The Steve Miller Band has canceled its entire upcoming tour, which included an Oct. 30 date at the Mountain Winery in Saratoga.
And, as expected, fans are none too pleased about it — especially given the Bay Area music icon’s reasoning for the cancelation. It turns out that Miller is blaming the weather. Yes, the weather — across all of the various states in which his band would’ve performed in during the tour.
And rather than simply basing this decision on weather charts/predictions and such, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is listening to what his gut tells him — which, apparently, is to pull the plug on the entire tour. Here’s what Miller posted on his website and across various social media channels:
“Dear Steve Miller Band fans,You make music with your instinctsYou live your life by your instinctsAlways trust your instinctsThe Steve Miller Band has cancelled all of our upcoming tour dates.The combination of extreme heat, unpredictable flooding, tornadoes, hurricanes and massive forest fires make these risks for your audience, the band and the crew unacceptable. So ….You can blame it on the weather … The tour is cancelled.Don’t know where, don’t know when … We hope to see you all again.Wishing you all Peace, Love and Happiness,Please take care of each other.Steve, The Band and the Crew.”
Many fans, however, took to social media to question the validity of Miller’s instincts in this case.
“All these things have always existed. To blame it on the weather sounds a little suspect,” Ryan Miller posted on Facebook.
“All Steve Miller fans. Due to all of these new phenomena….rain, floods, fire, tornados and hot weather…we can no longer keep on rockin’. As soon as these things cease to exist, it’ll be safe for us to get back on stage and play the same old songs. Thank you,” Scott Michael posted on Facebook.
“Yeah, trust your emotions over any ability to think critically. Enjoy retirement,” David West posted on X.
“In other news a dog ate my homework. The weather has been constantly changing for millions of years,” Lord_D1972 posted on X.
“The band is cancelling their tour because it’s summer!” Jeffrey Cohen posted on X.
Many of the posts raised the possibility that other non-weather-related forces were at a play in the decision to cancel the tour.
“Code for ‘We’re too old to do this at this level and we’re tired.’ These guys were great in thee 70’s. The year, not their age,” Mike_E_V posted on X.
“Blaming global warm— Pardon me, ‘climate change’ for poor ticket sales,” JGmajor7 posted on X.
“Aka ‘we haven’t sold a lot of tickets on this tour like we expected so we are just going to blame it on the weather which sounds better to us,’” Klay Fennema posted on Facebook.