Steve Lukather

I have to preface this by saying that Lukather is one of my guitar heroes. Alongside Ritchie Blackmore, Rory Gallagher and the guys from Iron Maiden, he was the big reason why i started to play guitar - and one of the axes i use is a Music Man Luke.

Maybe that's also the reason, why i was disappointed with this book. When it comes to musicians books, i guess there are two ways: Either you it like Mötley Crüe and just dish out "The Dirt" on everybody or you talk about the music and what went on in the studio.

This book is neither really. Lukather calls everybody a "great cat", with mentioning only one bad experience - but not going into any details. He talks about his own drug usage, with the funniest story being about him doing shrooms and being so fucked, that George Clooney had to drive him to his home (while he was busy in the back seat with a girl) but outside of that, there are no really dirty story. On the contrary, large portions of the book are spend on defending Jeff Porcaro's death from a cocaine overdose, something the Band Toto still doesn't accept as reality. It's kinda funny though that Luke says Jeff was "a little Ozzy Osbourne" on the road, only to go "he never really did drugs" (then again, singer Joseph Williams for example openly talked about the fact that it was Jeff and David Paich who got him hooked on drugs...)
I can understand that you want to defend your friends and Luke and Jeff were really close, but it gets quite ridiculous.

He sadly also never really gets into interesting details about the music. Here we have a guy who play on who knows how many albums (2,500 to 3,000 or something like that), who played with some of the biggest names in music, who play on and co-wrote hits - but he rarely talks about it. It's a bit about Toto (and a lot of complaining about CBS and music critics) and a bit about Michael Jackson. Personally, i would've loved to hear some stories from his experiences with the likes of Alice Cooper (On the Inside, Luke even co-wrote one song there), Eric Clapton or Don Henley.

So, even as a very big fan of his work, i have to say i'm quite disappointed about this book.… (mais)