Since he was a teenager in the early '70s, keyboardist David Paich has been working at top recording studios _ first as an apprentice with his father, Marty, a jazz musician and producer, then with Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson and just about every star you could name. Today, with his nearly 40-year-old band Toto, he's playing theaters, casinos and state fairs _ let's just say the sound isn't quite so pristine.
"I crack up when I watch (ex-Beach Boy) Brian Wilson's band _ they just nail everything, to the last detail of the record," says Paich, 62, by phone from his own studio in Calabasas, Calif. "We will let a few things slide, and give you the feel of the record, and try to get into the 95th percentile. We're very particular and picky ... but at the same time, we realize it's live. Our crowd fills in the rest."
The founders of Toto were experienced session hands when they started in 1978 _ at 17, drummer Jeff Porcaro had quit high school in order to tour with Sonny and Cher. But they mostly knew each other from attending the same school.
The original lineup _ Paich, lead guitarist Steve Lukather, keyboardist Steve Porcaro, drummer Jeff Porcaro, bassist David Hungate and singer Bobby Kimball _ had similar ideas about making pop music and came up with slick hits such as "Hold the Line."
By the early '80s, they were superstars _ "Toto IV," containing ubiquitous smashes "Africa" and "Rosanna," has sold more than 3 million copies in the U.S. Toto songs were engineered, as if by scientists in a lab, to be catchy and radio-friendly; Paich came up with the distinctive, off-beat finger-snaps in "Rosanna" after listening to Philadelphia soul records by the Spinners and the O'Jays. Early Toto songs achieved their commercial and creative goals. "When Jeff Porcaro was working on an Elton John album, and Elton John was lying on the front of the couch, when Jeff played 'Rosanna,' (John) stood up and said, 'What's that and who's that and what's that tape you're playing?'" Paich says.
Through its session work, the band had a connection with veteran jazz arranger and producer Jones, and "Q" enlisted several Toto members to be a sort of studio house band on Jackson's "Thriller." The future King of Pop called Lukather at 8:30 a.m., to introduce himself, and the sleepy guitarist (who would later say studio musicians in Los Angeles spent the '80s "gacked to the t _ " on cocaine) profanely dismissed him until Jones had to intervene. Among other things, Lukather and Jeff Porcaro found themselves on a three-day session in Tucson, Ariz., to record "The Girl Is Mine" with Paul McCartney and Jackson. "It was funkier than a m _," Lukather said recently.
Paich and several of his Toto bandmates are among the few musicians in history to have worked with both the Jackson-Jones and McCartney-George Martin production teams. "All I can say is, one's English and the other's not. One's R&B and jazzy and the other's more classical," Paich recalls. "But I give both of them a '10' as producers."
For its slickness, Toto was lambasted by critics _ Robert Christgau of the Village Voice wrote of "IV": "The lyrics are utterly forgettable, and the tone and spirit have nothing to do with rock 'n' roll." And sales began to drop by the early '90s, cementing Toto's legacy as the ultimate '80s pop band. Then drummer Porcaro died in 1992, of a heart attack reportedly connected to cocaine use. The band soldiered on but took a long time to fully recover. An upcoming DVD, "Toto: Live at Montreux 1991," documents the band's final tour with Porcaro and his brother, Mike, a bass player who joined later, and died in 2015.
"They seemed so f _ alive. We were having so much fun," says Lukather, 58, who recently mixed the sound on that film, by phone from an Italian vacation. "That was the only time that four-piece band existed (with Paich) and we did one tour. After that, everything morphed, and turned into what's going on now."
After 2006's "Falling In Between," Lukather, who by then was one of the band's few remaining founders, announced Toto would break up. It took a few years, and some intense meetings, to plot a reunion, but it finally happened in 2010 with Lukather, Paich, Steve Porcaro and others. The band's latest album, "Toto XIV," came out last year, and one of Lukather's agendas is to reclaim the band's legacy from critics and haters. Toto's songs, he proudly notes, remain hugely popular on digital services like Spotify, where "Africa" has more than 114 million streams and "Hold the Line" more than 52 million.
"We've had more hits than people realize. People think we're the 'Africa' band, (and) that's all we've ever done, and people go, 'Was that you, too?'" Lukather says. "All the cartoon shows that make fun of us _ we think it's the funniest thing in the whole wide world. Nobody laughs harder than we do. But we're still serious musicians."
