Toto interview

Text header reading "Toto's Dune"

Originally published in ‘zine issue #36, 2006

Toto guitarist and vocalist Steve Lukather says he has a copy of the original screenplay of writer/director David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which, he explains by phone from Los Angeles, is a lot more bizarre even than the final version of the film. In it, reveals Lukather, offering one example, the character Frank, who was prone to breathing deeply into an oxygen mask, also breathes helium.

“David Lynch is an old friend,” says Lukather. This is because Lukather’s band, Toto, wrote, composed, and performed the soundtrack to another of Lynch’s films, Dune. “I’m a huge fan from Eraserhead on. He’s a great cat, man.”

Toto was able to choose between scoring Dune or Footloose. Luckily for Dune fans, the band chose the former, although the process was not without its problems.

As opposed to the symphony orchestra with whom they were used to working, they recorded with the Vienna Symphony, who tune to A444 as opposed to A440, which is more common in the Americas. “That’s four cents sharp,” explains Lukather, and as they were used to playing in the latter, they had to slow down the recording tapes of the orchestra in the studio in order to be compatible with the tuning with which Toto wrote. “They refused to tune down. They said, ‘No, man, this is how we play.’”


“Sometimes you just scratch your head and go, ‘Why the fuck are we doing this?’”


At a different point in the scoring process, remembers Lukather, “The sound effects editor, me and him were going at it.” Setting the scene, Lukather explains that for a soundtrack, there are three mixes: the music, the dialogue, and the sound effects. The editor repeatedly moved to bring sounds such as dogs breathing up in the mix, from Lukather’s view to the point of interfering with the music.

“It almost came to blows a couple of times.” Remembering his frustration, Lukather says, “Sometimes you just scratch your head and go, ‘Why the fuck are we doing this?’”

As Lukather describes it, when the lights came up after the screening of Dune at the film’s premier, the Toto members looked at each other in disbelief at how awful they felt was the film. By his account, the film––and their music from the soundtrack––was compromised because Dino de Laurentiis, father to the film’s producer, who owned the rights to the Dune book upon which the movie was based, took the film away from David Lynch before the director completed it. Lukather goes so far as to say the film is so bad that it’s funny, although unintentionally so.

Photo of Steve Lukather

PolyGram released the Dune soundtrack in 1984 to coincide with the film, and in 1997 re-released it with several bonus tracks and alternate versions of other tracks from the original.

Referring to the reissue, Lukather admits, “To be honest with you, man, I never listened to it,” explaining that he considers the project more of the baby of David Paich, keyboards and vocals for Toto.

“I haven’t thought about this in a really long time,” reveals Lukather, almost to himself. “It was an interesting experience; I wouldn’t call it a highlight. It was a learning experience.”

More information on Toto can be found at www.toto99.com. ■

Photo: Steve Lukather, courtesy Wolfson Public Relations


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