Run,” “Jet Airliner” and more — massive as they were — has been fading into the distance. Heck, it’s been nearly 30 years since the “comeback” hits “Abracadabra” and “Heart Like a Wheel.”

But Miller is finishing up a new disc, his first since 1993, and he’s working with an old friend, producer Andy Johns, whom he calls “the best guitar-bass-drums engineer out there.… He’s so much fun to work with.” Miller began recording 42 songs at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch last year, and he’s putting the finishing touches on at his home studio in Idaho, envisioning a 23-song release in the spring.

Such mega-sessions are the norm for Miller; he recorded the songs for his classic “Fly Like an Eagle” and “Book of Dreams” records in the mid-’70s at the same time, and with basically the same method. “Generally, I try to be efficient when I record. In the early days, it was out of necessity; now, it’s out of habit.” He says he did the 42 new songs in about 11 days. “Once I get things sounding good, it doesn’t take too long to record a four-minute song.”

On Miller’s Web site, Johns refers to the new disc as “the frat-rock album of all time.” Miller laughs at the characterization and says, “I think what he means is it’s a party record. And it’s a great party record, with real rocking songs. I mean, when I was 12 or 13 years old, I was playing fraternity parties! So it is kind of that kind of party record.”

Miller has been out of the studio for so long largely because “the state of the record industry has been so bad for so long. My own particular record label was run by crooks and gangsters; there was a long period of time where I didn’t want to do business with them.” He adds that “the record business is nonsense, and it’s been nonsense forever.… Computer companies have taken over the music business, and they don’t know music from shoes.”

Now that a few years have gone by, he says, “I don’t know why, but I just decided that this was a good time for me to jump into it and see if I can start my own record company.” He’s looking to sell his own records through the Internet, and figures he can make a go of it due to his name recognition: “I’m luckier than most, because I have a large audience that comes to see me, and they know who I am. We have about 300,000 people who come to see us perform every year.”

Miller had made seven records before hitting with “The Joker” in 1973, and his ups and downs on the pop charts have never bothered him. He says that, like his friend Les Paul, he had nothing against having a hit record, “But when I started recording, I was in the underground; we were considered a progressive rock band.… AM radio was about as crappy as radio is today. I wasn’t interested in that.”

Once “The Joker” came out, “there was a creative period, where you had all kinds of music charting. And then the next thing I knew I was the guy who was on the radio all the time, and other people were trying to knock me off.”

And, well, that happened. But that didn’t bother Miller, who says he was always in it for the long haul: “I aways planned to record and perform for my entire life, so I never looked at it as a pop music career.”

A look at Miller’s biography suggests he’s led a charmed life: His doctor father was a huge music fan, and the family home in Milwaukee, and later Dallas, was always filled with musicians in the middle of long stands at area venues who came to the Miller house to hang out and to make recordings on the high-quality machine Dr. Miller had bought. Indeed, Steve Miller’s first guitar lessons were from Les Paul himself, and he learned plenty from T-Bone Walker. He headed to Chicago in the early ’60s and picked up knowledge and session work with blues greats such as Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, then headed to San Francisco just as the rock movement was picking up there, and he fused the hippie aesthetic with a no-nonsense blues-based ethos.

“I don’t think anyone’s in the right place at the right time all the time,” Miller says now. “It seems to me like I’ve spent a lot of time on the outside looking in, like anybody. I have had a lot of opportunity and known a lot of great musicians.… But when I was 20 years old, I didn’t think I was ever going to make a record. I mean, I was in Madison, Wisconsin, going to college! The world we live in now didn’t exist.”

He acknowledges, however, that he was working at the cusp of a generational change, as the Frankie Avalon generation gave way to something a little more ambitious.

“I feel like I was a big part of that group of people who created that industry and played those gigs and built those big PA systems and figured out how to play sheds and make things sound good at that scale. We spent years and years and years touring before anyone knew where we were coming from.”

And he draws the parallel between his generation’s creation and the world of the young musicians whose careers he was worried about earlier: “They’ll figure it out. They always do.”

The Steve Miller Band plays at the Providence Performing Arts Center, 200 Weybosset St., Providence, Sunday night at 7:30. Tickets range from $45 to $85; call 421-2787 or go to www.ppacri.org.

rmassimo@projo.com