1976 No. 1 Classic Rock Hit Was Written to 'Kick Pink Floyd in the Butt'
What inspires a songwriter? It seems like most of the time, an emotion like love is the driving force behind a song...but in the case of one classic '70s hit, it was the desire to blow a rival rock band off the stage.
Released as the second single from Steve Miller Band's ninth studio album, Fly Like an Eagle, "Rock'n Me" peaked at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on Nov. 6, 1976, and went on to become a classic rock staple. But initially, Steve Miller had just one motive in mind when he sat down to pen the tune.
As Miller explained to Uncle Joe Benson on the Ultimate Classic Rock Nights radio show, it all started when he was asked to open for Pink Floyd at the 1975 Knebworth festival near London, England.
"I kept trying to turn down the gig," Miller recalled. "I said, ‘I don't have a band. I don't wanna do this. This is a bad time for me. I'm in the midst of recording...' They just kept saying, ‘Well, how about some more? How about if we paid you this much? If that wouldn't be enough would this be enough?' Finally I decided, ‘Well, this would be enough! Yeah, I can take a little break to do this!'"
Miller contacted a few musicians he'd been working with - Les Dudek, Lonnie Turner and Doug Clifford - and asked them if they would be interested in an "all-expenses-paid vacation to London to go do a Knebworth festival with Pink Floyd."
"They came over to the house, where we rehearsed for one afternoon. We got on a plane, flew to London and played to 120,000 people," Miller continued. "I had thought about the gig and I knew the way it was going to work was, I was going to play just before Pink Floyd...The sun would be going down. It would be really cold. There wouldn't be any lights on the stage. It would be a lousy time...I went, ‘You know, I'm gonna kick those guys in the butt.' So, what I did was, I wrote ‘Rock'n Me' as a song to play at a festival, to just get it going."
'Rock'n Me' has been streamed hundreds of millions of times
Just as Miller hoped it would, "Rock'n Me" "ripped the joint up."
"They just loved us," Miller said, adding that the audience's reaction made him think, "‘Maybe we oughta record this one? This might be a good one to put on the record.'"
Of course, recording the tune turned out to be a wise move. In a 1976 review of the song, Billboard called it a "catchy and highly humorous midtempo rocker," comparing the melody to something by the Beach Boys or The Eagles.
All these years later, the song is just as popular as ever: At the time of this writing, "Rock'n Me" has been streamed over 200 million times on Spotify alone.
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This story was originally published May 19, 2026 at 6:56 PM.