The drummer Donald Fagen said could play anything: “He was such a virtuoso”
Timothée Chalamet made headlines recently when he hit the stage at the SAG Awards and accepted his prize for best actor in a motion picture. As the Bob Dylan protégé took to the stage to receive his accreditation for his portrayal in A Complete Unknown, the actor was all business, acknowledging how grateful he was for the award but also announcing that he wasn’t where he wants to be in terms of career or legacy, and there’s more to come of him yet.
“Thank you, I was not expecting this at all, truly,” he said, “I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five and a half years of my life […] I poured everything I had into playing this incomparable artist. Mr Bob Dylan. A true American hero. It was the honour of a lifetime playing him.”
Chalamet continued, saying he is seeking greatness in his profession. “The truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that. But I want to be one of the greats. I’m inspired by the greats. I’m inspired by the greats here tonight,” he said, “I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps. And I wanna be up there. I’m deeply grateful for that. This doesn’t signify that but it’s a little more fuel, a little more ammo to keep going.”
The majority of people respected Chalamet for admitting that he was in the acting business to be one of the best. If a sports person said in a press conference that they were competitive and wanted to be the best in their field, nobody would bat an eye; however, it feels somewhat odd having someone in the arts say it. Why?
The main reason is likely because of the fact that you can never truly be the best in something that’s so subjective. When we talk about the greatest boxer, runner, or footballer of all time, our frame of reference is incredibly small because the results speak for themselves. There is a winner and a loser in those fields. Meanwhile, in acting, or in any creative endeavour for that matter, there is no winner or loser; there is the art, the consumer, and how it makes them feel.
When we talk about who the greatest is, we have people who are part of the conversation in different artistic fields; however, we don’t have a definitive answer. The names Chalamet mentions in his speech, Day-Lewis, Brando, and Davis, are all part of the conversation in cinema, but they are only a fraction of the options, and even with just these three, it’s still hard to pick a favourite. The same can be said for music.
When we talk about the greatest musicians, plenty of names spill out as instinct. Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Joan Baez, John Lennon, John Bonham and Jimmy Page (and those are just the Js). It’s impossible for us to say who the greatest is because our opinions on that matter are so subjective. Additionally, there are a lot of artists who are overlooked when we talk about the best musicians, and one of the bands that are often left out of discussions that deserve a seat at the table is Toto.
While you might have started humming the tune ‘Africa’ to yourself and nodding a little, it’s hard to say right off the bat that Toto are some of the greatest musicians of all time; however, you need to look outside of what they accomplished just as a band to understand how important their members are to music. The band’s guitarist, Steve Lukather, once commented on this, saying that he thinks what the band did across music as a whole needs to be recognised more.
“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.”
One of the band’s definitive members was their drummer, Jeff Porcaro, who did wonders for Toto but also worked with a number of different bands and artists from that time. He had an energy infused within his playing style, which made his sound borderline infectious. It was impossible to ignore his music once he started playing, as he gave bands and artists he played with an energy that separated them from anybody else in the scene at the time.
Donald Fagen worked with him previously and was left speechless by his ability as a drummer and the fact that he could seemingly play everything that was asked of him. “The thing about him was he was so enthusiastic, he was kind of a lightning rod at sessions […] He was a great drummer, and some friend of ours brought him over; I can’t remember who. We booked him for the whole album,” recalled Fagen,
“He was such a virtuoso. He play on all the different, you know, varieties of grooves that we were interested in. He was great. He was a great drummer, and his personality came out in his drumming.”
