A century ago, the most successful gamblers who played the world’s stock markets were beginning to respond to a gut instinct that it was all going to go horribly wrong. The Roaring Twenties had convinced many leading lights of the economy that the financial boom would continue. They created more products, increased prices, kept staff wages low to improve profits, then were amazed when no one bought their stuff because they didn’t have enough money. So as usual it all collapsed spectacularly, and the world became poor and needed a war to fix it.
History books don’t explore many of the individual stories beneath the Great Depression of the early 20th century. Criminal records do. Anyone who waters down the connection between crime and poverty is trying to sell you something. In the US in the 1930s, the problem wasn’t poverty, they said, it was crime. And the solution was Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. It was described by one diarist as “the great garbage can of San Francisco Bay, into which every federal prison dumped its most rotten apples”.
You weren’t expected to come back from The Rock, as it was nicknamed, an ugly, cruel pile of granite and iron on Alcatraz Island, from which it was impossible to escape – the 36 recorded attempts resulted in recapture, drowning or being shot by guards. When Frankie Miller first cast his eye over Alcatraz in 1975, its three-decade reign of terror had officially been over for 12 years, but the scene had a massive impact on the homesick artist.
“Frankie often said that if he hadn’t got into music, he’d have ended up in prison,” says Miller’s biographer, Davy Arthur. “He grew up in Brigton [the universal pronunciation of the east end Glasgow area of Bridgeton] and he was surrounded by poverty and crime. He once said they demolished the slums and replaced them with skyscrapers, but then the skyscrapers became slums too. By that time they were too busy rebuilding Edinburgh for the tourists.”
Convicted murderer Jimmy Boyle – who later became a writer and artist – is a relative of Miller’s and served time in Glasgow’s Barlinnie prison, another notorious place with its own sense of dark foreboding.
“Frankie knew of the Bar- and some of the people in there,” says Arthur. “He probably visited the place. So when he saw Alcatraz, which he did every day as he crossed the bay when he lived there, it merged with his sense of homesickness.”
Miller was inspired to write The Rock, a song which gave his 1975 album its title. It has all the hallmarks of a classic Miller track – his ‘I can’t believe it’s not black’ voice, his thoughtful lyrics and his melancholy trying to survive alongside his determination. But The Rock is more than that. Listen closely and it’s a gospel-style prayer for everyone who couldn’t find a place in the form of society served up for them.
Arthur suspects it was written quite quickly, perhaps even on the commute across the beautiful bay that frames the ugly island.
“I have a recording from Radio 1 in 1967,” says Arthur, mentioning the basement in his home in Germany that’s become a massive Miller archive. “Before he plays The Rock he says: ‘This is a song about prisoners. This is a song about prisons. It has everything to do with everything.’ Imagine that on Radio 1 in the sixties!”
The album The Rock featured former Wings guitarist Henry McCullough, bassist Chrissy Stewart, drummer Stu Perry and keyboard player Mick Weaver, with contributions from vocalist Jimmy Dewar (Robin Trower, Stone The Crows), the Memphis Horns and the Edwin Hawkins Singers. It’s the only record credited to the Frankie Miller Band – a line-up that didn’t last long, but made some impact while it was around. And not just on stage.
“Henry was taking tequila and mescaline for breakfast in the seventies,” Arthur says of McCullough, who died in 2016. “So he didn’t remember much. He did remember the time he and Frankie got arrested in San Francisco.
To quote McCullough from Arthur’s new book: “I was driving, and I remember coming to this T-junction and turning without thinking, so that I was driving on the wrong side of the road – and the first car we met was the sheriff’s car. The fact I was the driver meant they told Frankie: ‘Right, fuck off!’ So he staggered off into the night.
“They handcuffed me and put me in the back of the car. I had a chunk of black dope on me but I managed to manoeuvre it onto the seat and eat it – it was a fairly decent chunk. They threw me into this cell along with a crowd of Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and a couple of black pimp-types, with me wearing a green velvet jacket and leopardskin shoes.”
McCullough imagined Miller was on the case. But as the drink and dope wore off, and the situation became more real, he didn’t know that Miller had actually forgotten what had happened.
“It went to a third day, and the rest of the band asked Frankie if he’d seen me around. He tried to retrace our steps for a few minutes before he went: ‘Jesus, Henry’s in jail!’” The best part of the story for Arthur is that McCullough wasn’t angry, he was more surprised and indignant that his friend forgot about him.
At this point a fourth jail comes into the story. Some Hells Angels inmates at San Quentin State Prison heard about The Rock, and invited Miller to perform at their place. Concerts for prisoners were not a new thing, of course; but given Miller’s investment in his own narrative it could be a very powerful, and therefore dangerous, experience. Arthur doesn’t think it took him long to make the decision.
During research for 2025’s Long Way Home: The Frankie Miller Story, Arthur discovered that music writer Todd Tolces had gone to San Quentin with the band and photographer David Staugas. In a quirk of fate, both journalists had kept their work associated with the visit, and both responded to Arthur’s opening queries in less than an hour, offering him more than he’d hoped for. It contributed to so strong a narrative that Arthur created a standalone photo book, Incarcerated Ecstasy: The Frankie Miller Band At San Quentin – the title taken from Tolces’s article on the event.
“San Quentin had the biggest death row in America, with a gas chamber and a lethal injection chamber,” the writer says, outlining the tensions within the premises as generated by three rival inmate gangs: the Black Guerillas, the Aryan Brotherhood and the Mexican Mafia. They had strict rules about who could interact, when and why, and if the rules were broken, violence could ensue. Just a few years previously, three guards and two inmates had been killed as Black Guerillas co-founder George Jackson attempted to escape and was shot dead in the process.
“There hadn’t been a concert in San Quentin for a while, because of bad behaviour,” Arthur says. “A lot of people didn’t want it to go ahead.”
Into this tense environment Miller, McCullough and co. endured a grilling entry procedure for the prison performance in August ’75, accompanied by visiting Angels who’d helped arrange it, and a trio of ‘girlfriends’ who Arthur believes were professional strippers. “You start looking closely and you think, ‘My god, I wonder what those girls were thinking. I wonder what that prisoner is thinking. I wonder what Frankie’s thinking!’”
Some shots show real concern on Miller’s face as the security measures are taken. As an illustration of the era, Arthur points out the details on the entrance sign: “It is a felony to bring upon these grounds any firearms, intoxicating liquors, beer, wine, narcotics or benzedrine!”
The platform/stage in the prison yard had exclusion ropes – nothing that would hinder a stage rush, but that would be dealt with by the trained marksmen on the rail along the yard walls.
“Some of those armed guards had previously been in scrapes with prisoners,” Arthur says. “They’d been put up there for their own safety – they were in danger of being stabbed if they were on the ground. The prisoners in the yard, who’d been allowed to attend [the concert] for good behaviour, were the ones who’d be doing the stabbing, the ‘bad’ ones were still locked up.”
He makes note that the ‘girlfriends’ appear to be having a great time all the time.
“They were probably quite hardened to certain experiences, but their lives were at risk,” he says. “Maybe they thought they were under the Hells Angels’ protection. But the Angels’ lives were at risk, too. Who knows what was being fixed up? Inter-gang warfare could have kicked off. If you look closely, there are certain groups sitting a few yards away from the stage, and they’re observing. They’re not in the throng, where the danger probably lay. What did they know? How clever were they taking a step back?
“And of course Frankie and Henry and the guys all had to sign a form to agree that if they were attacked, kidnapped or killed, the prison was not responsible.”
While the tension remains palpable, the Frankie Miller Band clearly deliver a triumphant show, and if anything negative went down, nothing has been reported. It leads to Arthur’s selection of his favourite photo (above): “Frankie’s looking so proud, so happy. And how many pictures have you see in your life of Frankie Fucking Miller smiling?!”
The photo book puts the San Quentin adventure in context, with shots from the recording studio and on stage, at a time when Miller was performing on stages trodden in the same month by John Lee Hooker, Etta James and others of such calibre. With each picture offering thousands of words, it’s perhaps less distressing that Arthur wasn’t able to connect with those who remain alive from that day in San Quentin, including the insider who’d arranged it – whose jail term ended four months ago.
“I’ve been told the chances of any of the authorities involved are nil,” he reports. “It’s a period not many people want to talk about. “Frankie said at the time that it was society’s fault, not the fault of the prisoners. A lot of the prisoners from San Quentin who are now being rehabilitated – thanks to the help of musicians like Johnny Cash and Frankie – they’re writing their own stories. They’re being honest about how they got there. And the common thread is poverty, even in the twenty-first century. You can connect it all to Frankie’s upbringing.”
Arthur continues his quest to connect all the dots of Miller’s career, and hopes to offer more insight into particular events in future. One of the problems is that, even when Miller could speak, he didn’t often say much. The writer recalls that, when interviewed regarding his part in 1979 gangster-themed TV movie Just A Boys’ Game, Miller shouted: “Point the camera, ask the fucking questions!”
“He wouldn’t have thought any of it was important,” Arthur says, referring to Miller’s commitment to his music rather than celebrity or finance. He even suspects that Miller might have performed prison shows that remain unknown, perhaps at Glasgow’s Bar–L, “with one or two others, or he might have just jumped in with an acoustic guitar”.
Alas, Frankie Miller’s San Quentin show wasn’t recorded, and Miller will never sing again. Many things in social history won’t happen again. The fact that Trump has discussed reopening Alcatraz shows that some things could happen again, and some people seem to want them to. Think about that when you listen again to The Rock – it might be about you this time.
Incarcerated Ecstasy: The Frankie Miller Band At San Quentin by Davy Arthur is out now, published by New Haven. Buy from Amazon.
