Toto interview: ‘The old classic rock guys are keeping the record companies alive'

Yahoo

31-01-2025

In 2017, after assuming co-management duties for his band Toto, Steve Lukather decided to disprove the axiom that you can't fight City Hall. Equipped with a keen sense of his own worth, the now 67-year-old guitarist set about negotiating a deal that would see the (not normally generous) streaming platform Spotify pay the LA-based veterans a higher-than-normal royalty rate. How he did this, exactly, remains a secret. 'I can't tell you,' he says, 'because if I did, someone would kill me.'
He does, though, offer this. 'You're not supposed to make as much [money] as we do from this s___. But I got in when they didn't know what they had. It was brand new' – not quite true, but never mind – 'so I got one over on them there. But it was a fair deal. We made them hundreds of millions of dollars and it was our turn to make it back.'
For a group whose best-known songs were minted in a previous century, Toto have proved themselves uncommonly suited to the digital age. In what Clive James described as 'the permanent present', the band's songs are cued up by users of Spotify more than three million times a day. That more than half of this listenership were born years after standards such as Hold The Line and Roseanna were recorded suggests many of the people holding tickets for the group's imminent UK arena tour might well be a good deal younger than the musicians onstage.
'We're the people who are keeping the record companies alive,' Lukather says. 'It's us, the old classic rock guys. [Toto] are at over four billion streams, man… that's a lot of people who are listening.'
Despite offering emphatic apologies for appearing on my computer screen 20 minutes behind schedule, today, Steve Lukather can be forgiven for his apparent tardiness. With the fires of Los Angeles continuing to terrorise the city in which he was born, earlier in the week, the prospect of his own home in the Hollywood Hills being razed to the ground saw him packing the car with possessions in anticipation of a sharp exit from a monumental disaster. Even as we speak, his phone pings with a warning that the Santa Ana winds might yet whip up a fresh batch of chaos. 'Excuse me,' he says, 'for being a little...' – the description hangs in the air, somehow out of reach – '…I'm usually pretty on the case.'
Nonetheless, he provides a riot of an interview. Looking like Sammy Hagar at the business end of a long and uniquely harrowing breakdown, Lukather speaks at high speed, swears often, and launches into his answers while my questions are still halfway inside my mouth. He tells me of the time he first came to London, in 1977, and saw a young man on the street with a leather jacket and a Mohawk haircut. 'I thought it was a joke,' he says, meaning punk rock itself (this appraisal has softened with age). This, I think, is rather strange. If I didn't know, and had to guess, I would liken Lukather's blazing energy to that of an unrepentant punk rocker rather than a grand statesman of the soft rock scene.
'I'm loud,' he says. 'I say stupid sh–t. I make mistakes. I say things that I don't really mean and then when you read it you think, 'That guy's an a–hole'.' Apropos of nothing, he tells me that 'I stopped dying my hair, and now I've let it grow out because I can. It's the last 'f–k you' I have in me. I don't give a sh–t anymore.'
Minutes later, when recalling the dismissal by opinion-formers of Toto's defiantly unfashionable self-titled debut album, from 1978, as the work of musicians who made their bones on the session circuit, he snaps, 'Do these f–king a–holes even know what that means? [As studio players] we got handed sheets of paper with notes written on them that said 'play something great now'. So that's what we did.'
It is, though, unwise to get caught up in the weeds. My question of how he would have played Eddie Van Halen's excoriating guitar solo on Michael Jackson's Beat It – a track on which Lukather and the late Toto drummer Jeff Porcaro also appeared – leads to a less than snappy anecdote featuring an unfathomable sentence about 'locking up two 24-track tapes so they sync back up [in] basically a 60-cycle tone but a little bit more further along technologically than that'.
'Oh God, this is unusable,' I think as Lukather's phone begins to buzz. He shows me the screen. Eddie's brother and former bandmate, Alex Van Halen, is calling.
He stops talking only when I ask him to nominate a highlight from the seemingly innumerable albums on which he's appeared (from George Benson to Paul McCartney, his credits encompass the great and the extremely good). Pausing to think, at last he answers, 'That's a hard one, man. There's a lot of records there. Couple thousand at least. There's the famous ones like Thriller… [because] who knew it would be the biggest record in history? It's kinda neat to be a part of that. It's what I studied for, to be in the moment where you walk into a room and go, 'Oh, Stevie Wonder is playing keyboards today'. Cos we didn't know. There was no rehearsals or demos or [the chance] to learn everything before you got there. You just showed up and you had to be ready for anything.'
Despite their own blockbusting success, even Toto's most successful albums couldn't compete with Thriller when it came to sales of physical records, tapes and CDs. No shame in that, of course; no one could. But as we have seen, a band who might well have been regarded as yesterday's men – like REO Speedwagon, say, or Styx – have, in the digital world, blossomed to the size of a continent. Naturally, the continent is called Africa.
Released almost 43 years ago, the group's towering monster hit is the most streamed song from the last three decades of the 20th Century. In the United States, Africa has to its credit a diamond certification for physical and electronic sales numbering more than 10 million. To say that the track's instant and enduring popularity caught them on the hop is putting it mildly. In fact, one needs look no further than its position on its parent album, Toto IV, to gauge the measure of surprise. Closing tracks very rarely, if ever, become beloved international anthems.
Today, the damn thing is all but ubiquitous. Notwithstanding its remarkable degree of public affection, however, I'm minded to disagree with the journalist Michael Hodges's recent assertion that the words 'I bless the rains down in Africa, gonna take some time to do the things we never had' – which don't entirely make sense, anyway – 'may well be imprinted on your brain' on the grounds that, in music, people hear what they want to hear. In the Thomas Pynchon novel Bleeding Edge, for example, one character says to another, 'I don't think it's 'I lost my brains down in Africa.'' Even Lukather, who would be hung from the rafters of any venue in which he appears were he to fail to play the song, says, 'To this day, I smirk when I hear the words.'
He goes on, 'We all cracked up at the lyrics. Those of us that didn't write them were going, 'What? Dave [Paich, the track's co-author and Toto's keyboard player], we're from Hollywood, what the f–k?' And you think it's just silly lyrics, like, this'll never be a single but it's a cool track… Yes, none of it makes sense [and] it's not geographically perfect or anything' – true enough, even Superman would struggle to see Kilimanjaro from the Serengeti – 'but you take poetic license. It rhymes, okay?'
Despite mining the Dark Continent for gold and platinum, though, Toto were as Hollywood as the Oscars. Notwithstanding a resolute work ethic, they took drugs and misbehaved. In the wake of the death of the 38-year-old Jeff Porcaro, in 1992, a coroner's report attributed his passing to coronary disease linked to cocaine use. (In what is the only testy moment in our interview, Lukather insists that 'he didn't die of that [drug use]'.)
In 1988, the group's second and now current singer Joseph Williams's took a lengthy leave of absence to deal with his own substance misuse issues. Before this, at the pinnacle of Toto's contemporaneous commercial success, in 1983, his predecessor Bobby Kimball was arrested for attempting to sell drugs to a police officer.
'It was unbelievable how [cocaine] overtook the city,' Lukather says. 'I didn't even realise what was going on. I didn't realise why there were five guys in the bathroom stall. I didn't understand. I'd walk into the bathroom to take a leak and there's all these guys in the stall. 'Hey, what the f–k are you guys doing in there?' 'Nothing man, nothing kid.'' (Cue a theatrical sniffing noise from our interviewee.)
He goes on. 'And then one night, two in the morning, I'm going, 'I've got a 10am [session], how am I f–king going to get through this?' And some guy goes, 'Come here man, have some of this'. And I go, 'Oh man, it's drug sh–t'… but they sold me the whole lot. They sold us all the lies: it's not addictive, it's better than coffee, it's no problem. And all my heroes were doing it so I said, 'Okay'. And it started out fine… but it got bad because it just turned into this weird dark thing. It became cloak and dagger sh–t. [People saying] 'No, I don't have anything.' It was the addiction thing that people lied to us about.'
Rather charmingly, give or take, Steve Lukather claims to have behaved himself during the time that people around him were doing quite the opposite. It took him until the 1990s, he says, during the commercial slough that preceded the digital bonanza, to start bending the elbow and rolling the banknotes with the worst of them. 'Do I wish I never saw that sh–t?' he asks. 'Yeah. I could have done without it.' But he is pleased he stopped, he tells me, not least because drug users today face the risk that their gram of toot has been cut not with baby powder, but fentanyl.
'Even in your youth, you just don't know how long you have left,' he says. 'I mean, today could be my last day. I could go tonight. I'm at an age now where every day above ground is a bonus. I'm 67 years old, man. I haven't had a drink or a smoke for going on 16 years but I did it pretty good back in the day. I was hanging out wherever I went. No matter where you are, people would say, 'Oh yeah, come on, we'll meet you at the bar.' It's really easy to get to the point where that's your everyday life. And it starts out harmless and nice, like it does when you're young, and then suddenly you're 50 and you're going, 'I can't do this any more.''
Which is why, today, Steve Lukather gives only the impression of being insane. Big difference. As the one member of Toto not to have stepped back from the band at any point, his significant achievements include a victorious role in the culture war between the kind of artists sniffy journalists prefer to write about and those to whom millions of people actually listen. For a younger audience, the digital age has smashed the boundary that once separated the cool from the uncool. Whether it's Rick Springfield or Radiohead, Toto or Tom Waits – at long last, music no longer has a VIP entrance.
'I've been smart about this,' Lukather says. 'I paid attention at school. That's how I know how to make records, to work with the best producers, engineers and studios. I kept my eyes and ears open and I asked a lot of questions… And I still have that fire. I still care. I still love it.'
Toto begin their British tour on February 1, at the Hydro in Glasgow; for tickets: totoofficial.com