For the record, all the original members of Toto (apart from Bobby Kimball) were studio musicians. That's how they met and I think how the band ended up coming together in the first place. One of the reasons that so many of the records that came out of LA during the early 80's sort of sounded kinda similar was because they typically had some combination of Lukather, Paich and at least one or two Porcaros playing on them. They and a handful of other musicians were the "A Team", basically the late 70's and 80's version of The Wrecking Crew.Originally Posted by Dan Roth
I remember talking to someone about that song She's A Beauty by The Tubes, and I made a comment about how surprised I was to find out it's Lukather playing the guitar solo (surprised because I know both Bill Spooner and Roger Steen were more than capable guitarists). The guy I was talking to said, "Yeah, that entire record was basically Toto pretending to be The Tubes". Now that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but that wasn't all that uncommon. I know for instance, Lukather also played on one song on Cheap Trick's Dream Police album. Lukather has a list of all the records he played on, on his website. Let's just say he's just as prolific as, let's say Tony Levin, for instance.
As for how many Porcaros there are. Well, Jeff of course is no longer with us, but there's also Steve (keyboards) and Mike (bassist). Mike actually joined the band later on, their original bassist was David Hungate. And for their record, their father, Joe Porcaro was also a percussionist, who was part of the Wrecking Crew and taught at the Musician's Institute, I believe.
Oh, and I've over the years read a few interviews with Lukather. He's a really funny guy. Foul mouthed guy, too, but extremely hilarious and brutally honest about his opinion today's pop music. My favorite line was in a piece he did around 2000 where he was talking about how eventually the metal guys were going to have their guitars tuned so low that it'd make you crap your pants. Another time, commenting on the autotune and quantizing software that was becoming common place in both pop and rock music, he said "Nobody sings that perfectly in tune, and nobody plays that perfectly in time, either". In one piece, he was asked what the studio scene in LA was like these days, and he said "What scene?! There's is no studio scene anymore, you come in, play four bars of music, they loop it and that's it! The session is over in 10 minutes!".
Another time, he was asked what his rig was like these days, and he said he dumped the giant effects rack rig he used in the 80's, because one day he plugged it into one of those multi-effects units, which had the various effects presets named after the various guitarists whose tones each preset was meant to emulate. And of course, there was one named after him, and it was this heavily effected sound with a lot of flanger, delay and reverb, and that was the first time he realized how "over processed" his guitar tone was. So he cut his rig back to just a few basic things as a result. The way he made it sound, he hadn't realized his guitar tone sounded like that, until he heard it on this one device, and realized it he had "gone too far" with the effects.
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