Yuku free message boards

If you were a South Florida hippie of the flower-child era, you hung out on weekends at North Miami-Dade's Greynolds Park, where pot smoke and live music filled the air.

Among the most popular bands of the day: Fantasy, which became local legend in 1970 thanks to its regional No. 1 single, Stoned Cowboy, and its wraith-like blond singer, Jamene Miller.

She joined the band at 16 and overnight became South Florida's answer to Grace Slick and Janis Joplin. Then, as if following Hollywood's ''doomed rock star'' script, she crashed and burned -- albeit in slow motion.

Miller died Sept. 27 at her home in Miramar, at 55. Her body will be cremated.

On the strength of its hit and Jamene's powerful voice, Fantasy got its proverbial 15 minutes of fame: a record contract and an album. Then Miller went on her own, and gradually self-destructed.

''She was very tired from this world and she simply could not catch up to her dreams,'' said longtime friend AnnDee Rucker's posting on jamenemiller.com.

Those dreams probably met a Joplinesque end. Broward County medical examiners don't suspect foul play, but await toxicology results.

Miller was facing felony trafficking and prescription-fraud charges from a July 2007 Oxycontin bust. She was under house arrest, wearing an electronic ankle bracelet.

In recent years, ''she went into a nose dive, but she had a huge heart, especially for animals and people who were less fortunate,'' said Rucker, ex-wife of Fantasy drummer Greg Kimple. She also had a history of cardiac problems.

She said that Miller seemed to give up after her dog died earlier this year.

News of Miller's death devastated the regulars at Limestone Lounge, an online message board devoted to the South Florida music scene. Miller thrilled fans when she surfaced there in July 2005.

''Ask me about Fantasy!'' she wrote. ``My name is Jamene and I barely lived through it!!! Just kidding; it was a great experience for me!''

Hinting at her brush with stardom, she said she 'was asked to be the lead singer of War, but being young and a bit conceited, I said, `No thanks, I'm doing my own thing.' ''

War, whose hits include Spill the Wine and Why Can't We Be Friends?, has been nominated to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Miller's ''own thing'' after Fantasy included singing backup for Eric Clapton and having Jerry Garcia sing backup for her. She toured with the band Foxy, and assembled a club band of Stevie Wonder's musicians.

''Jamene had an obvious gift,'' Greg Kimple said. ``She had great pitch, and her lungs were twice what other people's are. Like an athlete, she was so inherently skilled that anybody who got around her gravitated toward that gift.''

''She was brilliant, and anyone who ever saw her was mesmerized,'' Rucker added.

But she was her own worst enemy, making one bad decision after another.

''I believe in my heart that she was terrified of the responsibility of success, so before she could even get there, she made sure she wouldn't get there,'' said Rucker, a Pembroke Pines makeup artist.``She needed to be in control, and you don't have control in that life.''

Guitarist Steve Mele, who joined Fantasy in 1971, called Miller ''just straight-ahead good. She could sing without making mistakes -- a type of ability that real rock stars have. . . . She was able to perform with rock-solid precision. By 15, she was as good as you need to be,'' which may have been her undoing.

''Jamene always viewed herself as a world-class artist, and her career hit on all cylinders when she was very young,'' said Mele, a Falls-area stay-at-home dad. ``But it was very short-lived, and life is about moving forward. Part of Jamene's tragedy was that she so centered on what she considered the best days of her life. She became stuck in a short part of her past.''

She was born Lydia Janene Miller in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up as an only child in South Florida. In a Limestone Lounge posting, Miller explained that a record-company typo altered the name she used onstage, and it stuck.

Her father, James E. Miller, was a wealthy man who lived in Golden Beach. He and Jamene's mother, Irene, divorced. Irene died in 1991 and James in 2005.

Married and divorced three times, Jamene Miller never had children, but she always fans.

Norman Sloan, who played with the Coconut Grove band Good News during the same period, recalls first seeing her ``at a Greynolds Park love-in on a flatbed truck with a generator. . . . She was mature onstage beyond her years. She took the town by storm.''

When Miller joined Fantasy, probably in 1969, it was the house band at Thee Image in North Miami Beach, opening for super-acts like the Grateful Dead, The Doors, Steppenwolf, Cream, Frank Zappa, Led Zeppelin.

The band, with Jamene, appeared in Iron Butterfly's 1969 short film, Musical Mutiny, then released the trippy Stoned Cowboy.

Ironically, it's an instrumental, so Jamene Miller, the vocalist, isn't on it.

The band signed with Liberty/United Artists and headed to California. As Mele and Kimple tell it, the album -- recently rereleased in Europe -- went nowhere.

Miller, who wrote her own material, quit the band, signing with the label as a solo artist.

Not yet 18, she made Billboard Magazine, and ''got a lot of money up front,'' Mele said. She rented Rudolph Valentino's mansion, bought a sports car -- which Rucker said she wrecked -- and went into the studio with a veritable Who's Who of pop music: drummer Aynsley Dunbar, bassist Harvey Brooks, Ralph Shuckett on keyboards, and Jerry Garcia on lead guitar.

They cut a record, but Miller ''wasn't satisfied,'' Mele said. She tried again, with a band called Power, at Miami's Criteria Studios. That, too, sat on the shelf.

She turned down a song that might have changed everything: Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues, which became a Top 10 hit in 1972 for Danny O'Keefe, who wrote it. Country-Western stars like Elvis Presley, Waylon Jennings, Charlie Rich and Dwight Yoakam covered it.

Miller only wanted to record her own songs, Rucker said.

After a contract dispute with her label sidelined her recording career, Miller made a deal with Stevie Wonder's band that led to a nine-month gig in Chicago. Then she rejoined Fantasy, which played two high-profile concerts in the mid 1970s: one at the edge of the Grand Canyon, the other atop the World Trade Center.

Thereafter, Miller performed sporadically, worked at a Hollywood health food store, and battled addiction.

She would ''get cleaned up and go on a health-food kick,'' AnnDee Rucker said. Family and friends tried to steer her to rehab, but she wouldn't go.

In the end, the drugs apparently won.

Earlier this year, she posted a poem at poetry.com, titled Mirrorless Image:

Looking down the river reflected like a spoon

The past that's changed so rapidly has left me all too soon

Waves of prancing moonbeams, so near yet far away

You'll wet your hand in trying to capture yesterday.

Now as the hours grow greater and greater

All you have created are the thoughts you share alone

Every night the moonbeams grow greater like the thoughts

That you ponder lead to more that make you weep

Your eyes close tight and try to remember, but you're

Too far under water, you're sinkin' way too deep.