I Can Tell By That Look in Your Eye: 1978-2015
Presented by Anteater and Unknown Soldier two Toto Disciples
The classic Toto band shot circa 1978
Band Introduction
Anteater has come up with the fairly original idea of hosting a joint journal focusing on the classic AOR band Toto and he has asked me of course to co-host it with him, as he knows I’m a fanatical Toto fan and has conned me into writing the intro for it.
Before starting this concept we had been bouncing ideas off each other, on how to present a detailed discography of the band and their twelve studio albums, so as to celebrate their thirteenth studio release that comes out at the end of this month. We’ve split the albums between us in terms of introducing each one, but once the introductions are over we’ll be going into an informative chat about each album in some detail, where we’ll be dissecting everything that’s great and possibly not so great about each studio album. We may even include some live or solo stuff as well, but we’ll see how it goes. We’ve also opted for my journal format in general, but there will be some changes there to incorporate the novelty of our ‘chatting section’ which of course is something new for us.
Toto as a band are the perfect example of an all-encompassing AOR outfit and they released their debut album in 1978, the year where genres like punk and new-wave were king on both sides of the Atlantic and progressive rock was looking like old hat. I mention progressive rock here, as had the band formed several years earlier they may well have been playing a progressive rock sound, especially since the band members had exquisite ability as musicians. The band though found that crucial commercial niche provided by the likes of Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, two bands that were great examples of how to corner the very viable soft rock market, a sound that hugely appealed to a North American audience. Newer bands like the meticulous Boston and the harder edged Foreigner, clearly showed that there was a strong market for this kind of sound. The members of Toto themselves were already known around Los Angeles as not only seasoned session musicians, but as ‘the session musicians to have’ and they had worked on a large amount of quality releases by other artists between the mid to late 1970s and in some cases writing material for other artists as well.
Like most bands the original line-up was pretty pivotal with the heavy-weight vocals of
Bobby Kimball dominating, guitarist
Steve Lukather who would become the band leader a few albums later, bassist
David Hungate, keyboardist
David Paich the heart and soul of the band in terms of their material and feel,
Steve Porcaro synthesizers/keyboards and
Jeff Porcaro on drums, who in the early days was probably the band leader as he was the eldest. The third Porcaro brother bassist Mike would join officially much later on, but acted initially as a session musician for the band, in fact the band often used other notable session musicians such as Lenny Castro amongst others as well. Apart from Bobby Kimball, other members like Steve Lukather, David Paich and Steve Porcaro would all feature as principal vocalists as well, something unique as they all added something special to the band in the vocal department.
Finally no introduction for Toto would be complete without mentioning how the band got their name. Common knowledge has it that the band took it from Dorothy’s dog in the Wizard of Oz, also from Bobby Kimball’s real surname which was Toteaux and even an Italian person I once knew, thought the band had taken it from the famous Italian comedy actor Toto. The truth though is something far more reputable and as bassist David Hungate explained, the name ‘Toto’ is a Latin term that means all-encompassing, a description which perfectly suited the band.