Toto

Seen from today, the wariness that the more celebrated rock critics reserved for Toto looks almost grotesque, and mostly stemming from ideological trench warfare. Especially considering how much, on the other side of the fence, the institutions of the music industry — and, more importantly, their fellow musicians — loved and craved their sound, regarding them as a benchmark. So let's try to look at things from their point of view too.

If there's one artist who may have ruffled a few feathers among the harder, purer rock listeners, but who critics have always regarded as a "giant," it's Michael Jackson. It's curious, then, that this "giant" and his entourage, Quincy Jones chief among them, chose Toto to play on what would become their epic poem. The album that, more than any other, was backed by promotion and blanket media saturation. And which ended up becoming the best-selling album in history.

Five of the nine songs that make up "Thriller" feature Toto as instrumentalists and/or arrangers. One of the album's most graceful tracks, "Human Nature," was written by Steve Porcaro.

The band that critics ended up singling out with scorn, as the epitome of everything rock shouldn't be, implying more or less explicitly malicious accusations such as catering exclusively to a white audience and therefore being an unwitting advertisement for racism (in a decidedly delicate era: let's not forget that before "Thriller," MTV was reluctant to air videos by Black musicians). The band that critics held up as a symbol of a rock scene creatively spent and increasingly aimed at an audience that was less and less young, and thus less and less rebellious. The band that critics accused of helping to shackle — though not alone — rock's most street-level spirit within an over-polished, unintuitive professionalism.

And which, despite everything, was chosen to play on the record by the man who was, according to those same critics, saving pop music (from what, exactly, was never entirely clear). The man who did so much, in the collective imagination, to bridge Black and white. The man who was, without a doubt, launching — alongside Prince — the racial reckoning, at least on a symbolic if not a factual level, of millions of young Americans.

Somehow, Jackson and Jones failed to notice the danger, and not only did they summon to their court the very musicians critics saw as their antithesis, but they also made clear how much they valued their work.

Even today, for many music journalists "Thriller" is a landmark album, yet Toto, who were a significant part of it, are almost never mentioned in reviews. The producer gets mentioned. Eddie Van Halen gets mentioned. Paul McCartney gets mentioned. Even Rod Temperton gets mentioned, who, aside from having written some of Jackson's most famous songs, is hardly a household name. Toto, though, are rarely so much as noted. As if acknowledging them would amount to admitting their worth, thereby collapsing the whole ideological edifice painstakingly built over decades of moralizing about what pop and rock can and cannot be.

None of this was of any interest to Jackson and Jones. What they wanted on their record were the best musicians around, and in 1982 — as anyone in the industry knew — the best in the United States were Toto. To them, Toto were simply a group of extraordinary instrumentalists with a distinctive sound, yet also capable of adapting to the most varied situations, exactly as their already rich session-player résumé attested. They saw none of the rest, simply because there was nothing else to see.

The story of "Thriller" and that of "Toto IV," the band's fourth album, are closely intertwined. "Toto IV" was released in April 1982, the very month the sessions for Jackson's album began. A coincidence that actually led Toto to delay the promotion of their own record.

It exploded anyway, with all its commercial appeal, in the summer of that year, and stayed afloat well into the next thanks to a run of era-defining singles. "Toto IV" reached number 4 in the United States, staying on the charts for a year and a half. The same result in the UK. It then topped the charts in Canada, Australia, and across northern Europe, came close to doing so in Italy, and even made inroads in markets notoriously tough for Western bands, like Japan. Today it's not hard to estimate at least ten million copies sold worldwide — hardly surprising given how enduring two songs like "Rosanna" and "Africa" have proven, the latter especially boasting a fame that spans generations and cultures like few other songs released in the twentieth century.

"Toto IV" was, after all, conceived as the comeback album. The year before, "Turn Back" had proven something of a disappointment, and Toto risked an early decline after the glory of their debut. Sure, they could have simply carried on as session players, given the demand, but at a certain level, the importance of seeing your own work valued surely comes into play as well.

The lineup included David Paich, keyboardist and principal songwriter, Steve Lukather on guitar, singer Bobby Kimball, David Hungate on bass, and the notorious Porcaro brothers, Jeff on drums and Steve as second keyboardist. Besides Kimball, three other members also took on lead vocal parts, and it was precisely this alternation between different vocal timbres that became one of the band's most distinctive trademarks.

They're still the same people who played on the debut, but only just: Hungate could no longer keep up with that lifestyle and wanted to be reunited with his family. He recorded his parts and flew off to Nashville, where he'd become an in-demand session player in the country scene.

He was swiftly replaced by a third Porcaro, Mike, who would stay with Toto until 2007, when illness forced him to step down. It's therefore him who appears in the album's first promotional video, the one for "Rosanna," even though he actually had no hand in the recording.

"Rosanna" is also the track that opens the sequencing, extraordinarily complex in its catchiness: introduced by a jazzy drum passage, it has a laid-back, funky-flavored verse sung by Lukather, a variation on the verse - or pre-chorus, if you prefer - sung by Kimball in a brighter key, and a chorus that's itself split in two, one part almost whispered, with finger snaps up front in the mix, and one part shouted out in unison. At its center sit roughly thirty seconds of virtuoso playing, split between synthesizers and guitar, packed with a huge number of overdubs, mostly courtesy of Steve Porcaro, giving the impression of an interlude far longer than it actually is. After a reprise of the song, the musicians break out, starting around the 4'35" mark, into a memorable closing mini-jam, kicked off by Paich's honky-tonk piano and Jeff's shuffle rhythm, with the snare hitting on the upbeat of the third of the four beats.

It's striking to think just how contagious such a dense track can be. Before long, it was camped out for several weeks at number 2 on the Billboard chart, helped along by a video with a whiff of "West Side Story" about it, directed by Irishman Steve Barron, one of the greatest directors the field has ever seen (just take a look at his Wikipedia page, which lists so many credits it could warrant an entry all its own).

Some tracks are more direct, but always in the name of refinement, polish, and formal perfection.

"Make Believe" is a lovable piano-driven rock song, sitting halfway between the so-called yacht rock bands they were related to (the West Coast sound of the likes of Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan) and the British bands looking toward the new continent, Supertramp above all, but also Genesis, newly minted champions of pop (think of "Misunderstanding", from "Duke").

"I Won't Hold You Back", the only track on the album written and sung solely by Lukather, is a ballad with a rather overbearing orchestral arrangement, redeemed however by a melancholy tone capable of tempering its sweetness. Roger Sanchez must certainly have noticed that melancholy streak when he shrewdly sampled a fragment of it to build "Another Chance", a 2001 dance hit and one of the best of its era.

For his part, Steve Porcaro writes and sings "It's a Feeling", whose atmosphere drops into the tracklist like something alien, with its ethereal, delicate guitars, keyboards trailing off in wisps of sound in the distance, and a voice that never wavers. An impalpable track, among the most precious in the band's catalogue, it makes you regret how little the author wrote.

With "Waiting For Your Love", Toto return to one of their earliest loves, funk music, more overtly than anywhere else on the record. After all, the full band had first come together back in 1975 to record Boz Scaggs's "Silk Degrees". Co-written in large part by Paich, that album was a superb portrait of white funk and one of the starting points of the yacht rock era. Later on, some of Toto's earliest hits, such as "Georgy Porgy" and "99", also leaned fully into funk.

"Waiting For Your Love" is certainly the best track on "Toto IV" among those sung solely by Kimball, with its syncopated electric piano, its polished bassline, but above all its voice - gritty and powerful, arguably the most naturally gifted of the sextet's singers, though it would soon be partly compromised by alcohol and drug abuse.

Closing the album is "Africa", a Billboard number 1 in February 1983, and Toto's anthem. As in "Rosanna", Kimball is once again used to detonate the chorus, in contrast with a verse sung in a relaxed tone, this time by Paich. Paich himself also worked out how to reproduce the sound of a kalimba using a Yamaha digital piano based on FM synthesis. Percussion from famed session player Lenny Castro helps thicken up the rhythm section.

A mix of exotically-flavored electronic pop and hard rock trimmed down for radio play, "Africa" became one of the defining tracks of what many would end up labeling AOR. In truth, the meaning of that acronym is still shaky today and shifts depending on the country and the traditions of music criticism, so much so that depending on the context you see it used in, it can refer to Steely Dan just as much as Journey. It would therefore be more accurate to talk about arena rock, a term that marks out a narrower territory - though with "Africa" the question doesn't really arise, since it could loosely be considered a relative of both of the aforementioned bands (albeit with decidedly less intellectual ambition than the former, and less adolescent innocence than the latter).

At the 1983 Grammy Awards, Toto swept the board, winning - among others - the categories of Album of the Year, Record of the Year (for "Rosanna") and Producer of the Year. It did little good, in the years that followed, for certain corners of the press to keep attempting a perpetual damnatio memoriae. For anyone who appreciates rock music capable of marrying decorative artistry with massive success, this remains a run of songs worth treasuring.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

02/12/2018