Robert “Rollo” Miller was the consummate working musician.

Miller, who died Saturday at the age of 69, first gained notoriety as a teen guitar wizard with the band Mom’s Apple Pie.

Bob Fiorino, his bandmate in that group and others over the decades, remembered one of their early gigs in Geneva when the band covered Chicago’s “25 or 6 to 4.”

“I’m watching the crowd,” Fiorino said. “They’re looking at this 15-year-old kid with an undersized guitar and a single pickup, and they’re going, ‘Yeah, like he’s gonna play Terry Kath?’ And he played it to a T. I just remember watching people standing there thinking, ‘What am I looking at? What do I see here? What is this kid doing?'”

Before he was old enough to vote, Miller and the rest of Mom’s Apple Pie (who weren’t much older) were in a recording studio making their debut album for Brown Bag Records, a label founded by Terry Knight, who had been the manager for 1970s hitmakers Grand Funk Railroad.

In support of that album, Mom’s Apple Pie opened for The Kinks at New York’s Madison Square Garden and played shows with David Bowie, Doobie Brothers, The Guess Who, The James Gang, Blue Oyster Cult and many others.

Singer Doug Thomas, who played hundreds of gigs with Miller in the Mainstreet Lions and Full Moon Allstar Band, said, “I called him ‘The Heart of Rock’n’ Roll.’ That’s what he lived for, and uncompromisingly … After every single gig, he would walk up and shake everybody’s hand and say, ‘We rocked. We rocked.’ Yeah, what a guy.”

Thomas called Miller a guitar “phenom,” but that’s one of those words that often gets used to describe someone with an innate, naturally born talent. Miller was a working musician not just because of the thousands of gigs he played locally over 50+ years but for the additional hours he put in honing his craft and rehearsing with different groups in his home studio.

In recent years, Fiorino and Miller performed together as the duo FM Acoustic.

Fiorino talked about all the work Miller put into those gigs.

“I would say when we were playing sometimes, ‘Rollo types up the song, the words of the song. He scores the song, tells me what to play, how to play and even tells me how to sing,'” Fiorino said. “I would often say I’m just a monkey on a chain of Rollo the organ grinder.

“I got a greater appreciation for music because of the songs that he taught me through this two-piece acoustic band, some of the best songs written in the ’60s and ’70s.”

Any attempt to list all the bands Miller played with over the years is sure to omit many of them. Mom’s Apple Pie had the most national notoriety, but Miller played more gigs alongside Bill Scudier in Sideshow.

That band will celebrate its 50th anniversary this summer, and Scudier said it will feel weird to mark that milestone without Miller.

“You don’t play together for 50 years and not grow very close,” Scudier said.

They survived near-death experiences on the road and more than a couple of arguments, Scudier said. Miller quit Sideshow more than once, but they always got back together, because they respected each other’s talent.

Bob Jadloski didn’t make music with Miller, but they became fast friends their freshman year at Warren Western Reserve High School and remained so until Miller’s death. For most of their lives, they only lived a few blocks apart from each other.

Jadloski introduced Mom’s Apple Pie to their first manager, served as the band’s photographer and became its roadie when the group went on tour.

“Our senior year of high school, we dropped out (to go on tour),” Jadloski said. “Our parents had to give us permission to go. We had to finish school through a correspondence course. They didn’t have internet classes then.”

Rollo’s guitar playing is the soundtrack to many of Jadloski’s memories and those of the many people who either played with him or saw him perform live.

Andy Gray is the entertainment editor of Ticket. Write to him at agray@tribtoday.com.