Steve Lukather has enjoyed a long and celebrated career as a guitarist. Beyond his work in Toto, he's performed on hundreds of recordings with a remarkable range of artists including Boz Scaggs, Michael Jackson, Don Henley, Lionel Richie, Quincy Jones, and other superstars from the late ’70s and early ’80s.
In a new interview with Matt Pinfield for his New & Approved show, Lukather discusses how he discovered his guitar gifts early in life and went on to hone his talents through session work.
But he says he believes young players today can sound better than they really are thanks to the quality and affordability of gear at their disposal. As a result, he says, many young people don't appreciate just how much talent was required in his day to create recordings and perform them live with a high degree of similarity to the original records.
Lukather covers a good deal of ground in the half-hour show, from his earliest days as a guitarist through his session years and his current activities.
At one juncture, he shares when and how he started out by learning the electric guitar solo in the song “Gloria,” by Them, when he was all of eight years old. “People didn't believe that I could do that at eight years old or whatever," he says. “For some reason I could hear stuff, and it just came to me, man. It's very weird. I can't explain it. One day I couldn't play; the next day I could, all of a sudden. The first position all came in.”
He likens his innate ability to having knowledge gained from a past life. “I must have known this somehow," he says, "because nobody showed it to me."
Years later, Lukather honed his skills as a session guitarist and developed the techniques that made him one of the most celebrated players of his era. Over the years he’s played on hundreds of tracks, often uncredited, as a studio gun-for-hire. Playing as many as four sessions a day didn’t just improve his guitar chops, he says — it also helped him develop vital skills as an arranger.
“It was stuff we'd never heard before. No rehearsals, no demos,” he explains of his session calls. “We'd show up, and whoever was there would strum their guitar or play their song on the piano, and we’d all listen. And we all have ‘arranger’ ears and hear parts that aren't there to focus around the melody and the groove.
"So then we'd add our stuff to it. They give us a pencil sketch and at the end, in an hour or so, we had a nice little painting — not quite finished, but pretty good.
“So you do that four times a day, you get a pretty good muscle for it.”
Lukather believes the hard work involved in learning how to play in the pre-internet years gave both musicians and audiences an appreciation for the skills required to perform. He says he’s still surprised when he sees a live performance on YouTube from rock’s classic years.
“They were singing and playing, live on TV. And it sounds just like the record, man,” he says. “There was no Pro Tools. These guys were doing it. They could play! Three-part harmony — perfect. Don't tell me it can't be done.
“What makes it now a little weird is that you don't have to be that good and you can sound really like you are. The thing is, like, people say, ‘Wow, they're really playing,’ as if that's weird. Do you want to look at your doctor and say, ‘I hope you’re doctoring well’?
“I mean, I'm just sounding like some bitter old guy. I'm not. I laugh at it all. But, you know, sometimes you want to say, ‘Unplug everything and let’s see where everybody's really at.’ ”
Lukather is currently planning to launch a North American tour with Toto, Christopher Cross and Men at Work for summer 2025. The run begins July 18 at West Palm Beach, Florida.
He recently say down with Guitar Player to discuss guitars and named the top guitar in his collection: ""It was just appraised for… let's just say a whole lot of money," he says. "I don't want to take this thing around!”
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