Scott Warren Miller (April 4, 1960 – April 15, 2013) was an American singer, songwriter and guitarist, best known for his work as leader of the 1980s band Game Theory and 1990s band The Loud Family, and as the author of a 2010 book of music criticism. He was described by The New York Times as "a hyperintellectual singer and songwriter who liked to tinker with pop the way a born mathematician tinkers with numbers", having "a shimmery-sweet pop sensibility, in the tradition of Brian Wilson and Alex Chilton."
A biography of Miller by Brett Milano was published in October 2015, and Miller's posthumously-completed final Game Theory album, Supercalifragile, was released in a limited first pressing in August 2017.
In 2014, Omnivore Recordings began releasing a series of reissues of Miller's entire Game Theory catalog, which had for decades been out of print. Omnivore concluded the series in 2020 with Across the Barrier of Sound: PostScript, an album of previously unreleased Game Theory material recorded in 1989 and 1990.
Early life
Scott Miller was born in Sacramento, California, in 1960. He was of Scottish and Irish ancestry, and his mother's family had lived in the Sacramento area since at least the 1850s California Gold Rush. His father, Vaughn Miller, was an Army veteran of World War II who had a long career working for the State of California.
Miller was an only child, whose musical interests began "sometime as a six or seven year old, listening to the Monkees and the Beatles". However, his earliest musical influences were wider-ranging, springing from his father's "immense record collection – lots of Broadway show tunes. But the things I was really interested in were these New York folk scene records ... the Womenfolk being really prototypical. And after that it was the Beatles all the way. They were gods walking the earth to me."
At age nine, while taking folk and classical guitar lessons from Tiny Moore, Miller was writing "little albums' worth" of derivative songs, and started his first band, innocently calling it "The Monkees". He later noted, "We were really little kids, and we didn't realize you had to have your own personality... I was Mike Nesmith, of course," naming the serious Monkee known as a songwriter. By 1971, Miller's lessons switched to rock guitar, and he "had pretty serious bands from seventh grade on."
While attending Rio Americano High School, he and his longtime friend and bandmate Jozef Becker formed bands called Lobster Quadrille, Mantis, and Resistance, as well as the first version of Alternate Learning. Miller began recording his music at age 15, when he got his first TEAC multitrack recording machine. He reminisced in 1993, "Writing songs like the Beatles and trying to obtain real equipment – that's been my goal in life since I can remember." Some of Miller's early recordings from 1975 to 1979 were released in the 1990s to his fan club as a cassette called Adolescent Embarrassment-Fest; several others appear as bonus tracks on the 2014 CD reissue of Blaze of Glory (1982).
Another passion of Miller's youth was art. Until college, he noted, "I was extremely serious about being a visual artist, and only so-serious about doing music. I was producing really bad music and really good art."
Musical career
Alternate Learning (1977–1982)
Miller's first band to release commercial recordings, Alternate Learning (also known as ALRN), released its self-titled 7-inch EP in 1979, and a full-length LP called Painted Windows in 1981, on Rational Records. Alternate Learning was formed in 1977 in Sacramento, moved in 1978 to Davis, California, and performed frequently at U.C. Davis and in the Bay Area until the group was disbanded by Miller in 1982.
Game Theory (1982–1990)
Game Theory was formed by Miller in 1982 in Davis, California, and moved its base to the Bay Area in 1985. From 1982 to 1990, Game Theory released five albums and two EPs, not including compilations.
The early Game Theory was described as a "pseudo-psychedelic pop quartet" for which Miller sang and wrote "almost all of the material." The group, a college-rock favorite associated with the Paisley Underground scene of L.A. and Davis, developed a strong cult following.