Roger Miller is a remarkably good-natured gent for someone whose 30-plus years of being a musician will forever be reduced to what he did for the forty months in Burma that ended in early 1982. The headphones he has to wear onstage during the open-ended Mission of Burma reunion still look totally retarded. But all of us should be half as cool as he is when we’re 50. I interviewed the Alloy Orchestra/Mission of Burma/No Man/Sproton Layer/Birdsongs of the Mesozoic/Binary System/Destroy All Monsters guitarist/pianist/ bassist/drummer (please, we’re exhausted, can we stop now?) over the phone while Mr. Miller sipped beer from the local growler. I was left in a good enough mood by the end that I didn’t much care that Roger was unable to aid me in my decade-plus quest to divine Clint Conley’s lyrics to “Dirt.”

How’re the ears?
Oh, you know, they’re ringing more than they were. I can still hear fine, and all that shit. I can feel the wear, but the positive side is that {Mission of Burma] really don’t do very much. All of the stuff I do, even the Alloy Orchestra, probably wears me out a little bit, but compared to Burma, it’s absolutely nothing. But, I mean, the good thing about the band is we do three shows and then we don’t do anything for four months. We rehearse three or four times, and then we play. So, I guess what I’m getting at here is that I know it’s affecting my ears but the payback is worth it. That’s what it boils down to. When we quit, we were playing all the time. Every single day, almost, and nobody gave a shit.

I’m looking at this Sproton Layer CD [Miller’s first band, the posthumous With Magnetic Fields Disrupted released on New Alliance].
I was just discussing that. I just sent a copy of that to a friend of mine that I met in Minneapolis with Alloy Orchestra last year, and he used to smoke weed with me and my brothers in high school. I wrote the songs while I was 17 and 18. And my brothers are two years younger than me.

Were you guys playing out?
We played about 15 shows in a year and a half. Most of them were parties, and we actually played a few shows. We did a show with Carnal Kitchen which was the saxophone player that played on LA Blues. And then we played a couple of shows at the Big Steel Ballroom which [is where] I saw the MC5. But, we never really garnered a lot of attention. We didn’t have that kind of super raw energy, like the MC5 or the Stooges. We were a little bit more English, more Syd Barrett-oriented. More intellectual or something. It wasn’t easily apparent that we belonged anywhere.

But this was in a place where underground music was fairly big. Did you guys have any sense that there was there any place for you guys to latch on to?
I didn’t know shit. My brothers were 15 and 16, and I was 17 and 18. I thought I could make a record then be set for life; that’s what I thought. (laughs) I didn’t really know very much about it. We had a frat band too, that just did all covers. We had hip shit those days. Airplane, Hendrix, Blue Cheer...

Yeah. I have a friend who insists that people forget what a force AM radio was. Blue Cheer was getting played on AM radio.
Right, right. That was the equivalent of underground rock, and you could play that at frat parties. Or, you made certain you played “Rolling on a River” by Creedence, but then you could get away with some wacko shit.

What were you doing before Sproton Layer?
Well, when I was six I took piano lessons. My dad was a zoologist, but he was very musically oriented, so I happened to be good at the piano. I wasn’t great or anything, but it was obvious that I had some kind of a knack for it. By fifth grade, I was starting to lose interest, and then the British Invasion hit in sixth grade, and that was the end of my life, basically. The end of my old life and the beginning of my real life.

Come to Jesus.
Yeah, I saw the Beatles when I was little. It’s only people my age that can say that. Anybody who was interested in rock music watched The Ed Sullivan Show for the two songs that a rock band would play. There was nothing else anywhere available, whatsoever.

How old are you now?
I’m 50. I graduated from high school in 1970. Then between ninth and tenth grade had a band with my two brothers and some others. We did Yardbirds, Zappa, Elevators. Pretty cool shit, Hendrix and stuff.

At that point, did you have a sense that some of this was the rock establishment? And then this was the weird stuff? Was there this sense of division?
It wasn’t divided like that. There’s a lot of these moments, but I can remember when I was in Yellowstone Park with my family the very first time I heard “Somebody to Love.” I heard that guitar solo and the sky just opened. And that was Top 40. The most progressive shit was Top 40. The division later on, which happened towards the end of the ‘60’s and early ‘70’s was a bad thing. The main people never heard this other shit. And then pretty soon AOR turned into classic rock, and you had to go to college radio, and Top 40 just turned into absolute tripe. They’ll fuck with anything you can come up with, you know? The corporate reality will just drive it into the dirt because they can.

Why did Sproton Layer break up and when?
Sproton Layer started in March of ‘69, and ended in the fall of ‘70. I think we did a reunion a year later . It was all instrumental because we didn’t have a PA. It was quite silly.

What were you doing post-Sproton Layer, pre-Burma?
There’s two main threads of what I was interested in after the psychedelic rock. By 1970, rock was getting real conservative; by ‘73, I had lost touch with rock, and I was already a free-form improviser, and started getting into free jazz —Art Ensemble, Cecil Taylor. I went to college in the middle of Michigan, then I went to California Institute of the Arts. Very briefly. So, my two main post-rock threads were free jazz, free improv, written music, and 20th century composition.

What sort of 20th century stuff?
Bartok, Stockhausen, Oliver Messian, and there’s Edgar Varèse, Xenakis...

How did you end up in Boston?
I studied composition stupidly at the University of Michigan [which signalled] the end of my school career. By then, punk rock started to materialize. [My brothers] Larry and Ben were in the band Destroy All Monsters with Ron Asheton [from the Stooges]. I did everything I could with that band. If they needed a drummer, I played drums. If they needed a bass player... When they filled all of those slots, I didn’t play. This was fucking punk rock. It was the rebirth of life.

I’m having a hard time imagining your clean-cut brothers on the back of this CD with Ron Asheton.
Oh, they aren’t. That’s just ‘cuz they were 15. I think my brother Larry was described in one review as a cross between Ted Nugent and an electrician. (laughs) We all looked pretty crazy.

In retrospect, how did Destroy All Monsters strike you?
I was only peripherally involved with the real early stuff. This was ‘77. It was Cary Loren’s band at that point. He just did these simple songs with Niagara, and then me and Larry and Ben would fill in. It was just so outlandish. Niagara could not sing for shit, but she had the presence, and Cary had this kind of vision without any ability in the traditional sense. It was just so inspiring to see things that were barely songs, but people felt this energy. It was completely contrary to rock fusion where you show off chops. It was the essence of punk rock.

Were people coming out to see it?
It was pretty small at first, but people started to show up. They’d open up for the Ramones. Sonics Rendezvous Band. It was the happening thing in town, so I was just so happy to be involved with it. I had my own band that I tried to get together, and nothing worked out. I actually developed tinnitus in Ann Arbor, so I quit playing rock music entirely. I played with a saxophone and drum duo. Free improv. I was a pianist. It’d been almost like an avant-garde fusion band. Then it went into free improv. And then it turned into a rock band. That’s when I developed my first form of tinnitus. After that, I was just so freaked out that I went into the piano and saxophone free improv. And then I just gave up entirely, just said, “Well, I’m gonna move to Boston and become a piano technician.”

Why Boston?
My brothers had been out there. And there was a piano technician school there. And I thought maybe I should move to New York and become a session musician. I could play all of these different instruments, so it could have worked. But, New York was just a little bit too big, and I thought Boston’s a bigger city than Ann Arbor, and it’s halfway between Ann Arbor and New York. So it seemed logical.

And then you go out and get sidetracked from all that.
(laughs) “Fuck this!” What I was planning to do was interesting. It predates a lot of my looping in Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and Maximum Electric Piano. I had a Fender Rhodes, and I had a tape loops. I was going to loop my ostinatos and improvise over it. So, in a way, it was like a looping system, except you had to pre-make the loops.

Did you ever perform that?
No, it was just an idea. Then I saw this ad in the paper for The Moving Parts. It said, “Punk rock band, but you must be able to read music.” So I auditioned for them, and, at the same time, I saw a change-your-life concert. It was The Girls, Live Fast and Human Sexual Response in February of ‘78.

And hadn’t you just moved there a month before?
Yeah, I moved there in January, between the two big blizzards.* The band that blew my mind was The Girls. When I saw that, I knew I came to the right town. They were just nuts. (laughs) They merged the punk rock aesthetic with art. There was just nothing like The Girls. I made The Moving Parts go see them the next time they played.

I’ve never heard The Moving Parts stuff.
The Moving Parts was Erik Lindgren’s band. He graduated from music school, and I had mercifully dropped out. (laughs) While I like Erik very much, he’s not fundamentally a rock musician. I became the guitarist, and he would write the chords out for me. With rock music, you don’t look at paper and figure shit out. Somebody shows you and you fuck around until you get it. It felt music school-ish. This isn’t to say that the band wasn’t good on and off, but Erik’s side would be like that, and my songs were [future Burma songs] “Max Ernst,” “Anti-Aircraft Warning,” and “Manic Incarnation.”

How long did you last with them?
I joined them in March ‘78, and then the band folded in December. Clint wasn’t writing at that point, but just by talking to him, there was an aesthetic that began to be established.

Can you unpack that a little?
Well, when I showed up to the first rehearsal, I opened the door and the Ramones were on, and I started dancing this funny dance when I walked in the door, and Clint came out of the kitchen doing the same dance. That was the first time I ever saw him. So it was basically a beaming from the beginning. And both of us just hitting the E chord. That leads directly into Mission of Burma. These one-chord rockers, like “Secrets.” “New Disco,” “All World Cowboy Romance.” I can’t put it into words any better than that. When Moving Parts broke up, it was just obvious that we were gonna form a new band. It was minimalism that Clint was way into, perhaps into that more than I was. And that helped pull me out of those vestiges of music school. When you look at a song like “Manic Incarnation,” it’s a pretty good song, but there’s just too many chords.

The formation of Burma’s been pretty well covered, but it’s been written in a bunch of places that you tried out Peter three times.

That’s what I keep reading.
(laughs) Yes, it is true.

Why do you feel it took three times to figure it out?
I have no idea. I just remember we tried out different drummers. I can’t remember if Clint first liked Pete, and I didn’t, and then I liked Pete and Clint didn’t, and then we both did. You know, I can’t explain it. He’s the only guy we played with more than once.

Missionofburma.com lists every Burma gig. It looked like you guys were playing a really stupendous amount in Boston. Like, several times a week.
At The Rat or Cantone’s we would play a Thursday and a Friday, or a Saturday and a Sunday. You would always play twice, two nights in a row. I think we played too much in Boston, and that was the problem. We were always opening up for the British rock bands like The Fall so people always saw us, but we really weren’t very popular right off the bat. We were “critics’ choice,” and “musicians’ choice,” and then there were some just die-hard, maniacally insane fans, but the rest of the world just couldn’t really comprehend it.

But Burma was doing this when there were far fewer bands. Did you have any sense of sort of extended “scene” is not the word, but...
Right. We really liked Pylon, Gang of Four, The Fall. When we heard Minor Threat or the Minutemen it was, like, “Yeah!” We liked Black Flag. Technically, there was very little similarity between the two bands, but we played with them in New York.

How did that go over?
Pretty good. Though later on we played with some hardcore bands in LA, and they did not like us at all. Both Clint and Peter liked the hardcore stuff. And honestly, I thought most of it was shit. It was very closed-minded, but I liked some bands. You couldn’t help but like Black Flag and Minor Threat. I was slower than Clint and Peter on that.

Compositionally, was there any way you approached writing for Burma that may have been different?
I don’t know how I approach things! It was a matter of stuff coming out. Before Mission of Burma formed, I remember I had just discovered the chords for “Einstein’s Day.” I knew that Clint would go bonkers when he heard the chords. I waited ‘til he was in the room, and Clint’s head just goes, “What was that riff?” I knew that would get him. Our writing styles differ. Mine was more convoluted and his had more of a pop leaning.

The stuff with the tinnitus has been pretty well documented and everyone knows how loud Burma was. Was this an issue all along?
I knew I had tinnitus when I joined the band. And in the back of my mind, I knew that someday I would have to stop playing because of it. But ever since I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, this was what I’d wanted to do — make an impact playing rock music. When Moving Parts broke up, it was when Clint was still drinking plenty, and we’d just play guitars for three hours the basement. We wouldn’t talk; we’d just make this ungodly drone-ish racket which “All World Cowboy Romance” came out of. And...shit, what was the question?

I don’t remember.
Oh, yeah. It was the first time I’d ever really woodsheded with a band. All of my other bands you’d come in with some material and say, “I’m going to do this.” This was just me and Clint saying, “What are we gonna do?” We didn’t really know. The first wave of punk rock had hit, we knew we wanted to clean shit away, and so we just made this racket. And while we were doing that, I don’t know if I really knew-that this was what I was supposed to be doing. It didn’t mean that we were going to be big. It just meant that I was going to fulfill something that I had to do which was: discover something new in rock music. “New” in quotation marks. Try some “new” territory. We started with my Moving Parts songs, basically. I thought even at that phase of the game, “OK, there’s gonna be a lot more guitar solos, and I’m gonna really lead this.” And then Clint pulls out “Peking Spring” [which was the] first song he ever wrote. Then, a lot of the guitar solos got whittled down, it was obvious that something was going on. From our very first show, which was April Fools’ Day ‘79, it was a show of brand new bands.

Here was the reformation. So, in those days, the people that were into the scene were deep into it. This was a theatre, and there were 150 or 200 people.** It was clear the minute we walked on, we just thought we were gonna kick ass. So, we got a buzz immediately.

What was in that first set?
We ended with “Cowboy.” “Max Ernst” Mostly my tunes. I think “Peking” might have been the only song Clint had written at that point. “OK/No Way” was pretty early. I don’t think we had “Academy” yet, but we were still doing stuff like “Smoldering Fuselage.”

Going way forward—you come to a point where you realize “My ears are incredibly fucked up, and I’ve gotta end this.”
It wasn’t a sense of relief. The way it got there was when we recorded Vs. Oh, boy, the headphones. You can hear me at the end of “New Nails.” My headphones were so loud I couldn’t tell if the fuzztone was on. The engineer for that session was not very good, and it was after that that I noticed that ringing really was much worse. Before that, I just kind of ignored it. I was always around loud shows, but then after we did Vs. it got worse. And then all that summer [of 1982] it got worse regularly. I could feel it going down month by month. Different tones appearing. I tried to ignore it, but by the end of the summer I was thinking this can’t continue. When I brought it up to the other guys later in the fall, both Martin and Clint didn’t seem to be that bothered by it. It bothered Pete, and I don’t blame him. I mean, everybody should’ve just kicked the shit out of me. But, people didn’t really care that much about us. Sometimes they did, but we weren’t going to get signed by any majors. We couldn’t make all that much money. The third Wire album, 154? That’s because they played 154 gigs on their third album. Our first album would’ve been called 300. So our third album would’ve been 900. You know, six times as much. That’s partly why my ears are ringing to oblivion.

How did you transition out of writing Burma stuff to...
Birdsongs*** was just there. In the fall of 1982, we’d already recorded Vs., and I didn’t think we were going to continue, so I just quit writing for Burma, and started writing more for Birdsongs. I was relieved when the band was done. I like to leave things and start new things. I didn’t give a shit about Burma for a couple of years. And Birdsongs actually did a few interesting things. I won’t stand behind all of it, but it’s the very fact that we would go out to the clubs and do whatever it is that we did.

I went to college in the late ‘80’s, so Burma’s sound was pretty much everywhere. It was very graspable. But Birdsongs was something else entirely, clearly.
Yeah. But, we opened up for Siouxsie and the Banshees at the Orpheum, and people really, really dug us. It was like, “Goddamn!”

How do you view Burma with all of the other stuff you’ve done? I mean, Birdsongs, Maximum Electric Piano, No Man, Alloy Orchestra, the general sort of tape loop kind of shows I’ve seen you do here and there? I’m probably forgetting, like, ten projects.
Yeah, well, the Binary System is the band that I’ve actually done longer than any other band. I think the thing about Burma is that it was the most fulfilled of all the projects I’ve done. Actually, some of the stuff out of the Binary System is completely fulfilled. But on Vs., Burma fulfilled the vision in completeness. Everything was there. Whereas Birdsongs, we had a really good start, and then it never really got to where I wanted it to go. Maximum Electric Piano was really interesting, and some of the recordings are good, but it was just a solo project. Despite the fact that I kind of created a whole ensemble unto itself. But there were unfulfilling qualities to them whereas The Binary System is different. We just played a festival in Atlanta over the summer. There were 500 people, and they just went nuts. They went completely nuts for The Binary System. We’re extremely unorthodox.

You said you didn’t really pay much attention to Burma for a couple of years thereafter.
Yeah, it took a while for me to care. Though to be honest, I knew when we folded we were going to get bigger. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite like this, but I knew.

Why?
I just knew it. We were driving back from our last show [with Public Image in New York], a show I did not want to play. It sucked. It was a disaster, and I was pretty bummed. I didn’t want our last show to be this, just because we were playing with PiL in New York. They weren’t any good at that point. We were driving back, and I was talking to Dredd Foole, and I said to him, “Down the road, we’re going to be called the Velvet Underground of the ‘80’s.” And he looked at me, like, “You fucking asshole!” And I went, “Dredd, don’t look at me like that. I didn’t say, ‘I think we are the Velvet Underground of the ‘80’s.’ I said, ‘People will call us that.’” He couldn’t quite fathom that. You can talk to him and find out. but a few years later, I saw in print, “Mission of Burma was the Velvet Underground of the ‘80’s.” I knew we were going to get bigger over time because it was too perfect. We were ahead of our time, we weren’t appreciated in general, we were critics’ choice, we died in a really funny fashion. Perfect way to die. It suited me to a T. Just as we’re about to be big, we vanish, and that’s just great!

Of all your projects over the years, which ones are you least proud of?
No Man [which had records on SST in the ‘80’s]. The guitar-guitar and rhythm machine thing. They’re really flawed. I was trying to play rock music without volume. That’s why I used the rhythm machine. It was all utterly absurd things, and I’m trying to pretend that these are a drum kit, you know? I mean, it was just ridiculous. But some of the songs are good, like “Wounded World.” [Which has since resurfaced on Burma set lists this past year.] And some of the Birdsongs stuff I’ve liked quite a bit, but then some of it just never quite broke this barrier. It got off to a good start, and then I just couldn’t push it in the direction I wanted it to go. That’s why I started doing Maximum Electric Piano.

I went to school outside of Cleveland, and I saw you open for Hüsker Dü on one of their late tours.
Yeah, that’s Maximum Electric Piano. As I recall, that night was scary. We played four shows with them. I remember feeling nervous there and in Chicago. It felt really scary. People didn’t want to see me. They didn’t want to see this crazy guy with a piano opening up for Hüsker Dü. Not live. I went into Wax Trax [in Chicago] the next day to see if any of my records were there. I said, “Yeah, I opened up for Hüsker Dü last night.” And they said, “You were that guy?” I thought, “Oh, I shouldn’t have opened my mouth!”

Were you thinking, “those guys totally ripped off my old band, did you know that?”
I just shut up and walked out the door.