Entertainment
Ben Gibbard on that glow-up of a haircut and his love-hate relationship with L.A.
![Ben Gibbard on that glow-up of a haircut and his love-hate relationship with L.A. Ben Gibbard on that glow-up of a haircut and his love-hate relationship with L.A.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/bb6e95b/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4513x2369+0+319/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fb9%2F76%2Feff3fe0d482aaace43ebd5a83c0d%2Fgettyimages-2151361175.jpg)
Twenty-one years ago, Ben Gibbard’s life changed twice in the span of eight months.
In February 2003, the frontman of Seattle’s Death Cab for Cutie released “Give Up,” the first (and only) album by his electro-pop side project the Postal Service; it went on to become an indie blockbuster, selling more than a million copies and spawning swoony millennial anthems like “Such Great Heights.” Gibbard doubled down in October of that year with Death Cab’s even swoonier “Transatlanticism,” which led to the band’s appearance on the hit teen soap “The O.C.” and a major-label deal with Atlantic Records.
Last fall, Death Cab and the Postal Service marked the 20th anniversary of both LPs with a tour on which each act performed its signature work from beginning to end. (Gibbard, an experienced long-distance runner, has joked about the no-big-deal endurance required to play two 45-minute albums in one evening.) Like “Give Up” and “Transatlanticism,” the road show was a hit, filling arenas and amphitheaters including Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl. Now the groups are set to take a victory lap with performances at Saturday’s Just Like Heaven festival in Pasadena.
For Gibbard, 47, the show marks a return to familiar ground: He formed the Postal Service with a pair of Angelenos: producer Jimmy Tamborello and singer Jenny Lewis of L.A.’s Rilo Kiley. “Transatlanticism,” meanwhile, describes a fling with a woman in Silver Lake and followed Death Cab’s 2001 “The Photo Album,” on which Gibbard asks someone why they’d want to live in a town that “smells like an airport runway.” (The frontman later moved to L.A. during his three-year marriage to actor Zooey Deschanel, whom he divorced in 2012.)
Gibbard talked to The Times about the albums — as well as the state of indie rock and his friendship with former Death Cab guitarist Chris Walla, who quit the band in 2014 — before a gig last week in Kansas City, where he’d just spent the day visiting the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum and the American Jazz Museum. “There’s only so many Ernest movies you can watch on tour,” he said with a laugh of the cultural enrichment. “At a certain point you gotta up it a bit.”
Is the relationship you’re singing about in Death Cab’s “Tiny Vessels” — the girl in Silver Lake with the light brown streaks in her hair — the same relationship that had earlier inspired “Why You’d Want to Live Here”?
No. “Why You’d Want to Live Here” is kind of a stand-alone piece of fiction. And the mentions of Silver Lake on “Transatlanticism” are specific to a relationship that’s not really central to the album.
So why identify Silver Lake by name?
Well, “Transatlanticism” wasn’t conceived as a concept record — it wasn’t written about one person, despite the legend that’s kind of grown up around it. The songs span from like August 2001 to the spring of 2003, and there was a lot happening in my life at that point: I’d moved to Seattle to live with someone in my first real adult relationship, and then that person moved back to the East Coast and I was kind of floating for a year and a half through false starts of relationships — just feeling that general mid-20s malaise, trying to figure my s— out. But I’d rather allow people their fantasies than go song by song telling them they’re wrong.
Rolling Stone described “Transatlanticism” in 2003 as “11 indie lullabies … ostensibly about a long distance relationship.”
I think a lot of it has to do with Chris’ production. Because we’ve been playing the record in order with the transitions and everything, I’ve really been living with it for the first time in 20 years. And there’s this three-song sequence — “Tiny Vessels” into “Transatlanticism” into “Passenger Seat” — where Chris did such a brilliant job of sonically connecting them that it kind of gives the listener the impression that the subject matter is related to the same person or the same situation.
“Give Up” was framed with this idea that you and Jimmy were sending music back and forth through the mail. But how significant was the time you spent working on the album in L.A.?
Crucial. L.A.’s where I first met Jenny Lewis. I just emailed her out of the blue because Rilo Kiley was on [Death Cab’s label] Barsuk and I liked her voice. She picked me up at the Burbank airport and we got Mexican food and then went to Jimmy’s house and started making the record. It feels like the kind of thing that would never happen today. But in your 20s you’re like, “Something’s going on? I’ll do it. I don’t need to know if there’s parking.”
You sing about L.A. in a pretty negative way on Death Cab’s “Kintsugi,” which followed your divorce.
“Kintsugi” is not necessarily an indictment of L.A. — it’s an indictment of the entertainment industry that I’d found myself rubbing up against. Whereas my experience making “Give Up” with Jimmy and Jenny was hanging out with their friends and recognizing that there were a lot of really interesting creative people doing cool things in the underground that weren’t directly tied to Hollywood. Los Angeles has been a character in so much of my music because I’m both attracted and repulsed by it.
![Zooey Deschanel, in a dress, and Ben Gibbard, in a light gray suit, smile for photos.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/337fbd7/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3600x2604+0+0/resize/1200x868!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fab%2F7b%2Fecad6d0243b4b4eac46f71daabb7%2Fgettyimages-139335574.jpg)
Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard at the Los Angeles premiere of “(500) Days Of Summer” at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in 2009.
(Gregg DeGuire / FilmMagic / Getty Images)
Where in town did you and your ex-wife live?
We lived initially in a duplex a couple blocks off La Brea — the Orthodox part of Hancock Park before it starts getting really fancy. Then we bought a house in the Cahuenga Pass, which looking back wasn’t somewhere I particularly liked living. As people do in relationships, I made a very hasty leap not only into that relationship but into a totally different city that I didn’t know. When I moved back to Seattle, kind of battered with my tail between my legs, I was like, “I’m never f—ing leaving this place ever again.”
Are there certain areas here that you avoid now?
There aren’t really. When we were rehearsing for this tour [in L.A.] last August, I went on a run one day and took this big loop through Hancock Park. My path went by our old place, and it was just: “Ah, I used to live there. Moving on.”
How big had “Give Up” become by the time “Transatlanticism” came out?
I don’t know how many copies it had sold but I think it was over 100 or 200,000. That was a fairly tense time because this little side project had completely outsold “The Photo Album” like three to four times over. I’m not sitting here 20 years later saying I wasn’t able to enjoy it as much I wanted to — nobody in Death Cab made me feel that way. But it was weird for the other guys: We’re going out on tour, and people are yelling Postal Service songs at us because at that point the Postal Service was bigger than Death Cab for Cutie.
In a sense that’s still true. The Postal Service is billed higher than Death Cab at Just Like Heaven.
As well it should be. It’s an issue of scarcity: When the Pixies came back after not playing a show for 10 or 15 years, they were playing venues way bigger than the places they played when they were actually a band. So of course the Postal Service is gonna headline the show. We sold 13,000 seats in Toronto a couple nights ago. The last time Death Cab played Toronto, we played Massey Hall, which is like 2,800 people. We all know what’s driving these tickets.
Nick Harmer, left, Chris Walla, Jason McGerr and Ben Gibbard of Death Cab for Cutie in 2008.
(Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times)
Has the strong reception made you think about what audiences are responding to?
Absolutely. Music is a time machine — more than any other art form, it has this ability to take us back to a time in our lives. I remember coming home from college and my dad was playing me some records. He played “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” and it got to “Girl From the North Country” and he had his hand over his face — I knew he was listening to this song, thinking about a woman that wasn’t my mom. That’s just what music does.
So when I had the idea to do this tour, I felt like we almost had an obligation to do it because of how much these two records mean to people. And because there’s not another artist or band or collection of people that could. I don’t mean that in a self-aggrandizing way. If you can name another artist who had two records like this in the course of one calendar year, by all means tell me.
Even so, has the reaction surprised you?
It was the additional nights that were humbling: adding a second Hollywood Bowl, a third Hollywood Bowl, a second Madison Square Garden. I knew that people had relationships with these records, but I had no idea that this many people did.
This tour’s really changed me as far as how I move forward, not necessarily as a writer but as a performer. Before this tour, my performances were physical but kind of internal — I’m up there playing my guitar, I’m talking a bit, but I’ve never performed to the crowd. Now, for whatever reason — maybe because I’m standing next to Jenny Lewis, who’s one of the most amazing performers we have — it’s given me the confidence to look people in the eyes, to move toward the front of the stage rather than staying toward the back. A little less Stephen Malkmus, a little more Bono.
![Jenny Lewis, in a bedazzled suit, and Ben Gibbard play guitar on stage.](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/73252f0/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x2040+0+0/resize/1200x816!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F72%2F48%2F9d9ca6214792bf0de9d071cddfdb%2Fgettyimages-166584077.jpg)
Jenny Lewis and Ben Gibbard perform with the Postal Service at Coachella in 2013.
(C Flanigan / FilmMagic / Getty Images)
At some point before the tour you got a real glow-up of a haircut.
I went to the woman who cuts my hair and said, “I’ve had bangs for 25 years — I gotta make a change.” But there might be something to not performing with a mess of hair in my face all the time. It’s nice when you have friends text you photos or Twitter posts saying nice things about how you look — certainly helps build your confidence.
Your voice in these shows is almost eerily unchanged from the records. It doesn’t sound like you’re having much trouble singing this old music.
I’ve been blessed with pretty good genetics. But I’ve spent the better part of the last 15 years being very cognizant of what I put in my body. Knock on wood that it remains so, but if you’re not smoking or drinking, and you’re physically fit, it’s actually easier now.
You ever worry that the boyishness of your voice will start to feel emotionally inappropriate for your age?
There’s the tone of the voice and then what the voice is singing, right? Playing songs you wrote when you were 21 or 22 when you’re 47 or 50 — there’s a lot of life between those ages. But I think as a concertgoer you just kind of know that’s the case. I saw the Cure last year — one of my top three bands of all time — and there’s Robert Smith singing “Boys Don’t Cry.” I think I’d feel more self-conscious about it if I wasn’t also writing songs from the perspective of a 47-year-old man.
As far as the tone goes, I’m a little cringey when I hear how boyish I sound on the old records. No one’s ever gonna consider my voice masculine, but it has a little bit of a patina on it now — a little bit grittier, a little more heft to it.
![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/NSgHGFuPNus/hqdefault.jpg)
How would you describe your relationship with Chris Walla at the moment?
We just texted yesterday about Steve Albini. Chris and I had some rough patches after he left — he was very upset about some things I said specifically to you. And, you know, I stand by what I was trying to say, though I probably could have said it better. But he’s in Norway with his wife and a kid, and he’s making records and living the life he wants to live. His influence on my life, both as a human being and as a creative person, can’t be overstated. But sometimes what’s best for somebody you love is not necessarily for them to stay with you.
Was Albini important to you?
I think he was important to everybody in our world. But for Chris specifically, I remember he had this Shellac 7-inch where the insert was like their recording setup, with a drawing of every microphone and every compressor. The takeaway was: Get this stuff, and you can do this too. That was such an important message to receive, certainly for Chris — the idea that you don’t have to wait around for a major label to find you and put you in the studio. You can just start making recordings yourself. All of the schematics and photos that Albini was willingly putting out in the world, not caring whether anybody was gonna quote-unquote steal his sound — that was part of the DNA of our first few albums.
The era of those albums — the era this tour looks back on — was a fruitful one for white dudes writing indie rock songs. Two decades later, most of the energy in indie rock is with young women.
White male voices dominated rock ’n’ roll from the jump until, like, five years ago. We had a pretty good run [Laughs]. No one is sitting here saying, “I really want to know what a 25-year-old white guy has to say on this topic.” We already know! I think one of the wonderful things about the world we’re living in these days — and contrary to popular belief, there are some wonderful things — is that voices that maybe once were very much kept to the fringe are now finding an audience.
I’m gonna go off on this for a bit, if you don’t mind. Basically, in the early aughts, with the rise of indie rock, there were a lot of straight white men who were making music that was fine — not unique, not particularly interesting, but it was fine. And I’ve seen a number of people — my friends — who’ve kind of fallen on hard times. And while I feel bad for them, I’d rather live in a world where being a straight white guy is not enough. You actually have to be really f—ing talented.
I feel horrible saying this. But people don’t have to listen to you anymore. They can find something that speaks to them as a queer person or as a person of color. We’ve experienced this ourselves with putting out new records. We put out records and they don’t have the impact they once had for a number of reasons. But one of them, which is entirely justifiable, is that people have more options now. They don’t need my perspective on things.
With that in mind: Drake or Kendrick Lamar?
Oh, Kendrick all the way. You gotta be out of your damn mind to go toe to toe with that guy.
![](https://newspub.live/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/np-logo.png)
Movie Reviews
Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad
![Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad Reagan Is Almost Fun-Bad But It’s Mostly Just Bad-Bad](https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/191/afd/c29a986144336e39edf1ea310d979113fd-reagan-review.1x.rsocial.w1200.jpg)
Dennis Quaid in Reagan.
Photo: Showbiz Direct/Everett Collection
Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice. The picture attempts to take in the full arc of the President’s life, following him from childhood right through to his 1994 announcement at the age of 83 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. But you’d never guess that this man was at all complex, complicated, conflicted — in other words, human. He might as well be one of those animatronic robots at Disney World, mouthing lines from his famous speeches.
Dennis Quaid, a very good actor who can usually work hints of sadness into his manic machismo, is hamstrung here by the need to impersonate. He gets the voice down well (and he certainly says “Well” a lot) and he tries to do what he can with Reagan’s occasional political or career setbacks, but gone is that unpredictable glint in the actor’s eye. This Reagan doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Everything he thinks or feels, he says — which is maybe an admirable trait in a politician, but makes for boring art.
The film’s arc is wide and its focus is narrow. Reagan is mainly about its subject’s lifelong opposition to Communism, carrying him through his battles against labor organizers as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually to higher public office. The movie is narrated by a retired Soviet intelligence official (Jon Voight) in the present day, answering a younger counterpart’s questions about how the Russian empire was destroyed. He calls Reagan “the Crusader” and the moniker is meant to be both combative and respectful: He admires Reagan’s single-minded dedication to fighting the Soviets. They, after all, were single-minded in their dedication to fighting the U.S., and the agent has a ton of folders and films proving that the KGB had been watching Reagan for a long, long time.
By the way, you did read that correctly. Jon Voight plays a KGB officer in this picture, complete with a super-thick Russian accent. There’s a lot of dress-up going on — it’s like Basquiat for Republicans, even though the cast is certainly not all Republicans — and there’s some campy fun to be had here. Much has been made of Creed’s Scott Stapp doing a very flamboyant Frank Sinatra, though I regret to announce that he’s only onscreen for a few seconds. Robert Davi gets more screentime as Leonid Brezhnev, as does Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner. Xander Berkeley puts in fine work as George Schultz, and a game Mena Suvari shows up as an intriguingly pissy Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife. As Margaret Thatcher, Lesley-Anne Down gets to utter an orgasmic “Well done, cowboy!” when she sees Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech on TV. And my ’80s-kid brain is still processing C. Thomas Howell being cast as Caspar Weinberger.
To be fair, a lot of historians give Reagan credit for helping bring about both the Gorbachev revolution and the eventual downfall of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, so the film’s focus is not in and of itself a misguided one. There are stories to be told within that scope — interesting ones, controversial ones, the kind that could get audiences talking and arguing, and even ones that could help breathe life into the moribund state of conservative filmmaking. But without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting. We get little mention of his family life (aside from his non-stop devotion to Nancy, played by Penelope Ann Miller, and vice versa). Other issues of the day are breezed through with a couple of quick montages. All of this could have given some texture to the story and lent dimensionality to such an enormously consequential figure. But then again, if the only character flaw you could find in Ronald Reagan was that he was too honest, then maybe you weren’t very serious about depicting him as a human being to begin with.
See All
Entertainment
How Toto held the line
![How Toto held the line How Toto held the line](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/2e1a788/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3600x1890+0+209/resize/1200x630!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Ffd%2F4b%2Fdfd2092142a091c43f61980145cd%2F1471875-et-toto-1-brv.jpg)
Steve Lukather has lived in his house overlooking Studio City since 1979 — longer than you’d expect, perhaps, given that he bought the place before his band Toto exploded with its fourth album, 1982’s quadruple-platinum “Toto IV,” which won Grammy Awards for album and record of the year and spawned a chart-topping single in the yearning, sumptuous, still-inescapable “Africa.”
“I don’t live a big, huge, stupid life,” Lukather says, brushing away any surprise that he didn’t upgrade as soon as he had the chance. “I like my little crib in the hills.” With a laugh, he adds, “I got it before both divorces, and I got to keep it.”
Lukather is hanging at home on a recent afternoon, barefoot as he sips a nonalcoholic Corona, with his bandmates David Paich and Joseph Williams. The walls are lined with plaques commemorating the millions of records sold by Toto and by some of the countless acts with whom Lukather has played in the studio; books about the Beatles and about rock’s greatest album covers are piled neatly on the fireplace.
In the middle of the modest living room sits a gleaming Steinway grand piano — the very one, Lukather points out, on which he wrote two of Toto’s biggest ballads, “I Won’t Hold You Back” and “I’ll Be Over You,” as well as “Turn Your Love Around,” which George Benson took to No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart in 1982.
Yet Lukather isn’t living in the past. On Sunday night, nearly four decades after the band last grazed the Hot 100, Toto will headline the Hollywood Bowl for the first time. The hometown show is part of a broader resurgence for a group of guys in their 60s and 70s who currently boast 30 million monthly listeners on Spotify — more than the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen or Eric Clapton — and who’ve survived long enough to see their once-derided yacht-rock vibe come back into vogue.
What’s more, Toto is on the road with two founding members in guitarist Lukather and keyboardist Paich at a moment when some classic rock bands are lucky to claim a single OG. (Take a bow, Foreigner.)
How to explain Toto’s endurance? For sure, the band has been lifted by a rising tide for all legacy acts: a kind of catch-’em-while-you-can mind-set that’s helped draw huge audiences to the likes of Billy Joel, the Eagles, Stevie Nicks and Dead & Company. In 2022, Toto opened for Journey on a U.S. arena tour; this summer, Journey is playing stadiums with Def Leppard.
There’s also the songs, of course — “a couple of which have just struck a nerve with people,” says Williams, who joined Toto as lead singer in 1986. He means “Hold the Line,” the band’s hard-riffing breakthrough, and the swank “Rosanna,” which beat Willie Nelson’s “Always on My Mind” and the theme from “Chariots of Fire” for record of the year at the Grammys. But what he really means is “Africa,” that fever dream about a rain-blessing excursion that’s been memed to high heaven, been used on “South Park” and “Stranger Things” and been covered by Weezer as a joke that no one can quite figure out. On Spotify, the song has racked up nearly 2 billion streams.
According to Williams, these hits have “lived past the knowledge of the band itself,” as he puts it.
“I was on an elevator once in a hotel when we were on the road, and there were two couples in there,” he says. “One woman was saying to the other woman, ‘What are you guys doing tonight?’ and she says, ‘We’re going to see that band Africa.’”
“Imagine their disappointment when we walked out,” Lukather says.
As individuals, though, the members of Toto — among the other founders were the brothers Jeff and Steve Porcaro on drums and keys, respectively — have inspired a certain fascination, at least among music nerds, with the way they balanced the band with busy side careers as studio players who shaped the slick but soulful sound of ’80s pop.
Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’,” Don Henley’s “The Boys of Summer,” Michael Jackson’s uber-blockbuster “Thriller” LP — all featured Lukather, Paich and/or the Porcaros. Also: Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical,” a framed platinum copy of which hangs next to one of Jackson’s “Beat It” by Lukather’s dining room table.
“These guys in their sleep could do it pretty much on the first take,” says David Foster, the veteran record producer who started out as a fellow session musician — you can hear both him and Paich behind Benson on “Turn Your Love Around” — before becoming the one hiring Toto’s members to play on hit records like Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.”
“It was just an amazing array of musicians,” he adds. “David Paich has the best feel of any piano player I’ve ever met.”
![Toto](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/831762e/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3543x2302+0+0/resize/1200x780!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F13%2F76%2F8bad144d460b90f3d6a00cac075a%2Fgettyimages-1740753024.jpg)
Toto in Amsterdam in 1982: Mike Porcaro, from left, Steve Lukather, David Paich, Jeff Porcaro and Steve Porcaro.
(Rob Verhorst / Redferns / Getty Images)
Toto’s high-gloss only-in-L.A. aesthetic didn’t age well into the ’90s and early 2000s, when rock went grungy then garage-y; even in Toto’s heyday, critics dismissed the band as hot-dogging technicians. (Rolling Stone’s oft-quoted dismissal: “All chops and no brains.”)
Yet a new generation of acts — Haim, Bon Iver, the War on Drugs, Mk.gee — has lovingly embraced the intricate sense of craft that Toto built into its records. And though the members’ session work wasn’t highly visible in the early, no-liner-notes era of digital music, their contributions are now eagerly tracked on websites like Discogs and in music docs like this year’s “The Greatest Night in Pop,” about the recording of “We Are the World” — one more defining mid-’80s smash that featured Paich and Steve Porcaro on keyboards.
“Everybody knows Toto, but you only really know Toto when you know all the other things they worked on and how sick they were in any circumstance,” says Ethan Gruska, a young L.A. musician and producer who’s convened a not-dissimilar crew of musicians to make not-dissimilarly tasty records with Phoebe Bridgers and Ryan Beatty. “Obviously, I’m biased” — Gruska is Williams’ nephew — “but my friends who are players have always thought that what they established was cool.”
Which isn’t to say that Lukather, Toto’s intellectual thought leader, is without his share of older-rock-star grievances. Among them:
- the term “yacht rock” (“We deserve a yacht, don’t you think?” he asks)
- the fact that Toto hasn’t been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (“It’s not based on stats — it’s based on the taste of 80-year-old men”)
- clueless record execs (“Walter Yetnikoff knew nothing about music,” he says of the late CBS Records boss)
- Weezer frontman Rivers Cuomo’s unwillingness to meet Toto after its hit “Africa” cover (“The guy just iced me”)
Still, asked whether he identifies a bitterness within himself, Lukather scoffs.
“F— no,” he says. “How could I be bitter with a career that’s almost 50 years old?”
Toto formed out of friendships struck up at Grant High School in the Valley. Nobody called anybody “nepo babies” back then, but the members of Toto were all connected: Paich’s father was Marty Paich, the arranger and conductor known for his work with Ray Charles and Barbra Streisand, among many others; the Porcaro brothers were the sons of the jazz drummer Joe Porcaro; Lukather’s dad worked in TV production on shows like “I Dream of Jeannie.” (No wonder that when they needed a new singer after frontman Bobby Kimball left the band, they clicked with Williams, son of the celebrated film composer John Williams.)
The players had already proved themselves as session guys — Boz Scaggs’ “Silk Degrees” was a crucial showcase — when they cut Toto’s self-titled debut in 1978 and scored a top 10 hit with “Hold the Line.” For the next year’s “Hydra,” “we started to go all Dungeons & Dragons on everybody,” Lukather says; the result whiffed, as did 1981’s “Turn Back.” But with “Toto IV” the band found just the right blend of groove, melody and texture, a sweet spot it stayed in for a few glorious years.
Did Toto’s famous perfectionism in the studio ever suck the joy out of making music?
“Sometimes,” Williams says, shaking his head beneath a black cowboy hat. “I spent a few times behind the glass where the joy had left my body.”
Lukather, for one, still loves getting deep into the weeds of recording; last year he released an album of new songs under his own name even though he knew he wouldn’t make any money from it. The paying work — not to mention the validation he’s grown accustomed to receiving from an audience — is onstage, which is one reason he went into something of a tailspin during the pandemic when live music ground to a halt.
The guitarist doesn’t want to go into detail about it today. But as he told the music-industry analyst Bob Lefsetz last year in an episode of Lefsetz’s podcast, Lukather struggled with depression and a subsequent bout with ketamine abuse. So when Toto finally got back on the road with Journey two years ago, he says, “it made me appreciate life like I’ve never appreciated it before.”
The tour reenergized Toto’s live business as well. “People saw us and went, ‘Wow, these guys are actually good,’” Lukather says.
![](https://img.youtube.com/vi/qmOLtTGvsbM/hqdefault.jpg)
Surely, the members of Toto saw the recent news that Journey’s Jonathan Cain had filed a lawsuit accusing the band’s Neal Schon of misusing the band’s corporate credit card — while the two are in the midst of playing concerts together? Williams laughs. “They need the money from the shows to keep suing each other,” he says.
“We’ve gotten close to that,” Lukather adds. “It’s not pleasant.” (Fun classic-rock fact: Lukather’s son is married to Cain’s daughter.)
Lukather doesn’t name names in regards to this almost-litigation. But asked why his solo record wasn’t a Toto album — Paich and Williams are both all over it — he says, “Don’t want to deal with fighting people over semantics.” Susan Porcaro Goings, widow of the late Jeff Porcaro (who died in 1992), has sued the band over her share of Toto’s royalties; Steve Porcaro quit Toto in 2019. Why did Steve Porcaro leave?
“The last tour he was on, he was so miserable every day,” Lukather says. Reached on the phone, Porcaro says, “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I was very, very happy on the road. I just needed a break.”
Last month, Porcaro announced that he’d sold the rights to his music — including the Toto songs he had a hand in as well as the indelible Michael Jackson hit “Human Nature,” which he co-wrote with lyricist John Bettis — in a deal with the Jackson estate and the music company Primary Wave. (The New York Times reported that the deal, the latest in a long series of catalog transactions involving veteran pop and rock artists, was “estimated in the low eight figures.”)
“OK, so 10, 11, 12 million?” Lukather asks. “I don’t know, I haven’t talked to him about it. But most of the people I know that have sold have regretted it.” He’s been approached, he adds, and said no every time. Lukather’s view is that it’s smarter to resist a one-time payout — “Living in California, they take 50%, boom, right off the bat” — and instead keep the royalty checks coming “a couple times a year,” he says.
“Also, you have no say [after selling your rights] if somebody wants to make a toilet-paper commercial out of one of your songs,” he adds. “That’s my life and my creativity balled into this thing called music. It’s personal.”
![Steve Lukather and Joseph Williams of the American rock band Toto](https://ca-times.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/5c4c960/2147483647/strip/true/crop/4000x2667+0+0/resize/1200x800!/quality/75/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcalifornia-times-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fc1%2Fa0%2F10dc0dec4929a50f60532ede19e3%2Fgettyimages-2163979469.jpg)
Steve Lukather and Joseph Williams of Toto perform in Madrid in July.
(Mariano Regidor / Redferns / Getty Images)
For these reasons and others, Lukather serves as Toto’s manager, which he reckons keeps him busy on the phone and the computer for at least four hours every morning before whatever musical labor the day holds. Like the catalog buyers, would-be managers have tried to woo Toto.
“There’s been a lot of fabulous people — put ‘fabulous’ in quotes — and they all have 20 acts yet still find time to play golf every day,” he says. They’ll promise they can work untold wonders for the band, he adds. “It’s like dating — you’ll say anything you can think of to get those pants off.”
Which, considering the strong shape Toto is in, just makes Lukather laugh. “If we were sucking the last bit of air out of the tire, it’d be a different conversation,” he says. “But we’re headlining a stadium show in Amsterdam in February. We’re doing 80,000 people at a festival in Mexico City with Paul McCartney and Green Day, and our name’s right there. It’s astounding to me, man.
“This is getting bigger, not smaller. I’ll take the ride for a while.”
Movie Reviews
‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War
![‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: An Extraordinary Adaptation Takes a Child’s-Eye View of an African Civil War](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Don-t-Let-s-Go-to-the-Dogs-Tonight_Still_01-H-2024.jpg?w=1296&h=730&crop=1)
Alexandra Fuller‘s bestselling 2001 memoir of growing up in Africa is so cinematic, full of personal drama and political upheaval against a vivid landscape, that it’s a wonder it hasn’t been turned into a film before. But it was worth waiting for Embeth Davidtz’s eloquent adaptation, which depicts a child’s-eye view of the civil war that created the country of Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia — a change the girl’s white colonial parents fiercely resisted.
Davidtz, known as an actress (Schindler’s List, among many others), directs and wrote the screenplay for Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and stars as Fuller’s sad, alcoholic mother. Or, actually, co-stars, because the entire movie rests on the tiny shoulders and remarkably lifelike performance of Lexi Venter — just 7 when the picture, her first, was shot. It is a bold risk to put so much weight on a child’s work, but like so many of Davidtz’s choices here, it also turns out to be shrewd.
Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight
The Bottom Line Near perfection.
Venue: Telluride Film Festival
Cast: Lexi Venter, Embeth Davidtz, Zikhona Bali, Fumani N Shilubana, Rob Van Vuuren, Anina Hope Reed
Director-screenwriter: Embeth Davidtz
1 hour 38 minutes
Another those smart calls is to focus intensely on one period of Fuller’s childhood. Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is set in 1980, just before and during the election that would bring the country’s Black majority to power. Bobo, as Fuller was called, is a raggedy kid with a perpetually dirty face and uncombed hair, who’s seen at times riding a motorbike or sneaking cigarettes. She runs around the family farm, whose run-down look and dusty ground tell of a hardscrabble existence. The film was shot in South Africa, and Willie Nel’s cinematography, with glaring bright light, suggests the scorching feel of the sun.
Much of the story is told in Bobo’s voiceover, in Venter’s completely natural delivery, and in another daring and effective choice, all of it is told from her point of view. Davidtz’s screenplay deftly lets us hear and see the racism that surrounds the child, and the ideas that she has innocently taken in from her parents. And we recognize the emotional cost of the war, even when Bobo doesn’t. She often mentions terrorists, saying she is afraid to go into the bathroom alone at night in case there’s one waiting for her “with a knife or a gun or a spear.” She keeps an eye out for them while riding into town in the family car with an armed convoy. “Africans turned into terrorists and that’s how the war started,” she explains, parroting what she has heard.
At one point, the convoy glides past an affluent white neighborhood. That glimpse helps Davidtz situate the Fullers, putting their assumptions of privilege into context. Bobo has absorbed those notions without quite losing her innocence. Referring to the family’s servants, her voiceover says that Sarah (Zikhona Bali) and Jacob (Fumani N. Shilubana) live on the farm, and that “Africans don’t have last names.” Bobo adores Sarah and the stories she tells from her own culture, but Bobo also feels that she can boss Sarah around.
Venter is astonishing throughout. In close-up, she looks wide-eyed and aghast when visiting her grandfather, who has apparently had a stroke. At another point, she says of her mother, “Mum says she’d trade all of us for a horse and her dogs.” When she says, after the briefest pause, “But I know that’s not true,” her tone is not one of defiant disbelief or childlike belief, as might have been expected. It’s more nuanced, with a hint of sadness that suggests a realization just beyond her young grasp. Davidtz surely had a lot to do with that, and her editor, Nicholas Contaras, has cut all Bobo’s scenes into a sharply perfect length. Nonetheless, Venter’s work here brings to mind Anna Paquin, who won an Oscar as a child for her thoroughly believable role as a girl also who sees more than she knows in The Piano.
The largely South African cast displays the same naturalism as Venter, creating a consistent tone. Rob Van Vuuren plays Bobo’s father, who is at times away fighting, and Anina Hope Reed is her older sister. Bali and Shilubana are especially impressive as Sarah and Jacob, their portrayals suggesting a resistance to white rule that the characters can’t always speak out loud.
Davidtz has a showier role as Nicola Fuller. (The movie doesn’t explain its title, which hails from the early 20th century writer A.P Herbert’s line, “Don’t let’s go the dogs tonight, for mother will be there.”) Once, Nicola shoots a snake in the kitchen and calmly wanders off, ordering Jacob to bring her tea. More often, Bobo watches her mother drift around the house or sit on the porch in an alcoholic fog. But when her voiceover tells us about the little sister who drowned, we fathom the grief behind Nicola’s depression. And wrong-headed though she is, we understand her fury and distress when the election results make her feel that she is about to lose the country she thinks of as home. Davidtz gives herself a scene at a neighborhood dance that goes on a bit too long, but it’s the rare sequence that does.
There is more of Fuller’s memoir that might be a source for other adaptations. It is hard to imagine any would be more beautifully realized than this.
-
Connecticut1 week ago
Oxford church provides sanctuary during Sunday's damaging storm
-
Technology1 week ago
Breakthrough robo-glove gives you superhuman grip
-
Politics1 week ago
Clinton lauds Biden as modern-day George Washington and president who 'healed our sick' in DNC speech
-
Politics1 week ago
2024 showdown: What happens next in the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump face-off
-
News1 week ago
Who Are Kamala Harris’s 1.5 Million New Donors?
-
Politics1 week ago
Trump taunted over speculated RFK Jr endorsement: 'Weird as hell'
-
Politics1 week ago
Vivek Ramaswamy sounds off on potential RFK Jr. role in a Trump administration
-
World6 days ago
Portugal coast hit by 5.3 magnitude earthquake