Steve Miller (author)

Steve Miller
Born (1957-09-24) September 24, 1957
Buffalo, New York
Residence Lansing, Michigan
Occupation Author, journalist, musician
Notable work "A Slaying in the Suburbs: The Tara Grant Murder"

"Girl, Wanted; The Chase for Sarah Pender"

"Nobody’s Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer"

"Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City"
Style True Crime, Music

Steven Robert Miller (born September 24, 1957 in Buffalo, New York) is a Lansing, Michigan-based musician, journalist and author. His 2013 "Detroit Rock City" reached #5 on Amazon.com in the rock and roll bestsellers category.

Miller has two books in production for 2015 and 2016. One is a detailed look at The Insane Clown Posse and its dedicated fan base: "Juggalo: Insane Clown Posse, Their Fans, and the World They Made" (2016, Da Capo Press). The second is a true crime title, "Murder in Grosse Pointe Park: Privilege, Adultry, and the Killing of Jane Bashara" (fall 2015, Penguin/Berkley).

Miller has worked as a metro reporter for the Dallas Morning News and as a national reporter for the Washington Times, as well as writing for People Magazine and U.S. News & World Report. He covered the auto industry for Brandweek Magazine and is currently an investigative reporter with Texas Watchdog.org.

He has written and edited books on crime and music, including "Girl, Wanted; The Chase for Sarah Pender," "Nobody’s Women: The Crimes and Victims of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Serial Killer," "Commando: The Johnny Ramone Autobiography" and "Touch and Go: The Complete Hardcore Punk Zine '79–'83".

"Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City," a book stocked with verbatim quotes from Detroit rock legends, hit stands in June 2013 . The book received positive reviews from the Wall Street Journal, among other national and international publications.

Early life

Born in Buffalo, New York, the only child to Boyd and Julie Miller, a newspaper man and a high school teacher. Miller lived the itinerant life as a child until the family settled in Lansing, Michigan, where his father became a journalism professor at Michigan State University.

Music

Miller was vocalist in the punk rock band The Fix, which he co-founded in Lansing, Michigan. The band, the first signed to Touch and Go Records, was formed by Miller and bassist Mike Achtenberg. Miller was supposed to be the guitarist in the band when he and Achtenberg began assembling personnel in late 1979. But when guitarist Craig Calvert answered their ad posted in a laundromat, he was so good that any semblance of skill Miller had on guitar was useless; he agreed to sing rather than hang it up.[1]

The Fix released two 7-inches, a single “Vengeance” b/w “In This Town” (March 1981) and the four-song "Jan’s Rooms" EP (January 1982), both on Touch and Go Records. The Fix also had a song, "No Idols," on the "Process of Elimination" EP. The first Fix single is among the most collectible hardcore records in the world, at one point fetching $4,250 on eBay.[2]

The band was among the first of the hardcore units to tour the U.S., obtaining a contact list from Chuck Dukowski of Black Flag and Ken Lester, manager of D.O.A. On its first tour, in summer of 1981, the Fix played through Texas and the Southwest on up through San Francisco to Seattle and Vancouver before heading home. The Fix shared bills with Dead Kennedys, Flipper (band), D.O.A. and T.S.O.L. on that tour. The second tour later that year took the band again to San Francisco, with stops in New Orleans, where the Sluts opened, on to Phoenix for a show with Toxic Reasons. On New Year’s Eve, 1981, the Fix played a warehouse with Flipper, Dead Kennedys, Effigies, and Anti-Pasti. It would be the last Fix show.

In early 1982, Miller and Achtenberg formed Blight, a Flipper-esque post-hardcore band at a point that hardcore was exploding. They recruited Tesco Vee of The Meatmen as vocalist and performed a dozen shows in the Detroit area. Blight also recorded an EP in the basement studio of Corey Rusk, which was released in 1984. Miller in 1983 played guitar briefly in Strange Fruit, which also featured Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth on drums.

Journalism

Miller began writing as a reviewer for Your Flesh magazine in 1991. The next year, while working as a shipping clerk at Viking Cases in St. Petersburg, Fla., Miller submitted a freelance story to the St. Petersburg Times, which not only published it but paid him the equivalent of one week’s pay at Viking. Miller soon began writing for other area publications, including Players, an entertainment weekly. Miller got his first newspaper job in McKinney, Texas, at the McKinney Courier-Gazette on the basis of a few clips from alternative newsweeklies, including the Dallas Observer and the Houston Press.[3]

After moving to the Dallas Morning News, Miller covered cops and courts and also did some work for the state desk, including coverage of the Oklahoma City tornadoes in 1998. He moved to the Washington Times in 2000 as a national reporter. For the next four years, Miller covered some of the biggest stories in the U.S., including the six weeks of Recount 2000 in Florida, Hillary Clinton’s senatorial campaign in New York, and the riots during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles in 2000. He was one of the first journalists from outside of New York at Ground Zero in the wake of 9/11, coming into the shuttered city on a train that had been reserved for Amtrak employees to get home to New York the night of September 11. Miller also delivered a series on the rise of wealth among African-Americans in the U.S. which the New York Times presented as its nomination for the Pulitzer in 2001. Miller in 2006 joined Brandweek Magazine, a business-to-business publication that was part of the Nielsen Business Media chain. He covered the auto industry, delivering stories on the branding and marketing of cars both in the U.S. and abroad.

In 2009, Miller joined Texas Watchdog, a fledgling investigative news agency based in Houston, Texas. The Society of American Business Editors and Writers selected Miller’s 2011 coverage of the Texas Windstorm Insurance Association, which resulted in a state takeover of the agency, as the winner of its award for digital investigation.

Bibliography

Music discography

The Fix
Blight
Strange Fruit

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Blog.
  2. ↑ Ebay listing.
  3. ↑ "From Rocker to Writer," www.lansingcitypulse.com/

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