A three-minute song can be daunting when your attention span is 20 to 30 seconds. His notion of being straight was to drink, snort and smoke sequentially. Miller had written very little new work in 10 years and as I spent time with him it was easy to guess the reason. To understate the matter, there were challenges. This, at least, was my pitch to Roger Miller, and after five or six more such visits he agreed to become, as he put it, ''the Jerome Corn of the American musical.'' Rock music is about the beat, but country music is about the words, or more properly, lyrics that tell a story set to a compelling melody. I had always felt that country music and musical theater were closely related, even though no country artist had ever written a Broadway score. 1 hit on both the country and pop charts simultaneously). Always an eclectic and wide-ranging songwriter, Miller moved comfortably from the conventional love ballad with a twist (''The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me'') to the outlandish (''You Can't Roller Skate in a Buffalo Herd'') or tart (''The Days of Our Wives''), to the occasional masterpiece (''King of the Road'' is arguably the greatest country song ever written, but is inarguably one of the most successful, becoming a No. In an astounding creative burst over a two-year period in the mid-1960's, Miller had written and recorded a dozen chart-topping hits and won 11 Grammy awards. Sitting on a backstage couch with only a guitar, he sang maybe 15 of my requests, and since he wasn't exactly sober, I was happy to help here and there with the forgotten lyrics. Our eventual opening on Broadway was not as thrilling as the personal concert Miller performed for me that summer night. I went there to try to convince him to write our score, a long shot since not only had he never written a musical, he had never seen one (he later joked, ''Rocco made me an offer I couldn't understand''). My first real meeting with Miller occurred in his dressing room after a concert in Reno in 1982. I was a fan and my wife at the time, Heidi (who would co-produce and design the original ''Big River''), had an idea that my favorite songwriter was the perfect choice to write a score for a musical adaptation of my favorite novel. He was, in my view, the most original songwriter in America. When I met Roger Miller I was still young enough, and had accomplished little enough, to know the difference. If we are that intelligent, surely we must also be talented being clever couldn't be all that different from being creative. The occupational hazard of the facilitating class - the legions of producers, agents, lawyers, editors, well, there are so many of us - is the temptation to blur the distinction between midwife and mother in the artistic process. The story of my friendship with Roger Miller is an old and familiar one: it's the relationship between the genius and the ingenious. What is the rhyme there, exactly? Does it count if the word is the same but the meanings are different? I'm the king of Kansas City, no thanks Omaha, thanks a lot. 1 attraction in every supermarket parking lot, Miller wasn't that interested in the rules of songwriting, or he wouldn't have rhymed ''all'' with ''Arkansas.'' Or wouldn't have written this, from his 1965 hit ''Kansas City Star'': That's from ''Arkansas,'' a song I think it's safe to say will never make Stephen Sondheim's famous list of songs he wishes he had written. Miller, the great country songwriter and singer who died in 1992 at the age of 56, wrote songs for the show in a vernacular all his own, with verses like this: A revival of ''Big River'' by the Roundabout Theater Company and Deaf West Theater opens on Thursday at the American Airlines Theater. Based on Mark Twain's novel ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'' it won the best-musical Tony and six others that year. I found out because Roger Miller wrote the score to ''Big River,'' which I produced on Broadway in 1985. ''Is this guy crazy?'' The answer, I found out some 20 years later, was, more or less, ''Yes.'' ''What the hell was that?'' I remember thinking. From out of nowhere, a flat, twangy, gravelly voice mumbled: Louis and listening to the local rock station. THE first Roger Miller song I ever heard was ''Dang Me,'' as in ''Dang me, dang me, they oughta take a rope and hang me.'' I was driving, newly licensed, in 1964 St.
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