the pompitous of love

[A. Vine]

In case any of you are curious...

> Steve Miller Band
>
> I decided to include this section due to the large number of usenet
> postings I have read concerning "the pompitous of love."
>
> Steve first used this phrase in the song Enter Maurice from his 1972 album
> Recall the Beginning...A Journey From Eden. This is also the song marking
> Steve embracing the persona Maurice. The spelling of pompitous is correct
> according to the lyric sheet from the album, but you will never find it in
> a dictionary since the word is made-up anyway!!
>
> The producers of the recent Jon Cryer release, "The Pompatus of Love" took
> their spelling of the word from the sheet music for The Joker as printed in
> the songbook "Rock Hits Through the Years" published by Warner Chappell.
> Many die-hard SMB fans would argue for the spelling as POMPITOUS as this is
> the first and only spelling in print on a Steve Miller Band release.
>
> "The pompitous of love" originates from a line in The Medallions' 1954 R&B
> hit The Letter. Miller was a fan of 50's R&B, so he's very familiar with
> that tune.
>
> On first hearing that particular track, it would appear that the line is:
> Let me whisper sweet words of pismotality and discuss the pompitous of love
>
> Vernon Green, the author of The Letter, says, "You have to remember, I was
> a very lonely guy at the time. I was only fourteen years old, I had just
> run away from home, and I walked with crutches." The uneducated but
> imaginative youth was prone to fantasy, so he just made up the lyrics.
> 'Pismotality' described words of such secrecy that they could only be
> spoken to the one you loved.
>
> "And it's not pompitous," he emphasizes. "What I said was 'puppetuse',
> which is a term I coined to mean a secret paper doll fantasy figure."
>
> Steve either misheard this lyric, or drew upon this song to develop his own
> word. Either way, 'pompitous' has made its mark in pop music history.
> Interestingly, Steve appears to also have drawn upon the word 'pismotality'
> to create the word 'epismetology' which he also used in the song Enter
> Maurice.
>
> Of course, everyone knows Maurice and his speaking of "the pompitous of
> love" from Steve's 1973 hit The Joker. Unlike Recall the Beginning, this
> album did not have a lyric sheet, so one must refer to the previous album
> for spelling.
>
> I read an interview with Steve where he was asked what pompitous meant. He
> said, "It doesn't mean anything. It's jive talk."
>
> Steve uses this phrase once again in Conversation from his 1993 album Wide
> River. This song also features Steve's second use of the word epismetology
> in a SMB tune.
>
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>
> =A9 1997 Chris Harris All Rights Reserved