Louder AAA
It’s the summer of 1981. Toto have been hastened into Sunset Sound, their recording studio of choice in their native Hollywood, to make their fourth album. Their third, Turn Back, had come out just six months earlier and wasn’t a great success – No.41 in the US at its best, and without a hit single. After striking gold with their self-titled, two million-selling debut album of 1978, the band were under mounting pressure from their record label Columbia, to deliver another multi-platinum smash, or else.
“Columbia had let our managers know they thought we were a one-hit wonder,” says David Paich, Toto’s principal songwriter and keyboard player. “Their thinking was: ‘We’ll see how this next one performs and decide if we pick up their option for more records.’”
Paich’s first response was to set out to deliberately write a hit single – a song, as he puts it, with “great musicianship, poignant lyrics, may I be so bold, a memorable chorus, and good production.” The result was Rosanna, a 5:31 tour de force of all of Toto’s greatest attributes (see everything Paich just said).
After they were done recording the track, the band – completed by Paich’s fellow keyboard player Steve Porcaro, guitarist Steve Lukather, singer Bobby Kimball, bassist David Hungate and drummer Jeff Porcaro – played it to Al Teller, their overseer at Columbia. Teller was impressed and signed off on the budget for them to press ahead with their increasingly vaulting ambitions.
Sessions on the record proceeded over the next six months, yielding eight more songs. Good ones, too – slick, tuneful, artfully played – but without an ace in the pack. Just the kind of song from left field Paich had, in fact, been conjuring up on his own time at home. He’d begun it while messing around on a new keyboard he’d recently acquired, a Yamaha CS-80. Specifically, with a riff he’d developed from a brassy flute sound he’d happened upon with the instrument.
“As soon as I played it, within two minutes I had that riff, ‘Bom, bom, bom, bom-bom-bom,’” says Paich.
From there, Paich had sketched out verses and a chorus for the nascent song. He waited until the end of the album sessions to bring his creation into Sunset Sound for the band. He played them the outline of it on piano, scat-singing. Told them it was a song about Africa.
“Naturally, we found this last fact hilarious,” says Steve Lukather. “Never mind not having gone there, I don’t know that Paich had even flown over Africa.”
“The band wanted to flesh it out,” Paich picks up. “Put some more instruments on it and see where it went.”
Jeff Porcaro had a particular idea in mind for the opening to the song. Porcaro asked the band’s engineer, Al Schmitt, if it would be possible for him to fashion a drum loop on the spot. Schmitt, a veteran of sessions with such exacting perfectionists as Steely Dan and Quincy Jones, set about the task at once, aided and abetted by Porcaro and a friend of the band’s, Roger Linn, inventor of the selfnamed electronic drum machine.
“We were lucky to have Al,” says Paich. “He took two-inch recording tape, and wrapped it around the mic stands, all around the room. Thirty inches of sound per second of tape, it was probably twelve feet long by the time he was finished. We made a tape of Jeff and Roger Linn playing, and that’s the intro.”
Onto this foundation, Schmitt and the band decided to overdub yet more tracks. Jeff Porcaro invited his father, Joe Porcaro, a venerated jazz drummer, and his godfather, Emil Richards, a seasoned percussionist for artists as varied as Frank Sinatra and Frank Zappa, down to the studio. Together with Toto’s regular percussionist Lenny Castro, they filled up another two 24-track tapes with drums and percussion.
“Emil was famous for his collection of African tribal instruments,” says Lukather. “Joe had his marimbas, Lenny had shakers, congas, and bells. They brought all of this stuff along with them. Out of that, Al and Jeff got four bars that they liked and Al cut the loop. It was fascinating to watch the whole process. This was when there was no such thing as world music. We were creating this shit from dust.”
“Then we kept this loop and had another machine record the band’s new overdubs,” says Paich,“putting down one instrument at a time over the tape loop. I put a guide track down with my keys, then Hungate put some bass down, Lukather did some brilliant guitar stuff, then we got into the background vocals.”
When it came to the lead vocal, Paich took the verses himself, and Bobby Kimball was assigned the main melody part in the choruses. “That part was so high, we only got it out of Bobby the one time and he was never able to manage it again,” reveals Lukather. Once completed, Africa was earmarked as the closing track on the album, which was going to be titled IV.
On their final day at Sunset Sound, Toto gathered to listen to their new creation top to bottom. The Eagles’ Don Henley, working on his first solo album in the next-door room, dropped by, plopping himself on the studio couch, equidistant between the studio’s two giant speakers.
“We turned the lights down and hit play,” recalls Lukather. “As the last echoes of Africa faded away, nobody said too much but for Don. He popped up out of his seat, smiled at us and said: ‘Wow, that’s a really good record guys.’ Henley could be a harsh critic, so coming from him that was especially good to hear.”
Rosanna was the album’s designated lead-off single. After its release, IV began to sell, but it was the release of Africa that proved to be the tipping point. The followup single in the UK, it came out third in the US and soared to No.1 on the Billboard Hot 100. Crowned ‘Album Of The Year’ at the 1983 Grammys, IV went on to sell more than four million copies in the US, marking Toto’s commercial peak. Africa, meanwhile, has progressed to being a genuine, inescapable pop-culture phenomenon, with two and a half billion Spotify streams and counting.
“At last count, there are 138 different variations of that song,” says Paich. “I look at all the people covering it, these things on TikTok and YouTube, and scratch my head. You could never try for that. That was writing music purely from the heart.”
“It’s the silliest, most oddball song in our entire catalogue, but it truly hit a nerve,” concludes Lukather. “Every time you forget about it, someone else samples it and it breaks out all over again. And to think I told Paich: ‘If Africa is a hit, I will run naked down Hollywood Boulevard.’”
Paul Rees’s book Raised On Radio: Power Ballads, Cocaine & Payola – The AOR Glory Years 1976-1986 is out now.
