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(Credits: Far Out / Kåre Eide / The National Library)
Mon 21 April 2025 1:00, UK
Studio musicians are some of the most talented instrumentalists in the world. They can’t just dabble in one specific genre, but have to know how to work with a range of different styles of music. If they can’t do this, they won’t be able to do their job. You would be surprised how many great guitarists, such as Jimmy Page, had careers as studio musicians.
Jimmy Page owes a fair bit of his career to the time he spent in the studio. The moment you start to listen to more of the work that Led Zeppelin did, the less surprising it is that he worked with a range of different bands. The band became so famous because its sound completely transcended genre, and Page only knew how to do this because of his experience playing such a range of genres.
“I had a lot of ideas from my days with The Yardbirds. The Yardbirds allowed me to improvise a lot in live performance, and I started building a textbook of ideas that I eventually used in Zeppelin,” said Page. “I wanted Zeppelin to be a marriage of blues, hard rock and acoustic music topped with heavy choruses – a combination that had never been done before […] Lots of light and shade in the music.”
While you may nod your head and agree that it makes sense, Page was a studio guitarist because of the range of genres within the music he made; he might not immediately do the same for Steve Lukather, who played lead guitar for Toto. No disrespect is meant for Toto in that statement, but in the grand scheme of rock, Led Zeppelin are considered in a much higher regard. However, it seems that in recent years, Toto are starting to get the credit that they deserve for what they did as a band and what their individual members did for music throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.
“We’re getting more action than anybody fucking knows,” explained Lukather when discussing peoples attitude towards Toto in the modern age. “People are showing up, and it’s not a bunch of old people with my colour hair. There’s a few of us old fuckers out there, but mostly you look and it’s like every basic younger audience.”
He continued talking about how time seems to have given the band as a collective and individuals new light. “People are going, ‘You know those guys, we were wrong, they ain’t so bad’,” he said. “Toto is a stupid name, I’ll give you that. But we contributed to a lot of music from the ‘70s and ‘80s to the early ‘90s. Every record out of Los Angeles had at least one of us on it.”
You have to give Lukather credit where it’s due. Throughout his career, not only has he released a string of hits with Toto, but he has also helped out some of the biggest artists in the world when it came to overcoming hurdles in the studio. Some of these names include Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson, Quincy Jones, Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder (to name a few). Not only has his influence been visible in past decades, but the current acts that influence modern musicians have some of his talent mixed into the recording.
“I’m the guy that’s been hanging on the boat the longest and keeping the music alive,” he concluded. “I would’ve given you a much different answer a decade ago, because now I’m not aching for credit like I once was as a 30-year-old, when you’re a little bit insecure.”
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