The Duke Street Kings might just be Denver’s longest-running garage band, having knocked around the badlands of Denver’s Front Range for 40 years. And they might be the only garage band that is also a bona fide registered charity, having raised $350,000 over the years for Habitat for Humanity and its affordable housing mission.

“That’s an odd juxtaposition, right?” said frontman Ranger Miller, a highly responsible and respected United Airlines pilot, 737 captain, Air Force veteran, husband, father … and complete rock ’n roll goofball. Ask anyone, and they will tell you: “Ranger Miller is the happiest guy I know.” And four decades of playing (mostly) cover songs has made Miller – and thousands watching – deliriously (and often drunkenly) happy in dive bars, dorm rooms, theme parks, reception halls, mountain towns and, yes, garages. He’s a 59-year-old man with the hungry heart of a 16-year-old who’s getting his very first taste of just how great life can be.

“Both of my parents were eternal optimists, and I think optimism is probably the best thing that you can inherit from your parents,” Miller said. “I think most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be – and I have always made up my mind to be happy.”

Miller figures about 50 musicians have sat in with The Duke Street Kings since 1981, when he and fellow Denver Northsiders Frank Serra, Jim Rusley and Dave Trefz played a house party near Colorado State University in Fort Collins. The newly crowned Kings had about 20 songs in their set list that first night, including Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild,” ZZ Top’s “Backdoor Love Affair” and David Bowie’s “Suffragette City.” “And now that I’ve just said that out loud,” Miller said, “we’d better re-learn them for the 21st.”

That would be Aug. 21, when Miller will be hosting the Kings’ 40th anniversary concert at the Crystal Rose in Golden. But first comes the Kings’ 24th annual Blues ’N BBQ festival this coming Saturday (July 17) in Edgewater, which the Kings will again host and headline, and Miller hopes will net another $100,000 for Habitat for Humanity.

Miller had just graduated from Holy Family High School when he heard Serra and Rusley from nearby Regis were starting a band and looking for a singer. Their harmonies led to harmony between the neighborhood rivals who bonded over a love for The Rolling Stones and took their name from a Springsteen lyric:

Slow dancing in the dark.

On the beach at Stockton’s Wing.

Where desperate lovers park.

We sat with the last of The Duke Street Kings.

Huddled in our cars.

Waiting for the bells that ring.

In the deep heart of the night.

We let loose of everything.

In those first two years, the Kings played anywhere that would have them, including Lakeside Amusement Park, Sam’s on Lookout Mountain and lots and lots of kegger parties. But impending college graduations – the death of many a musical dream – sent both Miller and Serra into the Air Force … and that put the band on hold for the next 15 years.

Miller was deployed to Germany, where he would have been part of the second wave of Air Force pilots called into the 1991 Gulf War, if necessary. (It wasn’t. Not even close.) “But flying for Uncle Sam did make me a better musician,” said Miller. Up to that point, he had been solely a singer. In Germany, he taught himself to play the guitar.

“As soon as I found out I might be stuck in the desert for three months with no electricity, I ran down to the pawn shop and bought two acoustic guitars to take with me,” Miller said. “But we never even got to the desert, and we really had absolutely nothing to do. So all we did was play the guitar all day, every day … and we did a lot of drinking, too.”

Miller and Serra were both back living in Denver by 1997, hanging out on Miller’s doorstep playing songs. A restart of the band was inevitable. After some hilarious misadventures trying to find most recent guitarist Al Hines in the White Pages – (it helps if you know how to spell the last names of your past bandmates) – the Kings reassembled for a rough set at Splinters from the Pine, one of the many bars that had sprung up around Coors Field at the time. This one was run by an old Regis pal named Tommy McAleer, who had told them if the Kings ever reunited, they would always have a place to play at Splinters.

“We probably only had 30 people that night, but we raised 300 bucks and decided to give it to Habitat for Humanity,” Miller said. “That was fun, so we did it again the next year, and the next year, and the next year. And that has become a staple of the band ever since.

“It cracks me up that The Duke Street Kings are now a 501c3 non-profit,” Miller added. “Because really, we’ve always been a charity.”

Translation: Garage bands, by definition, aren’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the music. For the party. For the pure, stupid fun of it. And Miller has lots of stupid anecdotes from over the years, most involving alcohol and absurdly funny dance-floor falls. More than you would think involve trees hitting faces. One is the tale of a couple that transformed into a human Slinky right there on the dance floor. Another that actually fell off a dance floor because it was ever-so-slightly sloped on a mountainside.

But riches? “If we ever walk away from a gig with $50 each, that’s a pretty damn good gig,” Miller said with a laugh.

But show a little faith, there’s magic in the night. And for Miller, that night came in 2011, when he unenthusiastically agreed to play a free set at a friend’s rehearsal dinner. Not a wedding, mind you … a rehearsal dinner. And really, who asks a band to play at a rehearsal dinner … for free?

“We were playing at Dennis West’s 23rd Avenue Sculpture Studio,” Miller said. “There were only about 20 people there. But the groom was from New Jersey, so we just played a bunch of Springsteen songs – and man, they loved us. By the end of the night, they were up there with us singing every song and asking us to play more and more.”

When it was over, one of the Joisey Boys approached Miller, pulled out a wad of cash and peeled him off 14 C-Notes. Then he told Miller to check his daytimer. “I am taking you to see Springsteen at the Stone Pony,” the man said. And, incredibly, he did. It was a private party at Springsteen’s legendary Asbury Park launching pad not long after E-Street Band saxophonist Clarence Clemons had died. Turns out this man had given a ton of money to Boston College, where Springsteen’s son, Evan, was attending, and this Stony Pony show was some sort of a quid pro quo. Miller found himself hobnobbing with Chris Christie and Boomer Esiason while watching The Boss – for free – at the Stone Pony. All his garage band dreams were fulfilled.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Miller’s dream really came full circle when his two sons became musicians – and, defying decades of garage-band tradition that stipulates having a dad in any band is by definition, not cool – actually wanted to play alongside their not-so-embarrassing old man. They have since they were 10.

Sam is a soul man and Kevin is a metalhead, but the Miller bros have become mainstay players with The Duke Street Kings over the past 20 years. Just the other day, Ranger was driving around with Kevin when they had a moment straight out of Springsteen’s “My Hometown.”

“We were getting kind of philosophical, and we were talking about how important it is to find the things in life that will make you happy,” Ranger said. “I told Kevin: ‘I hope that other people can find the happiness in their own lives that I find every time I get to play ‘Rosalita’ on stage with both of my sons.’

“And Kevin turns to me and says: ‘Yep, that is pretty damn fun.’ “

Miller can’t possibly compute how many shows or songs or people he’s moved to dance over the past 40 years. The band’s song catalog is up to more than 100 covers, but the Kings are also about to release their third full album of original songs. “We could play an entire night of originals,” Miller said. Problem is: “Nobody ever wants to hear that stuff,” he added with a laugh.

They want the moves like Jagger. And Springsteen. And Bowie.

Miller’s roster of playmates over the years is so long not even he remembers everyone, but the list includes everyone from high-school pal Lance “Romance” Riley on drums to local saxophone legend Tony Arceneaux, who died last year. It was only because of Arceneaux that

Miller was able to branch out and create a side Springsteen cover band that draws up to 1,000 people a gig. (The band name? Glory Days, natch.)

Miller’s favorite venues to play are still the Northside haunts where he grew up: The Oriental Theatre, Ziggy’s and Tennyson’s Tap. “Right there in the hood,” he said. “I love North Denver.”

Now nearing 60, Miller is not easily explained away as a man in a mid-life musical crisis. We know this because this is the man he has always been. He says it himself:

“It keeps the kid in me alive,” he says. “I guess that’s because I have no shame. I can never be embarrassed. My entire life has been like an ongoing high-school reunion … and I am loving every minute of it. So, yeah: Let it rip!”

Denver Gazette contributing arts columnist John Moore is an award-winning journalist who was named one of the 10 most influential theatre critics by American Theatre Magazine. He is now producing independent journalism as part of his own company, Moore Media.