November 12, 2003
Interview with Steve Lukather 1
Steve Lukather is a talented musician who has enjoyed a spectacular career; his partial discography on http://www.stevelukather.net is credit to his talent and the experiences he has had. In speaking with "Luke" we have learned of his humility, respect and caring for the music and other artists past and present. He is not one to mince words or hide what he feels, he calls it like he sees it and has the experience to back his opinions up. If you want to learn more about Luke and what he has done you might want to start by scanning the credits of your favorite albums, there is an extremely good chance you are already very familiar with his work! His latest record "Santa Mental" has just been released and promises to spice up any Christmas Party!Kathy: Good morning Luke, this is Kathy from Strike A Balance, did you have you're cup of Java yet?
Luke: I'm working on it; I just woke up a minute ago. What's going on?
Kathy: I'm just calling for the interview, do you need a minute?
Luke: That's okay, I'm sorry, I'm just kind of spaced out. I went to bed at 9:30, 10:00 o'clock last night so it's not like I had a late night. I've just been going, going non stop, I mean I have one week of before I go back on the road again.
Kathy: I don' know how you do it, but thank you for taking the time to do this interview.
Luke: No problem, go ahead with the questions...
Kathy: OK, Hendrix, Page, Clapton, Santana- are all masters of the guitar, along with Steve Lukather. We know of you as guitarist, vocalist, composer, arranger and producer, but would like to start the interview by asking you to describe yourself. In your own words - the man behind the music...
Luke: That's an interesting question, still the ever humble student really. I mean I've had a chance to work with just about all of my heroes. People that I started listening to in the 60's when I first started playing the guitar, I've worked with Eric, I've worked with Jeff Beck, Santana, I mean I've worked with just about all the greats, if Hendrix was alive, I'm sure I would have hung out with him at least. I managed to know just about every great guitar player; we just fall in each others paths. Most of the guys, we have such like minds we've become very good friends. I'm still a huge fan of music, I mean I still care about it. Maybe too much, in this day and age, I think if you care too much you're considered a slick soulless musician, which is really lame and unwarranted. It depends on which side of the tracks you're on; if you're on the side of the tracks that you actually believe what they write about in spin magazine then I'm really not the guy you want to talk to; because I have nothing in common with 90% of the artists that are mentioned in there. I come from a different generation, I mean my son is just about ready to sign a record deal. He's 16 years old and they're chasing after him, he's a modern rock guy, so I'm really hip to what's good and bad in today's music. That's also subjective, you know what I mean? But me, like I said, I'm still trying to discover new things, new ways to play, and music that gets me off. But I still keep going back to the old stuff.
Kathy: For the love of the music not love of money?
Luke: Well you know there's a reason why the Beetles are still on the radio all the time, I think a lot of music from today is very forgettable. I mean when their putting like "American Idols" on the cover of Rolling Stone which used to be some covert, underground magazine, what does that tell you? Deon Winters sold out, finally.
Kathy: Or a lot of if you want to say musicians, if you use that term loosely, they don't even play their own music or sing, they can't play an instrument, they don't write any of their own music...
Luke: I own a recording studio that major stars recorded in, it not a home studio, it's a commercial studio. Big, big console, I bought the console from EMI in London, which is the same console that they did Dark Side of the Moon, and stuff like that on, it has a great history. But those young guys you know, the best musician in the band is the Pro Tools guy; I mean there's the old joke now. What's the producer say to the new band after the first take? "That was really shitty guys go home." and then they fix it. I don't come from that school. We sat in a room, we still sit in a room and play together till we get a take and then we play everything until we like it, we use technology but like I said I did my Christmas record on a 24 track analogue; no quick tracks, no computers, no nothing, and did the whole record in 7 days. From top to bottom. Mixing and everything. So it can be done. So many people depend on the technology rather than use it, there's a big difference. I'm all for it, but if you can't play, then you can't play.
Kathy: Like Milli Vanilli,
Luke: It's worse than that now,
Kathy: It's worse than that?
Luke: It is, I mean they were just the first guys to get busted, I mean they were just props anyway, they weren't even trying to pretend like, I mean they were pretending like they were actually singing the parts, but there are people now that can sing a little bit and play a little bit and are able to make great sounding records. Then you go see them live and their terrible.
Kathy: And then we wonder why,
Luke: It's because they have a short life span, they're all the hype and then it goes away. Immediately. There are no long careers when a band has two to three albums; that's it. Bye! And their not good enough players to join somebody else's band, it' all about being a rock star, not being a musician, that's a huge difference between when I grew up and now. Anybody can be a rock star, but it takes years of dedication, years and years of dedication to be a musician.
Kathy: While writing an interview for many musicians is challenging due to their long spanning careers it seems possible yours was twice as hard given your Toto career and your career outside of the band...
Luke: I was kinda of lucky in the sense, more so than most musicians to have two careers, and sometimes three. I have the band that was like the guys I went to high school with, that I still love, which is the only reason we actually play together now and then; besides they pay us real good to get back together once in a while. But you know I have my solo shit and I have my session career and then I write songs, I just try to do as much as I can.
Kathy: Have you worked twice as hard as other artists and maybe had twice as much fun?
Luke: I think so, I mean how many bands, if you look at my discography on my web site, and that's a partial discography. That's not even the full thing, that's like about half of it. I've done thousands of records, with just about every major artist in the last twenty-five to thirty years of all different styles of music.
Yet we still take so much shit from the critics. I mean we're still the whipping boys, even though they can't really say we can't play, they can say they don't like the music, that's very subjective, and that's cool I understand that, but they just keep beating us up whenever they compare anything to like slick produced stuff, like shitty bands like Toto or something like that. It's like well guys, you know, lets go see the White Stripes discography and see how many those guys have played on -'One'. Nothing against them, I pulled them out of the air because they're this years model. Everybody loves them for some reason. The critics build people up, then smack them right back down, they've always smacked us down, but here we are twenty-six years later, still quietly selling records and we just got off the tour, we were playing from six to forty-five thousand people a night, headlining. So, I mean there's an audience for us, not necessarily in America, but it's a big world out there, and we stomp the competition outside of the U.S. and England. But, all the press, all the big music presses are in the U.S. or England, so if you get beat down there, you just assume that everyone is supposed to hate you. I laugh at it now, at first it hurt a lot because I didn't understand where it was coming from, but you know - whatever.
Kathy: You have had twice as much fun.
Luke: I've had so much fun, I've worked with so many cool people, I mean really! I have stories I could tell you that are so ridiculous that you wouldn't even believe them. Just with the people I've got to hang out with and play, to go out to dinner with; sitting at dinner with Bob Dylan and George Harrison, Okay right - if my high school friends could see me now, you know.
And they were great cats. Me and George we're good friends he's the reason why I play the guitar. And you know it's just having experience with Miles Davis and stuff like that. The assumption that he didn't like white people was just trash, that's not true. To me he's just a daunting figure, if he doesn't like you, you'll know it; but he was great with us, it was an honor. We had him play on a record and he wouldn't take any money for it. Yet other people try to get him and he's like "I want a hundred thousand dollars to play a solo." He wouldn't take it, he liked us for some reason. Not because we were the hippest guys in the world, but he liked our vibe I guess. I would take that over critical acclaim any time; that is critical acclaim.
All my peers come out to see us, we have a mutual respect for each other, nobody cares about a bad review, except the guys that write them. It's much more fun to write a bad review than a good one. Come on they're much more fun to read. If I pull myself out of the equation, some of the funniest shit I've ever read in my life is about me. I mean one of them said that our parents should have been sterilized, so that we could never be born to play the music that we play. Well your picking on my mom and dad, come on. Yeah but it's funny.
Kathy: This might take you a little back. Make you think. The fact is that you started working at a very young age, even as a child prodigy and have continued to amaze the world with your talent.
Luke: Come on your awfully kind
Kathy: How do you continue to produce and create such incredible songs? Where do you draw your motivation from?
Luke: I don't think about it that much, given a situation, as soon as I walk into a recording studio or walk onto the stage, my head is just completely outside of my body. I just go with my instincts and what I know, and my experience. I learned a lot when I was young, I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut, watched the legendary producers and engineers that I got a chance to work with when I was still a teenager, how do they do it, and the legendary artists. You know, sitting there watching Elton John write a song, those are experiences that you just shut up and watch. And go, "Wow! I can't believe I got to see." So it was that easy for him, mother f**k**. Right you just go wow, some people take a lot more time, there was an era in the 70's, where they used to hire the whole band and we'd sit there and listen to kick drums sound all day long. That's when we used to get into trouble, because there was too much time sitting around doing nothing, that's when I learned about the dark side of music. We had a lot of laughs. But you know, that was then this is now.
Kathy: Throughout your career you have worked, and we have touched on this, with some of the biggest names in history, time and again creating timeless music,
Luke: All of it was timeless I promise you that
Kathy: What accomplishments or times do you look back on as being the best experiences?
Luke: Man there's so many I could write a book.
Kathy: Yeah, you've mentioned already Elton John and George Harrison.
Luke: Jamming Beetles songs with Paul McCartney and George Harrison was pretty cool, you know at different times. Playing with Jeff Beck, he's one of the greatest guitar players ever to touch an instrument. Just hanging with the greats! I had great experiences working with Don Henley early on; he's such a great singer, me and Joel Walsh got to play on the same track it was a song called Dirty Laundry way back in the early 80's. Love the track, and Walsh was a big influence to me. I mean, eclectic stuff, getting a chance to work with all the great guitar players. Eddie Van Halen is a great friend of mine you know, playing with those guys. There aint too many fools stupid enough to get up and play with them. We're neighbors, been friends for 25 years. I've sung on their records, I've played with them live, they play with us live. Just being around people that are great. Just look down at the discography, I don't even remember half the shit, but I remember the great stuff.
Going to Hollywood Bowl and then having them make me come out and play with Clapton, in my home town, I thought that was pretty cool. It sounds like I'm name dropping which is really gay and I don't really want to do that, but I mean you're asking me great experiences, so many I could go on for hours, once I start thinking about it there's a million stories that come flood my mind, I'm one very, very lucky mother f**k**.
Kathy: How would you explain your ability to be able to capture the style of, and perform with so many different artists with such a wide range of sounds, I mean you almost become a chameleon?
Luke: Well you have to be, as a studio musician, that's what the job entails. I didn't know what a studio musician was until I got to high school and met the Porcaro brothers, and now it's this whole other world opened up, I was going, you mean this guy, the same guys played on all these different records, and I became really intrigued with people like Larry Carlton, who's a great friend and a great collaborator, and has been a very big influence on me and all the guys that made all those records. I started listening to Jazz, Funk, regular R and B, Country Music and realized in my studies, that I needed to learn, or at least be capable at all styles, I was basically a Rock and Roll guy.
Kathy: That's your roots
Luke: Yeah, that's my roots, the Beetles, the Stones, Pink Floyd, you know. All that whole 60's era, Hendrix, come on. Through that I learned how to read, which wasn't as important as you'd think it would be, but it's still important, because they basically wanted me to play what I wanted to play, I was very lucky to get what I did, not just be Joe Studio guy reading charts for movies and T.V. So that's where I got a chance to work with all the great artists, because it was pre-machines and computers and stuff, you used to have to hire real people to play. Now the days of the studio musician; aside from T.V. and film are gone, there is no scene any more. It used to be wonderful to play with all these great musicians, from London, from New York, or Nashville, we'd all get together and play, they put these super groups together, it was just awesome, it doesn't exist anymore. There's no budget for it anymore, nobody cares anymore. It's like get the record done and put it out and lets see how much money we make. That doesn't work because a hundred bands sound just like it.
I hate to say it but... I can't keep up with it. I keep telling my son, Trevor man, who the f**k is that. Oh that's so and so, and I said well that sounds just like that other band. And he said yeah it does kinda huh... and he's sixteen.
Kathy: As a musician you've lived the life so many dream of. Would you say that it's everything it's cracked up to be? And if it wasn't music in your life what do you think you would have pursued?
Luke: I can't... I started playing when I was seven years old, I'd be saying, "do you want fries with that?" I never thought that it wasn't going to happen, you've always got to have that kind of tenacity, not ego, but I'm not going to take no for an answer because this is what I'm going to be doing for the rest of my life. Again that was pre manufactured rock star like they have these days. Our whole deal as we were told, you have a billion to one chance to make it in the music business, if you're really f**k*** good. It was never like how pretty you looked, image was important but it wasn't really that important, there were some ugly ass bands in the 60's and 70's that were really incredible musicians, now you know what I'm talking about. I'm not mentioning any names. Just take a look at some of the album covers. You know the 80's hair was bad, there's some real funky people in the 60's and 70's.
Kathy: You're great. In the beginning you did a lot of session work.
Luke: A lot yeah.
Kathy: ...and understandably you became more and more selective of with whom and when you would play.
Luke: Well I got to the A list so even the gigs that I turned down were pretty cool, I was doing 20-25 sessions a week, it was on top of working with my band.
Kathy: What do you think those sessions did for you as an artist to help in your development?
Luke: Well I learned how to get my sound together in the studio, how to play with quick tracks, create instantly and flowing with fresh ideas, if somebody said, well I don't like that, you have to come up with another one right away. And just you know, having a laugh, personality can have a lot to do with how deep you got into the session. You had to have the right personality for it. The right sense of humor and the right respect for your elders too. Like if I was playing with Carlton, or Lee Ritenour or Jay Granten or anybody like that or Dean Parks, I'd sit in the guitar 2 chair, I wouldn't t be presumptuous even if they wanted me to do the solo, this is respect, how we do this here. You had to know your place; you had to earn your way into the seat.
Kathy: If you could re-do one thing in your past musically, what would you change?
Luke: The name of my f**k*** band, I always hated it, and it has this stigma attached to it, if we were named anything else we may have gotten a little less shit. I always hated the f**k*** name. I still do, but now I can't lose it, it's like a part of me. I've learned to accept it for what it is, people love, it people hate it - whatever.
Kathy: What were some of the other possibilities?
Luke: There's one that I liked called Ripe Jack, that was Jeff Porcaros idea, basically a euphemism for a hard on. It was; and there were some other ones that were passed around, but Page was persistent, and he kept writing it on the demo's that we were doing for the record company, and it just stuck, like a bad rash that comes back every year. But like I said the stigma is only really attached to England and the U.S. everywhere else in the world they don't really care, it means a lot of different things in different languages. It's a betting term in Europe, so it's not just a little dog, which I always f**k*** hated. I don't think it had anything to do with the music we were making. And that's the thing, it's really easy to make fun of a band that has a shitty name, the Goo-Goo Dolls, come on, whether you like the music or not the Goo-Goo Dolls? I'm sure they hate their name too. But it becomes its own thing, I like those guys, I mean don't get me wrong, I've really dug a lot of their stuff, but you know what's in a name? It becomes its own trademark. Like "McToto".
Kathy: Your life has been filled with music, good friends and hopefully good times, what out side of music and tennis do you enjoy, what do you do to "Strike A Balance?"
Luke: I haven't played tennis in a while, I hurt my arm, but I would say Family, you know my children, I mean I raise my kids; I got custody of them fourteen years ago. My daughter just started college yesterday, at the University of Arizona studying psychology - (LAUGHS!!), and my son is following in the family tradition.
Kathy: Someone to analyze you!
Luke: Oh it's wonderful, I'm so proud she's the first one in my family to go. My wife, I have been married a year, I have a great wife! I never thought I'd get married again, but I found the right person. I was a dog for twelve years.
Kathy: So you've changed your ways...
Luke: Oh yeah, and you know what, I am forty years old, and I didn't miss anything, I had a great time. Now I'm having a great time relaxing through it you know, I don't have to prove as much. When you're young, that's when your being used is wonderful, because you are always having to prove yourself and your strong enough to do it. When you get older you don't lose your fire, you just don't have to fight so hard to prove your point'cause you have a history and a legacy that's already proven the point.
Kathy: You just have to be able to tour all those weeks!
Luke: I love the road, some people hate it, I love it - I mean it sucks to be away from my family but you know my kids are teenagers and never around anyway, and my wife can come out and see me when she's not working herself. I mean hey, they pay me great, it's a great job; people scream for you every night and they pay ya for this - it's not a bad life. Some of the travels a little hard but, its like you don't get paid for the time on stage, you get paid for the other twenty-two hours of the day that are lonely and tedious and hard.
Kathy: -And always hanging around the same guys...
Luke: Fortunately I love them all, we don't fight too much. And I tour with lots of different people too, it's not just like Toto, you know me and Larry Carlson did that record last year and won a Grammy and everything; we toured together doing the Fusion Jazz Circuit; which was different and was really cool; met a lot of people that I wouldn't have normally met that I became friends with and you know I do Fusion stuff; weird silly stuff that doesn't necessarily make you a lot of money buts very satisfying musically. I got enough irons in the fire that I make a very comfortable living and I am very happy. It's not like I'm in a band that I have to play the same eleven songs for the rest of my life.
Come back next week for Part 2 of Luke's interview and what else this colorful character has to say!
Posted by Kathy at November 12, 2003 11:39 PM