Rock'n Me
by Steve Miller Band
- 123
- BPM
- E major
- Key
- 12B
- Camelot
- 70
- Danceability
- 20
- Acousticness
For two years in the mid-1970s Steve Miller was off the road, and he played only one concert in that stretch. It was in London, at Pink Floyd's one-off appearance at Knebworth in June 1975, where his band had the slot just before the headliners. He knew how it would go: the sun would be going down, it would be cold, and there would be no lights on the stage. He decided to kick the crowd awake and wrote "Rock'n Me" as a song to get a festival going.
The intro was a nod to Free's "All Right Now," a tack on the wall, he said, for guitarist Paul Kossoff. The lyrics come from a frequent traveler who stays upbeat. They name Phoenix, Tacoma, Philadelphia, Atlanta and Los Angeles.
Miller wrote and produced it, and it came out in 1976 as the second single from the Steve Miller Band's album Fly Like an Eagle. The North American single was credited to Miller alone, the European one to the whole band. It became the band's second number one on the Billboard Hot 100, holding the top spot for a week. It also topped Canada's RPM chart. It later turned up as a playable track in Rock Band 2 and as a radio track in Grand Theft Auto V.
Rock'n Me runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in E major, Camelot 12B, which shares its notes with C# minor and mixes cleanly with A major and B major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.