INTERVIEW WITH JIM MILLER
by Bill Kurzenberger
On Saturday August 1st, acclaimed guitarist/singer/songwriter and Cleveland native Jim Miller sat down for an interview with OhioJams’ Bill Kurzenberger at Springfield’s Mother Stewart’s Brewing to discuss Miller’s long musical history; Oroboros; experiences with Gregg Allman, John Popper and Phish; JiMiller Band and their Lazy Daisy Music Festival, celebrating its twentieth year in its return to Nelson Ledges Quarry Park in Garrettsville this coming weekend.
Interview with Jim Miller on OhioJams’ Youtube
August 1st, 2026 at Mother Stewart’s Brewing, Springfield, Ohio ~ Dead of Summer
Jim Miller: This is a great place here and Kevin, the owner used to come see the old band Oroboros back in the nineties and eighties and all that, at a place called Ruby Tuesday’s. Nice guy, I’m glad he has it here (Mother Stewart’s Brewing).
Bill Kurzenberger: Nice, I didn’t realize he went back as far as the Ruby Tuesday days.
Miller: Yeah, you did too. (Laughter)
Kurzenberger: That’s right. The first stage I ever played on in Columbus, ’94.
Miller: Oh, you did?
Kurzenberger: Yeah! So, welcome to Dead of Summer, here at Mother Stewart’s. I understand, is this your first show in Springfield in maybe twenty years?
Miller: Oh, my god, since the nineties, at least. You know, we haven’t been – Jim Miller Band hasn’t been here.
Kurzenberger: First Jim Miller Band performance ever in Springfield. What a fantastic occasion for us to celebrate Jerry’s birthday.
Miller: I would agree.
Kurzenberger: You know, we’ve known each other since the 90s and I’ve just had so much respect, for everything you do from a songwriting guitarist, singer-songwriter perspective over the years, and as a person as well.
Miller: Well, I – the same right back at you. So, we’re going to get this guy to play here if he’s willing.
Kurzenberger: Oh, thank you.
Miller: That’s always what you like to do, though. You know what we should do is get Neff off the – well, that’s later on, that’s an encore.
Kurzenberger: I’m flexible, whatever you’d…
Miller: We’ll see. We’ll find something. I have to ask him first, though. I can’t… you know the protocol.
Kurzenberger: Sure, especially since he only has the one keyboard, and not quite enough room.
Miller: That is a great keyboard.
Kurzenberger: I love the Nords.
Miller: The guys that I did the album with that I just finished here with my wife, he has a Nord too, and it’s just a fantastic amazing sound.
Kurzenberger: I find it to be the best of both worlds, from the piano and electric piano and Hammond organ sounds. Really solid piano and Hammond organ.
Miller: You still carry the Hammond around?
Kurzenberger: No. (Laughter) It’s resting in my living room, and…
Miller: No Hammond organ allowed! (Laughs)
Kurzenberger: And I got a portable XK-2 that needs a little work.
Kurzenberger: I really appreciate you taking the time for this interview with the OhioJams Network and Music Magazine. I’d like to just quickly… tell us about your first performances, growing up in Cleveland, when you first started playing music.
Miller: (Laughs) Got a couple days?
Kurzenberger: (Laughs) The abridged version.
Miller: Well, I played – I was at the University of Notre Dame and I went to school there, I majored in and I didn’t quite make it out of there. But I did end up graduating from Cleveland State and I designed my college major in spirituality. I wanted to get a job at the spirituality shop. You know, there’s plenty around.
Anyway, so at Notre Dame we did this little gig. Actually, I have pictures of it, and I have a big wad of sweat on me. I look a little younger.
Miller: It was in 1974, January ’74. Yeah, so that was my – I consider that my first professional gig, because I got paid. And then…
Kurzenberger: And I’m sorry, what band would that have been?
Miller: Well, it was a bunch of guys from Notre Dame, one of them I am still in touch with. I call him “Old Bert,” his name is Bert Guiseman?. Burt, if you’re seeing this… yeah, he’s a great – we’re still in touch. Isn’t that great?
Kurzenberger: Huh, very nice.
Miller: We really got along extremely well. I call him “Old Bert,” I still call him “Old Bert.” Everything’s a cartoon to me, you know.
Kurzenberger: Especially with the, the lysergic at the time…
Miller: Well yeah, I don’t… I don’t partake… whoever wants it and whatever wants as long as you don’t hurt anybody.
Kurzenberger: But the Grateful Dead, you mentioned earlier that you started seeing the Grateful Dead in the 1970s as well, you were there at Red Rocks.
Miller: So, ’74 was my first big sojourn into that. They were at Chicago at the big auditorium and they played the entire “Weather Report Suite.” They did “Seastones,” they did all of – almost all of Wake of The Flood. It was a great, really good show. I thought it was a great show, what I remember anyway. (Laughs)
Kurzenberger: Is that when you first started incorporating their material into your own?
Miller: I was writing before that, I had – in high school with the Catholic boys’ school called Cathedral Latin. It’s half Irish guys and half Italian guys, and I’m not Italian, so that shows you that. Robert Hunter was Irish, too, we talked at great length about that. And I was in Ireland when he passed, but that was later on. I was lucky enough to open for him, twice. It was in one day, I bought him dinner, and so we had a chat.
Kurzenberger: That’s fantastic.
Miller: Oh I mean, listen – it was a holy moment, it really was.
Kurzenberger: Very nice.
Miller: He was totally into the same stuff as I was, like the Irish writers. James Joyce. Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist, blah blah blah. Yeah.
Kurzenberger: Those stories, they inspired your own songwriting as well?
Miller: Oh, yeah. Yeah but you know really, The Beatles inspired me. My mom was into the Beatles, and she said “come upstairs.” I was ten years old, I went up there and I see them on TV and I’m like “what?!? I want to do that?” And I just followed my heart. Hopefully now…
But my first gigs, my first real gigs was a band called Chester Hotel. And that was a whorehouse that was down around that – it was on Chester Street in Cleveland. And we got a gig at a place called the Flipside. Now, that’s where later on – this is ’75 – later on in 1980, Oroboros started playing there, and it was in Cleveland Heights.
Kurzenberger: 1980, that’s where Oroboros started.
Miller: Yeah, and – going back to ’75 – that band actually, we took over The James Gang’s spot in Kent, we played JB’s up there.
Kurzenberger: Nice, Richard Shack…
Miller: And that’s when they went out west and they had a hit. They had “Funk #49” and all that.
Kurzenberger: Absolutely.
Miller: And I met him, he’s a nice guy.
Kurzenberger: Joe (Walsh)? Yeah.
Miller: You know, I was just… I’ve just been in the right places at the right time. But, so then I traveled, we traveled out west in ’76. And that’s where we tried to start Oroboros again, and we just couldn’t do it. It was just too much, too much of this (distance, gesturing).
Kurzenberger: It took many years, to get it off the ground.
Miller: Yeah. Well, we didn’t really – what happened was, I played a lot of that stuff, learned a lot. I played on the streets, I did a lot of busking over that two summers because I would hitchhike with this young woman I was with and we’d go to these little places. Yeah, like one of them was a Snake River Tavern, it was in Idaho. It was beautiful, and you know, we would play for meals and tips and all that stuff. And I did it on the old downtown area of Boulder. At that time it was pretty much a cowboy town, hippie town, cowboy town. And then anyway, blah blah blah.
Come to 1980, and I moved out to – I have stories in between, but we don’t have time, and so – I moved out to Bellingham Washington, and I played in a hippie band there, and I was a studio for lots of people, whoever came in.
Kurzenberger: OK. So, who was the favorite that you played with around that time?
Miller: Well, at that time it was just normal humans. Normal humans? (Laughter.) Whatever. But you know what I mean, it was just normal musicians. And my sister was getting married, and the guys were starting a band. And I told you the story today about Mark Redditch?, and I told him – you know, I went to Red Rocks and I sat with Owsley, I had no idea.
Kurzenberger: The guy said his name was “Bear,” like okay, don’t know any “Bear.”
Miller: Yeah, I didn’t know anything. I called him “the Snarf” because he was after this woman that I knew. But anyway, Redditch ended up being our soundman in Oroboros. I mean you know, it’s synchronicity, I mean fate. There’s no accidents in life.
Kurzenberger: Small world.
Miller: Well anyway, the band started in ’80 and we started at the Flipside, and we moved to the Euclid Tavern. And then the rest is sort of history.
JiMiller Band at Tabfest 2004
But the Jim Miller band, that was in ’98. I broke up with the old band, started – ’cause I just wanted to do – well, the members of the band didn’t really want to want to do… this, when I could still…
Kurzenberger: “This” as far as your original, or the Dead…
Miller: Yeah, the Dead stuff, yeah. So we have places where we play the originals, and other songs.
Kurzenberger: Sure. Customize it depending on what the, the audience, the room…
Miller: We do lots and lots of – yeah, as you know, we do a lot of Dead stuff. But then, I want to talk about something that happened right at the beginning of that. I started doing this party, it’s called Lazy Daisy, and actually it was right across from a native American mound. I’m into that, or I’m into Native American stuff quite a bit.
Kurzenberger: Important part of Ohio’s history.
Miller: Oh, tell me about it. Yeah, right here there’s a mound, yeah in Enon.
Kurzenberger: And the Serpent Mound…
Miller: And I used to, well we used to stay here and I’d go out to the fields and get permission to surface hunt for the arrowheads and all that. But you can’t do it anymore, because they have the farming methods, the no-till, you can’t find anything.
So anyway, after when Jim Miller Band started, I played this party for like two years, and then the guy stopped having it. I thought, “well, why don’t I just take it to Nelson Ledges? And that’s when we started, it was in 19… was it 1999? No, it was about 2001.
Kurzenberger: OK, fantastic. Right around the times of the early Gratefulfests, and really, when Nelson Ledges started catching steam.
Miller: We were on the Furthur Festival – Oroboros was on the Furthur Festival, but that was earlier.
Kurzenberger: And the H.O.R.D.E. , and the H.O.R.D.E. Fest!
Miller: Yeah the H.O.R.D.E. tour, that was a big “wow.” That was really wild, I couldn’t believe that! Because they all showed up, and they used our equipment. And I called the manager of, uh, John Popper’s band.
Kurzenberger: Blues Traveler.
Miller: Blues Traveler yeah, and he said, “yeah, let’s do that. We’ll get the guys to come.”
Kurzenberger: So I’m sorry, this is the famous Shooters, when Oroboros was playing the night before or after the H.O.R.D.E. performance…
Miller: No, the night before.
Kurzenberger: The night before Blossom.
Miller: We were on a little bit of that leg of that journey, and we played on the main stage. But we – back it up to Wednesday, it was a Wednesday night, the H.O.R.D.E. started on Thursday. And they all showed up.
Kurzenberger: Gregg Allman, and all…
Miller: Yeah, all of them.
Kurzenberger: John Popper, and I’m pretty sure Sheryl Crow.
Miller: Sheryl Crow was there, yeah.
Kurzenberger: Were there, were other Allman Brothers members
Miller: The whole crew, except for Dickey Betts.
Kurzenberger: No kidding.
Miller: Dickey Betts was trying to stay clean.
Gregg Allman and Jim Miller 6/13/1994 Shooters in the Flats, Cleveland
Miller: But I know all about that.
Kurzenberger: Legendary. Your Oroboros gig at Shooters, a beautiful waterfront venue on the west side of the Flats, then all of a sudden you’re onstage with Gregg Allman, and John Popper, and Sheryl. What an amazing experience to have…
Miller: Like I said before…
Kurzenberger: Playing at musicians at that caliber, which you certainly are, playing onstage…
Miller: I was just at the right place at the right time, that’s all. I mean really, we were the first band in the Midwest to be doing any of the Dead. They call it “jam-band.”
Kurzenberger: It’s well-earned, I think. You were the torchbearers in Cleveland of the Grateful Dead scene at… contemporary at the same time as they were performing. I mean literally, like my first Grateful Dead show at Richfield, I’m sorry…
Miller: Oh yeah, we were in Colorado at the, the snow day. I went to the one that, the Bruce Hornsby showed up.
Kurzenberger: Well I remember… okay, yes.
Miller: Remember they had the snowstorm?
Kurzenberger: Yes! 1993, March 14th was my first ever Grateful Dead show, the blizzard.
Miller: That was your first show? It was snowed out…
Kurzenberger: The first night was snowed out. Afterwards everyone was trying to figure out what do we do after? Hey – Holiday Inn, there’s Oroboros playing, and we go to the Holiday Inn.
Miller: That was the year after.
Kurzenberger: That was the year after? I thought you guys played after the blizzard. (Laughter)
Amazing. You also got a chance to open for Phish, at Peabody’s Down Under. (Correction: Cleveland Agora Theatre)
Miller: Yeah, that was when they first came to down, and they’re really nice guys. And it turned out their sound guy – I was looking at Trey’s guitar, he had a hoistening dog on the headstock. I said that’s cool man, let me see that. I gave him my electric, ’cause I had my acoustic to play.
Kurzenberger: Sure, like I’ll hold yours you hold mine.
Miller: Just in case I had a string break.
Kurzenberger: The Languedoc, or maybe this was before he had his custom Languedoc guitar.
Miller: Well what happened was, Trey was playing – it’s called a Time Guitar, it was made in Burlington. And I was playing Trey’s guitar, and Languedoc walked in and did a double take, and he came up and he was like “I designed that guitar.” And I still have it, I still have the Time (guitar).
Kurzenberger: No kidding.
Miller: Well, there’s more stories to that one, too.
But you know, Lazy Daisy’s coming up too, next week. Is it the 7th and 8th? I don’t have my phone with me.
Kurzenberger: The 7th and 8th, that’s right, at Nelson Ledges. That’s correct, Friday and Saturday.
Miller: I hope you have a list. (laughs) I know my son’s playing, he’s playing right before us at 5:30 (Vibe & Direct), and he’s sitting in with us. Michael’s a monster, he plays with the Quasi Kings.
Kurzenberger: He plays with the Quasi Kings? I – today I learned. We really enjoyed the Quasi Kings at the Stargazer Music Fest.
Miller: Oh yeah, that’s Michael.
Kurzenberger: No kidding, well that’s fantastic.
Miller: Uh oh, it looks like we’re starting, but anyway – what’s the date? What’s the date?
Kurzenberger: Well, it is definitely the 7th and 8th next weekend, at Nelson Ledges Quarry Park.
Miller: Thank you. Somebody knows what he’s doing.
Kurzenberger: It’s been – you know, that’s a fantastic fest. Not only does it have the vibe of you and the Grateful Dead, but then it also has that very family-friendly kind of environment.
Miller: Well, we always give, like – do you have the lineup? Is the lineup up there? Click the little thingy up there. And Tony Kocheff is my promo guy.
Kurzenberger: Sure. Tony is wonderful, shout-out to Tony and everyone in your band, what a fantastic group.
The JiMiller Band
So we have on the bill on Friday, we have Cody Pounds, and then the Joe Marcinek Band. They’re great, great guitarist.
Miller: They’re good, they’re really good, yeah.
Kurzenberger: Then on Saturday you’ve got Dub L D, possibly a solo, doing some solo stuff.
Miller: Yeah. That’s a friend of ours, yeah.
Kurzenberger: Lea Marra and the River Boys.
Miller: I like them, I sat in with them before, two years ago.
Kurzenberger: And hey – how nice it is, when you’re hosting your own festival…
Miller: This guy, he was there last year, I missed your show.
Kurzenberger: Oh, well we had so much fun. But my favorite Lazy Daisy was – well at the time with Terrapin Moon, but you and Brian sat in for the whole set. We had a member who wasn’t there, and we got to kind of collaborate many years ago.
Miller: That was good, yeah.
Kurzenberger: There’s also Grav, they’re after…
Miller: Now, Grav is back. They were a great group that had sort of broke up, but now they’re back together.
Well, that means I gotta play.
Kurzenberger: That’s your cue. Thank you Jim, for this interview with the OhioJams Network and Music Magazine.
Miller: Give this guy all the kudos you possibly can.
Kurzenberger: Your new album will be reviewed, and I really look forward to hearing your new album with members of the Jim Miller Band and Beth.
Miller: It’s called Music I Didn’t Know I Knew.
Kurzenberger: Music I Didn’t Know I Knew. We cannot wait to hear it.
Miller: And the band is called Sojoura.
Kurzenberger: Sojoura.
Miller: And then Brian (Golenberg, drummer), and our keyboard player (Steve Scheff) is in that band too.
Kurzenberger: Wonderful.
Miller: It will be December 12th at the Winchester, that’s our home base.
Kurzenberger: That’s the album release?
Miller: Yeah.
Interview photos by Julie Kurzenberger, OhioJams Associate Editor
JiMiller Band 8/1/2026 Mother Stewart’s Dead of Summer by Julie
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