TOTO Trivia — 128 Entries
128 sourced facts about TOTO.
Trivia
Toto played Japan for the first time in March 1980, on the tour behind Hydra. Between 2 and 13 March they covered four cities with ten shows, three of them at Nakano Sun Plaza in Tokyo — a run of that size only two years into their recording career. Sony Music Japan marked the fortieth anniversary of that first visit by putting all thirteen of the band’s Sony-era titles into hi-res streaming for the first time on 3 April 2020.
Japan has an official Toto Day. In 2018, the band’s fortieth anniversary year, the Japan Anniversary Association registered 10 October as a formal commemorative date — the reading of the Japanese numerals for the tenth month and the tenth day, to-o and to-o, echoes the band’s name. The registration certificate was to be forwarded to the members through their Japanese label. It is a form of tribute that could only have come from this country.
The Sony Music Japan announcement of Toto Day quotes something the late Mike Porcaro said about the country while he was alive: that the time the band spent in Japan was among the most memorable of their lives, and that the friendships built there over the years were irreplaceable. The label set his words down as a matter of record, alongside the observation that the bond between this band and its Japanese audience has been remarked on again and again.
The fortieth-anniversary deluxe edition of Toto IV was put together for Japan alone. It came as an SACD multi-hybrid disc whose 5.1-channel surround mix had never been issued here before, and its CD layer carried four bonus tracks making their first appearance on CD anywhere. Those four began as unfinished outtakes from the 1981–82 sessions and were completed in 2018 by Lukather and Paich adding new parts — which means they contain performances by the late Porcaro brothers played against work recorded decades later.
The Japanese package reproduced the country’s own 1982 in miniature: the ticket and the advertising poster for the 17 May show at Nippon Budokan, the tour programme, the LP obi strips from both the original pressing and the reissue, the members’ session list that came with the record at the time, and the sleeve of every seven-inch single cut from the album in Japan. It is a reassembly of what a Japanese buyer would have had in their hands forty years earlier.
The fortieth-anniversary box set All In ran to thirty-one discs: seventeen LPs covering thirteen titles, thirteen CDs in card sleeves and a single Blu-ray. Japan received two hundred sets, sold only through Sony Music Shop and carrying a Japanese translation of the box’s eighty-page hardcover book as a purchase bonus. The Blu-ray holds footage of a 1990 show in Paris and the 5.1-channel surround mix of Toto IV.
One of the centrepieces of All In was Live In Tokyo, the first official release of recordings from the March 1980 Hydra tour that brought the band to Japan. On 18 April 2020 it was lifted out of the box as a standalone Record Store Day vinyl release — forty years after the shows, those performances finally stood on their own as a record.
Hi-res streaming of Toto’s original albums was requested for years without result, and did not happen even for the band’s fortieth anniversary in 2018. What opened the door was the work done for All In: Paich, Lukather, Steve Porcaro and Joseph Williams sat down with Elliot Scheiner and others and remastered the entire Sony-era catalogue, and those masters are what made the 2020 release possible.
Three of the titles that went up in April 2020 were reaching ordinary download and streaming services for the first time as well. One was Live In Tokyo, the official recording of the first Japanese shows. Another was Old Is New, built entirely from previously unreleased material — unfinished tracks from when Jeff and Mike Porcaro were alive, finished with performances captured in 2018. The third was Toto XX: 1977–1997, the twentieth-anniversary collection of unreleased recordings, on which Toto’s own version of "Miss Sun" — the hit they had handed to Boz Scaggs before their debut — surfaced for the first time.
Sony Music Japan’s profile does not describe the relationship between Toto and this country as a one-way import. It states that a great many Japanese artists of the period took the Toto sound as a reference point, and that some hired the members outright for their own sessions — and that this fed directly into the sonic shape of city pop, the genre now being rediscovered worldwide. It is the label putting on record what the Japanese side took from them.
The 2023 Japanese tour opened in Fukuoka on 10 July, took in eight shows across eight cities and closed at Nippon Budokan on the 21st. It was the band’s first run of Japanese dates in four years, and doubled as the tour marking their forty-fifth anniversary. It was also the first time a Japanese audience saw the line-up with new players on drums, bass and keyboards.
For the fortieth-anniversary Japanese tour in 2019, a book was assembled that exists only in this country. AOR AGE Special Edition TOTO, published by Shinko Music, ran to 232 A5 pages: a new Lukather interview plus fifteen interviews pulled from the archives between 1979 and 2016 — Jeff Porcaro and Bobby Kimball in 1979, all three Porcaro brothers in 1982, a 1985 session with Fergie Frederiksen present — the record Japanese magazines happened to be keeping at the time. It also carries an annotated basic set list for every Japanese tour from 1980 to 2016.
Steve Lukather & Friends were due in Japan from the end of April 2020, and the dates were cancelled because of the coronavirus. In a phone interview conducted before the outbreak spread, Lukather said that calling Japanese listeners fans never sat right with him — he thought of them as friends — and that music let him forget the bad things for a couple of hours, which was what he wanted to bring over. Those shows never took place.
The thirty-fifth-anniversary Japanese tour ran to seven shows, opening in Nagoya on 23 April 2014. Speaking to BARKS, Lukather explained that Nathan East would play bass on those dates while David Hungate would take the American summer tour. East was busy with Eric Clapton’s band and with Fourplay, but Lukather said he had pushed for him because that was the line-up he wanted to bring to Japan.
Talking to BARKS in 2014, Lukather likened Toto’s history to a roller coaster — up, down and dizzying — and said the Japanese shows would be that history compressed into two hours. In the same interview he noted that although the tour was billed as the thirty-fifth anniversary, the band itself was thirty-eight years old by then, and that counting back to the high-school years when he met the others made it forty-one.
At the Budokan show in 2023 Lukather announced from the stage that the next song was for Jeff, Mike and Joe Porcaro, and the band played the title track of Kingdom of Desire — the last original album Jeff appeared on. The night had opened with "Orphan", the fifth song on 2015’s Toto XIV; the main set closed with "Rosanna" into "Africa", and the encore was the Beatles’ "With A Little Help From My Friends".
Toto assembled itself out of the players who met on Boz Scaggs’s Silk Degrees in 1976. Drummer Jeff Porcaro, keyboardist David Paich and bassist David Hungate were joined by Jeff’s younger brother Steve Porcaro on keyboards and by Steve’s school classmate Steve Lukather on guitar. They came together as a group of young session players already in constant demand on the Los Angeles studio scene, and that pedigree is audible in how tightly the early albums are built.
At the 25th Annual Grammy Awards, Toto took Record of the Year for "Rosanna" and Album of the Year for Toto IV. Producer of the Year, Non-Classical also went to Toto, credited in the official records to Bobby Kimball, Steve Lukather, David Paich, Jeff Porcaro, Michael Porcaro and Steve Porcaro.
Three more awards that night attached to Toto IV and "Rosanna". Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals went to Jerry Hey, David Paich and Jeff Porcaro; Best Vocal Arrangement for Two or More Voices went to David Paich; both for "Rosanna". And Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical went to Tom Knox, Greg Ladanyi, David Leonard and Al Schmitt for Toto IV. Six awards in all are tied to the record.
Paich’s line from the podium got a laugh. He offered sarcastic thanks to Robert Hilburn — the long-standing Los Angeles Times rock critic who had done nothing of the kind — for believing in them. A Grammy speech that calls out a hostile critic by name was, and is, a rare thing.
Steve Lukather picked up a second, separate award at the same ceremony. Best R&B Song went to "Turn Your Love Around", the George Benson hit, credited to Bill Champlin, Jay Graydon and Lukather as its writers — an award for his songwriting rather than anything to do with Toto.
Not everything went their way. "Rosanna" was nominated for Song of the Year with David Paich as its writer, and lost to "Always On My Mind" by Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher and Mark James. Among the records Toto IV beat for Album of the Year was John Mellencamp’s American Fool.
The figure Grammy.com attaches to Toto as an artist entity is five nominations and three wins. All three wins come from the 25th ceremony; the two remaining nominations are Pop Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals for "Rosanna", and Best New Artist at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards. The arrangement and engineering awards are filed under individual names and so fall outside that count.
Toto’s first contact with the Grammys was a nomination rather than a win. They were up for Best New Artist at the 21st Annual Grammy Awards, and the award went to A Taste of Honey. They would not actually collect a trophy until the 25th ceremony four years later.
Toto IV has sold more than twelve million copies worldwide. It produced "Africa", the band’s first American number one single, and "Rosanna", which reached number two. Sony Music Japan set out that figure in its announcement of the album’s fortieth-anniversary edition.
The figures on the band’s official biography have kept climbing since. Their catalogue has passed 3.4 billion streams on Spotify alone, with the total across all platforms approaching five billion. "Africa" accounts for over a billion of the Spotify figure by itself, and has been recertified eight times platinum by the RIAA — two steps up from the six-times-platinum level it held in 2021.
Toto’s numbers cannot be read off their own releases alone. According to the official biography, the family tree of their individual work runs through some five thousand albums with a combined sales history of half a billion copies, and the performances on those records have drawn hundreds of Grammy nominations from NARAS.
On the official biography, Lukather and Williams call themselves the Dogz of Oz. The two go back a long way; Williams describes Lukather as being like a brother and says their creative partnership has enriched both their lives. It is The Wizard of Oz — long offered as the source of the band’s name — turned back into a name for themselves.
The reason they formed a band is not mysterious. They had built their reputations on sessions for Steely Dan, Seals and Crofts, Boz Scaggs and others, and they were making a good living as hired players. The artists they were backing, however, were making a great deal more. Since they were already in the same rooms playing together anyway, the logic ran, they might as well form their own group and make their own records.
They never had to go looking for a label. By Paich’s account they already knew the executives at every company personally through session work, and never once called or approached anybody. The moment word got out that they were forming a band, the offers came to them. Paich described it that way in a 1979 interview with the British paper Sounds.
The contract arrived even more directly than that. Paich, Jeff Porcaro and Hungate played on Boz Scaggs’s Silk Degrees, and Steve Porcaro and Lukather joined them in Scaggs’s touring band. Columbia, Scaggs’s label, worked out that a new group was forming under their noses and made an offer. As Steve Porcaro tells it, a record deal was dropped into their laps without anyone having to audition.
Their family backgrounds were what let critics of the day write them off as spoilt rich kids. Paich’s father Marty was a successful composer and arranger; the Porcaro brothers were the sons of the celebrated jazz drummer Joe Porcaro; Hungate’s father was a congressman; Lukather’s was an assistant director in television. Paich himself concedes that their fathers opened a few doors. He also insists that nothing was simply handed to them and that they worked hard for the rest.
Jeff Porcaro and David Paich went to Grant High School together, and while they were there the two of them had a band called Rural Still Life. The partnership that became Toto began in a school corridor, years before any record company was involved.
The origin of the name stayed unsettled for a long time. The earliest story had it that Porcaro wrote the word on the band’s demo tapes to keep them apart from other bands’ tapes at the studio. Then the band began telling the press it came from the dog in The Wizard of Oz. The version eventually presented as official was the Latin in toto, meaning all-encompassing: the group brought together so many genres and specialities that they could, and did, do anything. That all three accounts stand side by side is itself the fact.
Lukather’s recollection is that the name surfaced while Paich and Jeff Porcaro were watching The Wizard of Oz, in which the central character has a dog called Toto. That memory and the official account tracing the name to the Latin in toto cannot both be the whole story, and the question has never been settled.
When they started out in 1977, what they wanted to be known as was a progressive rock band — with a melodic sensibility, as Lukather puts it. All of them had grown up on the seventies giants: Yes, Genesis, Pink Floyd. The thinking behind their vocal harmonies, he says, owed a great deal to Gentle Giant.
The first time Paich saw Lukather play was at a high-school dance, and what Lukather was playing was Yes material. Paich says he knew right then that he had to work with him one day. Once the band existed, the two of them would take Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes records apart, work out what made them special, and use that as the basis on which they built their own songs.
The new band’s sound started from heavy rock and progressive rock. Paich names Queen, Led Zeppelin, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and says flatly that what they did not want to be was the Eagles. Given that the music which actually reached the public was received as a defining example of AOR, that is a surprisingly sharp-edged statement of intent.
The title of the debut single "Hold The Line" comes from telephone usage. As an expression it means to keep your existing position, which in the song is a man asking a woman to be patient with him. It also has a literal sense — what you say to one caller while you pick up another — and in the days before mobile phones a few households had several incoming lines and a hold button. Paich grew up in one of them.
Paich tells it like this. His parents were the first family on the block to get a multi-line phone, and once he reached high school it never stopped ringing. One evening at the dinner table three girls called at the same time and every light on the handset was flashing. He was, by his own admission, juggling girlfriends at the time, and that is where the song came from.
Most of the lines in "Hold The Line" begin with the words "It’s not". According to Paich, once he had the title the writing became a matter of listing what love is not — working towards what it is by elimination.
The piano on the track hammers a single note as a percussion part, a technique much used at the time. Jeff Porcaro described what they were doing as taking a Sly Stone groove and meshing it with a harder, blunter rock approach — a record on which the guitar chords people call heavy metal sit alongside a repeated piano note.
That opening riff was worked out on a small upright piano Paich bought when he left home for college. He played it for days on end, until neighbours were pounding on his door telling him to stop, and — by his account — he was served with eviction notices for it.
Paich told the record company that the 1978 debut album would go double platinum for certain. After "Hold The Line" reached the American Top 5, it did.
The success stopped almost at once. The second album, 1979’s Hydra, took an experimental progressive turn and did not sell. Nor did Turn Back, a more straightforward rock record. Two failures in a row put the band at risk of being dropped, and label executives told Paich they wanted to see whether the group still knew how to make hit records.
"99" was written by Paich, who took it from THX 1138, George Lucas’s first feature, released in 1971. Paich set down the premise himself: a totalitarian state in the twenty-fifth century in which people are stripped of individuality, reduced to numbered drones and kept docile by a government programme of sedation.
"99" was the first single from Hydra and the biggest hit on it. How much the song meant to the band shows in the address of their first official website, which was toto99.com.
At a time when nobody had settled what a music video was, all a record company asked for was the band on a stage playing while fans waved in front of them. Paich and the others treated the budget as a chance to shoot short films instead, and from the Hydra album onwards they began making murky, shadowed clips — using money that had been granted for performance footage.
Before the fourth album, Columbia let the band know through their managers exactly where they stood: the label thought they were a one-hit wonder and would see how the next record performed before deciding whether to take up its option. That is how Paich describes being told. Turn Back had peaked at 41 in America with no hit single, and the two million the debut had sold felt a long way behind them.
Paich’s first answer was to sit down and deliberately write a hit single — a song with real musicianship, lyrics that landed, a chorus you would remember, and good production. What came out was the five-and-a-half-minute "Rosanna". When the finished track was played to Al Teller, their contact at Columbia, he was impressed enough to sign off the budget for the rest of the record.
The title "Rosanna" came from the actress Rosanna Arquette, who was seeing Steve Porcaro at the time. Porcaro did not write the song; Paich did, and it was about one of his own first loves from high school. Paich has explained that his best friend had just met Arquette and wanted a song with her name on it, and that the name happened to fit this one perfectly.
Lukather explains the shuffle on "Rosanna" as Jeff Porcaro morphing Led Zeppelin’s "Fool In The Rain" with a Bernard Purdie groove. Jeff was deeply into Zeppelin, and from that starting point the band took it the rest of the way.
The details were divided up. Kimball and Lukather transposed the key so that the verse and chorus could be traded between them as a duet; Steve Porcaro and Paich finished the keyboard solo at five in the morning. The basic rhythm track was done in a single afternoon, and the first guitar solo on the record was invented on the spot the first time they played it through.
The video for "Rosanna" began as a small idea of Paich’s. The finger-snapping that comes in under the line about her having been gone almost a year made him think of West Side Story, and what he had in mind was something restrained — like a Phil Collins clip he had seen, a couple of men snapping their fingers in a backlit alley. He passed the thought to director Steve Barron, and when they arrived at the lot there were ten pairs of men in leather jackets leaping about. Paich says the rest of the band looked at him with something less than gratitude.
The woman dancing in the video is Cynthia Rhodes, later Penny in Dirty Dancing. Patrick Swayze is in the same clip, much harder to spot: he is the one in the red jacket among Rosanna’s suitors. The West Side Story-style dance fighting predates Michael Jackson doing the same thing in "Beat It" by roughly a year.
Paich goes one step further with a guess of his own: that Michael Jackson saw the chain-link fence used in the "Rosanna" video and took it into "Beat It". And the fence, in turn, was something Paich had picked up from watching The Tubes use one on stage. He describes it as a butterfly effect of people watching each other’s videos.
"Africa" is also Paich’s. In the sleeve notes to the compilation Toto’s Best Ballads he described watching a late-night television documentary at the start of the eighties about death and suffering in Africa, being moved and appalled by it, finding that the images would not leave him, and trying to imagine how he would feel and what he would do if he were there.
Paich had never been to Africa when he wrote it. Lukather narrows that further, saying he is not sure Paich had even flown over the continent. The setting of the song was built entirely out of imagination.
What Paich constructed was a story about a social worker who goes to Africa, falls in love with the work and with a person, and has to choose between a lifetime of helping people and a family of his own. He mixed a little of himself into it. He was so immersed in work at the time, around the clock, that he sometimes felt he was becoming a victim of it — with no room left for marriage or children or the other things people his age were doing.
The riff in "Africa" came out of a Yamaha CS-80 Paich had only just acquired. He stumbled on a brassy flute sound on it and, by his account, had the riff within two minutes of playing. He kept the song back until the end of the album sessions before bringing it into the studio, where he played the outline on piano and scat-sang it to the band.
The loop that opens the record was made by hand on the spot. Jeff Porcaro asked engineer Al Schmitt whether he could fashion a drum loop then and there. Schmitt took two-inch tape and ran it around mic stands all over the room until it was some twelve feet long by the time he was finished. What they recorded onto it was Jeff playing with Roger Linn, inventor of the drum machine that carries his name — and that is the intro.
More percussion was piled onto that loop. Jeff Porcaro brought in his father, the respected jazz drummer Joe Porcaro, and his godfather Emil Richards, a percussionist whose credits ran from Sinatra to Zappa. Together with Toto’s own percussionist Lenny Castro, the three of them filled another two 24-track tapes. Lukather remembers Emil being known for his collection of African instruments, Joe bringing marimbas, and Lenny bringing shakers, congas and bells — all of it done before the term world music existed.
Bobby Kimball sang most of Toto’s leads, but the verses of "Africa" are sung by Paich, who wrote them. The lines are packed tight — the one about Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti is the famous example — and Kimball had trouble wrangling them. With Kimball taking the chorus instead, the song gained a wide swing of vocal dynamics.
Lukather has said that the chorus part was pitched so high that they only ever got it out of Kimball once. What is on the record is that single take; he was never able to manage it again.
An unnamed member of the band told Time magazine that they had simply been looking for something to close the album with, and had not expected "Africa" to do anything like as well as it did. The same piece mentions that if you listen closely under the line about catching some waves, some of them can be heard singing "catch some rays".
On their last day at Sunset Sound the band sat and listened to the finished "Africa" from top to bottom. Don Henley of the Eagles, at work on his first solo album in the room next door, wandered in and settled himself midway between the studio’s two big speakers. They turned the lights down and hit play, and when the last echoes faded the only person who said anything was Henley, who told them it was a really good record. Lukather says that mattered because Henley could be a harsh critic.
"Africa" nearly did not make the album. Lukather and Kimball told Rock Eyez that the person who pushed for it was a man at CBS named Al Keller. Lukather himself thought it was the worst song on the record — the lyrics made no sense to him and it did not fit — and announced that if it turned out to be a hit he would run naked down Hollywood Boulevard. He has been telling the story against himself ever since, as evidence of his gift for picking singles.
"Rosanna" was the designated lead-off single, but the record’s tipping point was the release of "Africa". It came out second in the United Kingdom and third in America, and went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100.
In Britain "Africa" was issued as a limited-edition picture disc cut into the shape of the African continent. The gimmick helped push it to number three, which made it their biggest hit in that country.
Several singles came off Toto IV, but only one of them topped the Adult Contemporary chart: "I Won’t Hold You Back", written by Lukather. It gave the band their first number one on that tally. "Africa" got only as far as number five there.
The backing vocals on the chorus of "I Won’t Hold You Back" are by Timothy B. Schmit, the Eagles’ bass player. The song had a second life later on: the DJ and producer Roger Sanchez sampled it on "Another Chance", which went to number one in Britain in 2001.
One track on Toto IV has no David Hungate bass on it. That is "Waiting For Your Love": Paich liked an early demo that used no bass guitar at all, so they took the same approach for the finished recording. Kimball had written a first version of the song back in the 1970s, when it was called "You Got Me".
The second single from Toto IV was "Make Believe". It was written by Paich, the band’s principal songwriter, and sung by Bobby Kimball — a man asking a former lover to pretend, for a while, that they are still in love.
Each of Toto’s first seven albums contains at least one song titled with a woman’s name. "Angela" on Toto, "Lorraine" on Hydra, "Goodbye Elenore" on Turn Back, "Rosanna" on Toto IV, "Carmen" and "Holyanna" on Isolation, "Lea" on Fahrenheit, and "Pamela" and "Anna" on The Seventh One. Most of them were written by Paich.
The habit has a source. Paich’s father, Marty Paich, arranged the Ray Charles album Dedicated to You, released in 1961, on which every single title was a woman’s name. Paich says he pulled the record out, noticed that, and started doing the same thing himself — a quiet nod back at his father’s work.
"Africa" went on to behave like no other hit. Paich says that at the last count there were 138 different variations of the song, and that he looks at what turns up on TikTok and YouTube and scratches his head. You could never aim for that, is his summary; it was music written purely from the heart.
In 1982, the year of Toto IV, Lukather, Paich, Jeff Porcaro and Steve Porcaro all played on Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Toto IV won Album of the Year in 1983 and Thriller won the same award the year after — two consecutive Albums of the Year with the same players on them.
Steve Porcaro had already worked on Off The Wall as a synthesiser player and programmer. For Thriller, Quincy Jones came to Toto looking for a rock song — Jackson wanted something along the lines of The Knack’s "My Sharona". What he found instead was a ballad Steve Porcaro had written, "Human Nature". For a man who had struggled to get his own songs recorded by his own band, it was as complete a vindication as could be arranged. He was in the room when Jackson cut the vocal.
The "My Sharona" Jackson was after turned out to be "Beat It". Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo, but the riff and the bass were played by Steve Lukather and the drums by Jeff Porcaro. David Paich played keyboards on several tracks across Thriller, "Billie Jean" among them.
Paich played on "The Girl Is Mine", the Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson duet, and helped arrange it alongside Lukather and Quincy Jones. In the room that day were Paul and Linda McCartney, George Martin, Geoff Emerick, Quincy Jones and Bruce Swedien, with Jeff Porcaro there too. Paich has described looking around and feeling as though he had died and gone to a producer’s heaven.
By Paich’s account he and Michael Jackson talked about music videos a good deal. Record companies at the time did not want to spend money on them and did not see the point. Paich told him that Toto had genuinely believed in videos as a marketing tool and that you could say something with them; Jackson said he would put his own money in. Paich sees those conversations as part of why Jackson started backing his own clips, "Billie Jean" among them.
Paich’s production credits include The Jacksons’ Victory, where he co-produced the tracks "Wait" and "The Hurt" with Steve Porcaro. Elsewhere he handled "The Girl Who Used to Be Me", the Oscar-nominated song from the film Shirley Valentine, and — working with his father Marty — Cheryl Lynn’s "Got to Be Real".
The follow-up to Toto IV, 1984’s Isolation, brought in the relatively unknown Dennis "Fergie" Frederiksen on vocals. It was also the album on which Mike Porcaro made his recording debut with the band — a third Porcaro joining Jeff and Steve.
"Holyanna" on Isolation was written by Paich and Jeff Porcaro, with Paich singing lead. It is about a girl at a Catholic school with a wild streak, and Paich says the starting point was that his sister and her friends went to Catholic girls’ schools. Several of them were rolled into the one figure of Holyanna. The word holy sits inside the title itself.
The "Holyanna" video was directed by Steve Barron, the same director as "Rosanna" and "Africa". The title role was played by Alice Adair, later seen in Beverly Hills Cop II.
When Isolation underperformed, the call went to Joseph Williams. He had been an LA acquaintance of theirs for years, and he had something else in common with Paich and the Porcaros: his father was the film composer John Williams, who had worked both with Paich’s father and with Joe Porcaro. Williams got the job by singing like Bobby Kimball at his audition.
Fahrenheit, in 1986, was the first album with Williams and also the end of Steve Porcaro’s first spell as a full member. Despite the money "Human Nature" had brought him, he felt sidelined inside the band — programming for Paich, as he puts it, and not feeling wanted. He kept working on later Toto albums and played two more tours, but says he was relieved to be out of the group.
The trumpet on "Don’t Stop Me Now", from Fahrenheit, is Miles Davis. Davis had covered "Human Nature", written by Steve Porcaro, and that connection was how the band talked him into recording with them. Lukather’s account is that they cut the track leaving the melody out, with open space in it, and asked Davis simply to blow over it and see what happened. Davis took out his Harmon mute and played it down in a single pass, carrying on into the blues after the song had begun to fade. When David Sanborn heard afterwards that they had a Miles track, he asked to be on it and doubled the melody.
"I’ll Be Over You" was written by Lukather with the Nashville songwriter Randy Goodrum, and it started as an assignment. The two had been asked to write something for Julio Iglesias. By Goodrum’s account neither of them was a fan, and trying to aim at that target felt like something their own instincts would not forgive. He wrote, half out of stubbornness, a deliberately un-Julio lyric; Lukather reacted strongly to it, and at that moment the song stopped being the job they had been given.
The route by which the song reached Toto was not planned either. Goodrum wanted to know how his demo was translating in another room, so he asked Lukather to take a rough mix over to Paich’s studio, which had the same monitors, and listen there. Somebody in the band heard it and said they had to cut it. Goodrum pointed out that he was not in the band; he was told that did not matter.
"I’ll Be Over You" opens on an unaccompanied vocal, which is unusual for a hit pop record. Goodrum has a theory about why. His demo had two bars of singing in front of the drum pattern, and Jeff Porcaro appears to have played to that demo in his headphones. If those two bars served as his count-in, there was never any room for an intro. Goodrum himself thinks the cold start is one of the best things about the record.
Michael McDonald sang backing vocals on "I’ll Be Over You" and appears in the video. His own band, the Doobie Brothers, were on hiatus at the time.
The shoot was troubled. Director Nick Morris had planned to film on the roof of what was then the Bekins building, a Hollywood landmark, but the logistics collapsed on the morning and everyone was sent home. They found another rooftop, and a few hours into filming it began to rain. The rain looked good, but there is very little footage of Toto in it: Lukather did not want his guitars getting wet, and refused the offer of a cheap replica on the grounds that some fans would know the difference.
Traces of a storyline survive in the video: actors playing a couple outside the building that appears on the Fahrenheit sleeve. The first cut played that story out, but when Morris sent it over the band had almost all of it wiped, keeping the focus on the performance on the roof.
The Goodrum–Lukather partnership did not end with that one song. The two went on to write "Anna", "Melanie", "No Love" and "One Road" for Toto, and Goodrum played keyboards on Lukather’s 2008 solo album Ever Changing Times.
On the eighth album, Kingdom of Desire, made after Joseph Williams had gone, Steve Lukather sang every lead vocal himself — the first Toto album on which a single voice carried the whole record.
On the evening of 5 August 1992, Jeff Porcaro died at the age of 38. The official cause was recorded as cardiac arrest brought on by chemical poisoning, following an allergic reaction while he was using pesticide in his garden at home. Kingdom of Desire was released after his death.
The cover of Kingdom of Desire was chosen by Jeff Porcaro: a skeleton clawing its way out of a grave. Lukather says he only saw what the image meant after the album had been released — as though, he puts it, Jeff had known he would not be around.
In their first conversation after Jeff’s death, Paich and Lukather agreed that Toto was finished. What changed that was the Porcaro family, who told them they should play music because that was what Jeff would have wanted. The band took the road instead, with the English drummer Simon Phillips behind the kit, and toured Kingdom of Desire.
Three albums of original material came between Kingdom of Desire and Toto XIV. Members came and went throughout, and the most unexpected of those movements was the return of Bobby Kimball, who fronted 1999’s Mindfields and 2006’s Falling in Between.
Falling in Between came out on 25 January 2006, roughly seven years after the previous studio album. In an interview carried at the time on the band’s official site, toto99.com, Lukather said he thought they had written better songs than on Mindfields, and that the new material was drawing reactions along the lines of "is that really them?" — which, he said, was the intention.
Toto have taken several breaks, but they have declared themselves over exactly once. In 2008 Steve Lukather — by then the only original member left — put out a statement on the band’s official website. He was explicit that it was not a break but the end, writing that he could no longer play a song he had recorded at nineteen with a straight face, and that he was fifty now. In 2010 they began playing together again.
What brought the band back was illness. The announcement in 2010 that Mike Porcaro had ALS led to a reunion and a world tour intended to raise awareness of the disease. Steve Porcaro and Joseph Williams returned for it, alongside Lukather and Paich, with Nathan East on bass.
There was another, more concrete purpose behind the 2010 restart. Speaking to BARKS, Lukather said one of the reasons for going back out was to raise money for Mike Porcaro’s medical costs. In the same interview he said that the years away had made him realise how irreplaceable this particular band was.
Keith Carlock took the drum chair after Simon Phillips left. Lukather, who had spent twenty-one years playing with Phillips, says Carlock’s style is nothing like his — closer, in fact, to Jeff Porcaro’s. Carlock is best known for his work with Steely Dan, but Lukather had played with him four years earlier at a New York club, on Bill Evans’s Toxic Monkey project. When they invited him into the studio, Lukather says, the answer was written on everybody’s face.
Toto XIV exists because one album was still owed. When Falling in Between came out in 2006 the band assumed it would be their last. Checking the paperwork, they found they still had a record to deliver. Paich describes that as a pleasant surprise, and says they decided against assembling odds and ends, choosing instead to write an organic record from scratch and make it count.
Lukather puts it less delicately. He calls Toto XIV an album born out of litigation, and says the lawyers told them making the record would be easier and a great deal cheaper than fighting about it. He also regards the result as a work of genuine depth and quality, and says they set out to make a classic Toto record.
"Burn", the first single from Toto XIV, came out of the very end of a complete song Joseph Williams had written. When Williams played it to Paich, Paich told him he loved not the song but its short closing passage. The piano figure in it became the engine that repeats underneath the whole of "Burn". Paich says it was the first thing they started writing specifically for the new album.
In April 2014 Lukather said the next album would be called Toto XIV and that they meant to release it early in 2015, with five songs written at that point. For him the line-up mattered: making a record with Joseph Williams, Steve Porcaro, David Paich and himself was something that had not happened since The Seventh One in 1988.
One more founding member came back for the recording of Toto XIV: the bassist David Hungate. Lukather made a point of what else the album meant — it was the first Toto record in twenty-seven years with Steve Porcaro on it as a full member — and said that it matters to have a Porcaro in Toto.
Toto XIV contains a song dedicated to Jeff Porcaro’s memory: "Unknown Soldier (For Jeffrey)". Lukather says he still thinks of Toto as Jeff’s band, and that every time they are on stage he feels Jeff is there with them.
The habit of comparing Toto XIV with Toto IV started with something Steve Porcaro said. He described the new album as, for him, the natural follow-up to IV — not as a slight on anything made in between, but as a sense that this was where the music should have gone.
"Alone" is one of the songs written from scratch for the fortieth-anniversary compilation 40 Trips Around the Sun, credited to Paich, Lukather, Steve Porcaro and Joseph Williams. Lukather told Billboard that the four of them sat in a room and wrote four brand-new songs top to bottom, writing, recording and playing everything together. The title says alone, but he described the song as an energetic and positive take on growing older.
The fortieth-anniversary European tour in 2018 was played by Lukather, Paich, Steve Porcaro and Joseph Williams with Shem von Schroeck on bass, Shannon Forrest on drums, Lenny Castro on percussion and Warren Ham on saxophone and vocals. The show in Amsterdam on 17 March was filmed for release, and Japan got it first, on 30 January 2019, ahead of the Japanese dates that February.
In November 2021 "Africa" passed one billion streams on Spotify. It is the band’s biggest hit, certified six times platinum in the United States alone. Paich, who co-wrote it, said this went beyond a dream coming true, thanked his family, his friends, the fans and Spotify, and added that he could see his co-writer Jeff Porcaro, who died in 1992, smiling and celebrating the moment alongside them.
In December 2017 a Twitter account appeared with a single purpose: getting Weezer to cover "Africa". It was run by a fourteen-year-old, who kept posting under a dedicated hashtag. On 29 May 2018 Weezer duly released their version. Toto answered by covering Weezer’s "Hash Pipe".
The sequel to that exchange was less warm. Weezer’s "Africa" earned them their first gold certification since "Beverly Hills" in 2005, but Lukather told Rolling Stone that he had tried to reach Rivers Cuomo and got nowhere — that he is friends with a great many of the biggest rock stars in the world and Cuomo is the only one who has refused to talk to him. He added that he had nothing bad to say about the band as a whole, and Weezer did bring Steve Porcaro on as a guest when they performed the song on American television.
"Africa" spread by unlikely routes as well. In the late nineties Straight No Chaser, an a cappella group at Indiana University, made it their signature number, then dropped it from a 1998 Christmas concert on campus to show off the rest of their repertoire — smuggling its melody into their version of "Twelve Days of Christmas" instead, as an in-joke for the audience. When one of them posted that performance to YouTube in 2006, it became one of the first viral videos, and led to an Atlantic record deal and the group re-forming.
Its television life has a logic of its own. A 2004 episode of Scrubs built as a tribute to The Wizard of Oz used it — a band named after the dog, chosen for exactly that reason. It also turned up in the first season of Stranger Things and in a 2009 episode of Chuck.
Toto IV took Album of the Year, but "Africa" itself was nominated for neither Record of the Year nor Song of the Year. The song put up in both categories, and the one that won Record of the Year, was "Rosanna". The American number one, meanwhile, was "Africa".
One of the first big-name musicians to talk Toto up in the press was Elton John. One of the first to talk them down was John Mellencamp. Opinion on this band was divided not only among critics but among their peers.
The music press was hard on Toto for most of their career. When they started, they were attacked for being session musicians at all — not raw, not real artists. Once they were hitting on the radio, much of the press turned round and accused them of sounding like every other popular act of the moment. Nobody ever questioned their craftsmanship. The complaint was that they were too polished.
Lukather’s version runs like this. They arrived at the end of the seventies, just as punk was new, and they were its opposite in every respect. Being session musicians got them called soulless; having no image and no pretty boy out front got them called faceless; and neither, in the verdict of the day, was real. He sums it up by saying they were simply the press’s whipping boys.
At the height of Toto IV’s success the band turned down the cover of Rolling Stone. Lukather’s reasoning was that they knew it would be a hatchet job. They were big enough at that point not to need the press on their side.
Lukather does not disown the hits, and admits they have given him a good life. He does, though, wish Columbia had put out some of their more challenging songs as singles at the time. Plenty of people know Toto as "that Africa band"; the band have repeatedly watched listeners who know only the hits turn up to a show and be startled by what they actually are. What is on the records, he argues, is only part of the story — like their progressive heroes, they treat albums as springboards.
Steve Porcaro says the band understood the value of writing a three-and-a-half-minute pop song early on: it mattered to the development of their career, and there is nothing wrong with that kind of material as long as you do it cleverly and do not undermine your own musical beliefs. By his reckoning Toto reached that conclusion a few years before Yes or Genesis did — though he is careful to add that he would never presume to call them pioneers for it.
Four decades into the American progressive scene, Paich maintains that Toto has little in common with peers such as Styx and Kansas. He likes what those bands do, but considers them more pop-oriented than Toto ever was, and places his own band closer to the British scene.
The band has a phrase for it: Toto Mode. As Paich describes it, they are all songwriters and producers in their own right, but something close to magic happens once they get into the studio and they start writing pieces meant for this particular ensemble and nothing else. Somebody brings in a fragment and plays it to the others, two of them pair off and start working it, and a song comes out of that.