Steve Miller did not leave Friday night's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony -- for which he was included -- feeling good about the whole thing. Rather, quite the opposite.During his acceptance speech, the rocker called the event a "lazy night" with "a bunch of fat cats" and got even more grouchy after the fact, telling reporters backstage that "the whole process is unpleasant" and it "needs to be changed from the top to the bottom."
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In an interview with Rolling Stone published Monday (April 11), Miller tripled down on these sentiments and then some. He trashed the ceremony and basically everyone involved, including his own label rep.
"The whole experience should be completely redesigned and become much more artist-friendly," he said. "Starting from who you can invite, what you can do, how long you can play, what you can say. The whole thing is sort of an amateur production and doing this is harder than doing a 20-city tour."
Miller went on, "A hundred thousand phone calls; the contract work. The licensing still isn't signed and isn't complete. Everybody is kind of a dick and an asshole. And every artist you talk to will tell you that. You're lucky that everybody didn't f---ing walk out. It was very, very close."
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And then there's the music business as a whole, by which he seemed equally turned off -- if not more. "All the people that were sitting in the front row tonight, like the guy that came from my record company, I wanted to pull him by his necktie and kick him in the nuts," he said. "He's made a billion dollars off my work over the last 50 years and the motherfucker just came over and introduced himself tonight. That cheery little thing. You know he won't do any contract work, he won't clean anything up, he won't get anything done.
"This whole industry f---ing sucks and this little get-together you guys have here is like a private boys' club and it's a bunch of jackasses and jerks and f---ing gangsters and crooks who've f---ing stolen everything from a f---ing artist. Telling the artist to come out here and tap dance."
Read the full interview here.
