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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Miller's overlooked art, October 1, 2000
Steve Miller is probably the world's most underated guitarist. He is also very underated as an artist. Your Saving Grace is no exception. The title track is heavy with emotion and while not writen by Miller, shows off the talent of Tim Davis who was the backbone of the early stuff. The forcefull lovesong "Little Girl" and the civil rights motif "Don't you let nobody" are solid rock tracks with a hint of blues and a lot of attitude. "Baby's House" shows off the piano skills of Nicky Hopkins as well as Miller's strength as a vocalist. If you have Miller's box set you are missing out on the full version of this awesome song. "Motherless Children" has a blues twing and a solid emotional base that makes it a classic. While the album is short, it is a good buy. For the Miller enthusist it is well worth it. If not, you might want to start off his early stuff with Antholgy.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just plain good music, October 30, 2003
Gave this album to an associate who was familiar with Fly Like an Eagle, and he was really surprised that it sounded so different, and that it was good "I mean, REALLY GOOD!" This band was putting out something like two or three albums a year at this time, yet the writing is really good. A really solid album.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Steve & his band enter a truly brave new world on here, January 10, 2005
For his first three albums, Steve Miller & his band provided some of the most psychedelic (yet least druggy) blues-rock of the time without making so much as a dent into the mainstream. After 1968's SAILOR though, the band went through the first of what would be many personnel changes with guitarist Boz Scaggs departing to go solo (and thus leaving most of the guitar work to Steve himself), and taking keyboardist Jim Peterman with him. Peterman had to have been rather aghast to see himself replaced by, not one, but two keyboard players in the form of another future soloist Ben Sidran and legendary sessionman Nicky Hopkins.
The latter two made their debut on 1969's BRAVE NEW WORLD, which was just as trippy as its two predecessors, but by now, the psychedelia was bordering on parody, and thus indicative that perhaps the blues-happy Boz knew when to abandon a potentially sinking ship. Maybe Steve recognized this as well, and decided to make his second album of the year YOUR SAVING GRACE a little more earthbound and bluesy. For the most part, it succeeds, but does not quite match the rarefied greatness of 1968's CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE and SAILOR.
"Little Girl" continues the tradition of Steve Miller album openers that could have made it as singles in a more perfect music world. Power pop had not been officially invented per se, but this song was as close to perfect both in melody and lyric as one could get. Again, if Capitol Records had taken a short break from promoting the Beatles in this era, they could have devoted some elbow grease towards Steve & his group, with this being their true breakthrough.
"Just A Passin' Fancy In A Midnite Dream" is a little inscrutable, but perhaps that can be attributed to the fact that it is co-written by Ben Sidran, who was more influenced by Van Morrison and Mose Allison, especially by their idiosyncratic songwriting styles. Maybe one can call this psychedelia without the phasers and Leslie cabinets, but that does not make the song any less hallucinogenic, if not as trippy as, say, the side one suite of CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE.
"Don't Let Nobody Turn You Around" is another song that could have helped get Steve some long overdue commercial attention, but it would take 5 more years of grunt work for that to happen. As for the song, it is his attempt at creating a Delta blues tune for the modern era, for it sounds like it is coming straight out of the South, but its subject (speaking out against racism and inequality) is one that still haunted the region & continues to this day. The fact that the song comes from a White musician makes it even more potent.
"Baby's House" closes out side one with a 9-minute trip to dreamland that is again rather light on the psychedelics, but has enough of them in smaller doses to give the listener a relaxing, woozy feeling. Co-written by Nicky Hopkins, his fingerprints are all over this song with him inserting some subtle classical measures into his piano work. He may have preferred the comforts of the studio to the stage, but I can guess that songs like this made fellow San Franciscans Quicksilver Messenger Service want to snare Hopkins up for their band, and they did.
"Motherless Children" is a return to traditional blues standards after an absence of them on BRAVE NEW WORLD. After 9 minutes of music that kept the listener occupied, the subsequent 6 minutes of near-flatlining stripped-down blues actually borders on the somnambulant. Eric Clapton would tackle this song 5 years later, and give it a much-needed dose of testosterone. Until then, Steve slipped up by giving his version an overdose of Dramamine.
"The Last Wombat In Mecca" brings things back to life slightly with bassist Lonnie Turner's second volume in his combination of acoustic blues with psychedelic lyrical imagery. Sounding like it was recorded live in the studio in one take (listen to the studio chatter at the beginning), it is mindless fun if anything else, although maybe someone other than Steve could have handled the vocals (it was Lonnie's song after all).
"Feel So Glad" is another blues- and jazz-soaked slow-burn with more excellent piano playing by Hopkins (a session musician who deserved to go headliner, if ever there was one). It is amazing that on this album the original material with a blues bent was more successful than the one that came straight from the source (an anonymous one). But that just indicates how good Steve was at appropriating blues influences and tailoring them to his own ideas, rather than become a slave to them like most other musicians of the time did.
It all closes out with the title track that comes from drummer Tim Davis, who tends to be the lowest-key member of the band in this time. After the slightly pedestrian "Can't You Hear Your Daddy's Heartbeat" on BRAVE NEW WORLD, Davis had improved as a writer to be allowed the title track on the band's next album, and although it may be just me, I hear a small bit of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" in the arrangment of this sociopolitical song (or at least, the sound of what was to come). One can wonder if Marvin had indeed given this song a listen while creating that magnum opus. He would depart shortly after this album's follow-up, but it is clear that Davis was the rare sign of stability for Steve early on as his band went through more personnel shuffles than a fast-food chain.
It was perhaps inevitable that after two wonderful first albums, Steve Miller would hit a rough patch on the next two. Even with a master producer like Glyn Johns at the helm, BRAVE NEW WORLD and YOUR SAVING GRACE cannot be considered as finely-crafted and timeless (even while remaining of its time) as CHILDREN OF THE FUTURE and SAILOR. It could be because of the game of musical band members or the fact that psychedelia was on the way out in a post-Woodstock world. Nevertheless, YOUR SAVING GRACE has its own place in Steve Miller's catalog as both a time-marker and an instance that, when the right occasion arose, they could scale back the hallucinogens and simply rock out as best they could.
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