Is Steve Lukather the most heard guitarist in history?
Most artists who break into the industry want the limelight at every opportunity. There may be legions of fans out there waiting to hear your music, but there are only so many times someone can notch up hits before they start fading out of relevancy. Or if you’re someone like Steve Lukather, you become one of the most-heard guitarists of all time without ever having people know your name.
Outside of the limelight, the session musician scene is the real gold mine for musicians. No matter how often someone shows up at the studio to collect a paycheck, everyone from Pino Palladino to Hal Blaine has had their names sprinkled across pop classics without ever having to tour behind some of their biggest works.
But Lukather did at least give it a shot when forming the group Toto. Since the group was made up of some of the greatest session players on the scene, their albums tended to feature multiple layers of shredding licks across every one of them, but there was only so far anyone could go with that. Yes, they had talent, but there were only so many times that people heard ‘Africa’ before they wanted to change the station.
That hardly mattered, though. Studio time was his bread and butter, and looking through his appearance credits, Lukather might be in 90% of people’s record collections without Toto. He contributed to everything from hard rock bands to jazz aficionados and casually found his way onto some of the highest-selling records of all time.
That doesn’t come without someone who didn’t do his homework, though, and his time working with legends like Steely Dan meant that he was a well-oiled machine on nearly every record he played. Just looking through the 1970s alone, Lukather’s work extends to everyone from Elton John during his disco-addled Victim of Love album to Alice Cooper on From the Inside.
Just when the fashions shifted towards people’s TV screens with the rise of MTV, though, Lukather didn’t even begin to slow down. If anything, the 1980s would be one of his most profitable decades, working with everyone from Earth, Wind, and Fire to Joni Mitchell to jazz great George Benson to laying down the borderline metal solo on the track ‘Runnin’ With the Night’ from Lionel Richie’s album Can’t Slow Down.
And lest we forget the fact that he played as the main session guitarist for Michael Jackson on Thriller. Sure, Eddie Van Halen gets all the accolades because he melted faces the minute he came down to inject ‘Beat It’ with a shot of adrenaline, but everything from that song’s rhythm track to the smooth tone of ‘Human Nature’ is Lukather’s handiwork rather than the ‘King of Pop’.
But maybe the biggest benefit of having Lukather behind the fretboard is that he never actually stops working. Throughout the 1990s, he had his fingerprints on different Van Halen projects as a backup vocalist, along with guesting on Steve Nicks records, Don Henley albums, and as of late, becoming the main man for Ringo Starr in his All Starr Band on his latest releases.
Steve Lukather is far from everyone’s first choice for a stunning guitar hero, but his approach was about much more than showboating. It was about sitting in the song and playing appropriately for whatever the tune needed, and by assembling such a vast discography, he has earned the title of not only one of the most heard guitarists of all time but the definition of how to be a musical chameleon in the process.
