I’m listening to The Gospel According To Luke on Audible. It being the autobiography of Steve Lukather, read by him.
A brilliant guitarist, aside from being in Toto, he was part of a culture of L.A. session musicians who played on pretty much every song you heard. He got his break on Boz Scagg’s Down Two Then Left and being his band on tour. Luke reckons he was on at least 1500 different records. At one point he was so in demand and so ubiquitous that just about every song on the radio he was on, everyone from Alice Cooper, to Cher, America, Chicago, Joe Cocker, Elton John, Michael McDonald, Joni Mitchell, Olivia Newton John and many more.
My favourite Luke solo is on Lionel Ritchie’s Running With The Night, done in one take, it soars, is long, melodic and gymnastic. A staggering piece of work. He seems to enter solos running at pace. They have such energy. The solo on Rosanna is another typical of the man. It absolutely burns, you just want it to go on forever.
Ludicrous now that Toto were so disrespected by music critics at a time of punk and new wave, they became symbolic of everything bad. Complacent ‘corporate rock’ when the reality was these guys were simply elite musicians. I remember Steely Dan being similarly viewed, which I always thought was ludicrous and emblematic of the shallow stupidity of liking fashionable music to the exclusion of everything else.
Luke also played on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and really should have had writing credits. It’s especially interesting how he recorded Beat It, coming to it with Eddie's guitar solo in place along with the vocals and nothing else. Jeff Procaro (Toto’s drummer) created his own click track that they played to. That riff is Luke’s invention too.
He won a Grammy for co-writing George Benson’s Turn Your Love Around, one of five he’s won. Naturally this being late 70s, early 80s LA, there are lots of sex and drugs to go with the rock n roll and Luke isn’t shy about saying he indulged in that but he couldn’t have been so productive if high all the time. It must have been a great time to have lived in LA. Of course, they partied for too long, we all would’ve, even when the scene had moved on and that led to, let’s say euphemistically, problems. But you don’t get the highs without the lows.
These days, that session culture has all but disappeared, along with most of the music industry. He only does a few sessions now, but for fans of that era’s music, it’s fascinating to hear about what it was like. If you’ve not read the book, for a look into what life was like at the centre of the rock universe, I highly recommend it.
