The Steve Miller Band-The Joker

UCRs top 100 classic rock songs list brings us to #58: The Steve Miller Band "JOKER"

After a string of blues-influenced albums, 1973's "The Joker" took the Steve Miller Band music and songwriting in a more pop and rock direction, resulting in the biggest hits of his career. That rise to superstardom began here and it's not hard to see why. With a guitar riff that's as catchy as it is simple and the kind of lyrics that are instantly quotable, "The Joker" is almost so stupid it's brilliant, or maybe so brilliant it's dumb.

That said, no in-depth discussion of the "The Joker" can avoid the tune's central question: What, exactly, is "the pompatus of love"? Well, nothing, at first – though it has grown into something of a neologism, or "a newly coined term, word, or phrase, that may be in the process of entering common use, but has not yet been accepted into mainstream language."

Whether pompatus will ever gain that acceptance remains to be seen, but it does exist in the Oxford English Dictionary, where it's defined as "to act with pomp and splendor." Miller might have invented the word — one story has him misinterpreting the lyrics from a 1954 song by the Medallions — or popatus could've simply derived from some long-lost snippet of conversation by someone with the world's weirdest vocabulary.

If this seems like a lot of research trying to understand a song that's really about weed and chicks, hey, that's rock 'n' roll. Plus, "the splendor of love" sounds downright boring.

Today, "The Joker" stands as a cornerstone of classic rock radio and part of the pop culture landscape. Topping Billboard's Hot 100 in early 1974, the song hit the top of the U.K. singles chart 16 years later after being featured in an ad campaign for Levi's. It even partially inspired a 1996 feature film starring Jon Cryer – titled The Pompatus of Love, of course.

Maybe what's most compelling about "The Joker" is the fact that even though the lyrics seem to make absolutely no sense, there is always this feeling that if you just listen a few more times, you'll somehow unlock the secrets of Maurice, the space cowboy, and the pompatus of love.