"Jet Airliner" was written by Paul Pena, a blind folk singer from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He played the Newport Folk Festival in 1969 and released his debut album in 1971. Pena recorded "Jet Airliner" for his next album, New Train, in 1973, but the album was shelved and didn't get released until 2000.
Ben Sidran, who produced New Train, played the song for Steve Miller, who reworked it and released it on his 1977 album Book Of Dreams.
Pena's version runs 5:42 and has five verses. Miller set out to make the song a hit, so he cut it down to 3:20 for the single (the album version runs 4:25) and excised two verses, adding some extra repetitions of the chorus at the end. He kept the distinctive guitar riff, the ear-catching chorus, and the memorable line, "You got to go through hell before you get to heaven."
The song is about missing home, something many musicians can relate to when they're on tour.
Pena's original is more detailed and yearning, with lines like:
There's so many people, Lord, to talk to
And a whole lotta debts to payand
Ridin' along in this big jet plane
I've been thinkin' about jumpin' out the doorSteve Miller was at the tail end of a run of hits when he added this one to his trophy case in 1977. Starting with "
The Joker" in 1973, he charted five more singles before releasing the Book Of Dreams album in 1977, which included three more hits: "Jet Airliner," "
Jungle Love" and "
Swingtown." He made his mark in the '80s with the #1 hit "
Abracadabra."
Steve Miller talked about this song in the book The Guitar Greats: "'Jet Airliner" is a tune written by Paul Pena, who's a blind guitarist and writer who I met through Ben Sidran. Paul had been involved with Albert Grossman, but things hadn't worked out very well, and it had left Paul feeling pretty bitter about the music business. I particularly liked 'Jet Airliner,' so I worked on it and reshaped it into what it became, and that turned out to be real good for Paul, because it got him off the street and into a better existence, and it was good for me because at that time, I was really on a streak of radio hits. We had six top singles one right after another, which is the way you should do it if you're going to do it, and if I saw a tune that would fit, then I would use it."
Miller changed some of Pena's original lyrics to make them more cliché, and thus more radio-friendly. For instance, "my home land is so far away" became "my love light seems so far away," and "but I couldn't seem to quite get it down" turned into "the big wheel keeps on spinnin' around."
Paul Pena died on October 4, 2005 at age 55. He went through some rough times when royalties from writing this song were his main income. In 1995, he traveled to Tuva and learned the art of throat singing, a journey that's documented in the 1999 film Genghis Blues.
The radio version substitutes the line, "Funky kicks going down in the city" for "Funky s--t going down in the city."
"Jet Airliner" had a very long flight. In 1978 it was on the tracklist for Miller's Greatest Hits 1974-78 album, which in America sold 3 million copies by 1991, 13 million by 2003, and 15 million by 2021. Many of these were catalog sales.
The song also found a home on classic rock radio, where it played throughout the '90s and '00s. Miller took a long break from the road in the '80s, but when he beefed up his touring schedule in the '90s, he found that he was more popular than ever.
