Remember Toto? Not the beloved canine from The Wizard of the Oz — the other Toto.
As hitmakers, they may not have had quite the staying power as the 1939 film classic, but their music has. For a brief period in the late ’70s and early ’80s, members of Toto seemed to be practically everywhere — on albums by Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs, Alice Cooper and even on Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
But they’re perhaps best known as headliners on their own albums, particularly Toto IV. The 1982 album won five Grammys (including Album of the Year) and produced four hit singles, including “Rosanna” and “Africa.”
Toto’s musical contributions to the era are explored in depth in the new HBO film Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which is devoted to the retroactively named genre of music that blended soft-rock, jazz and R&B and was once a major chart player. The tag “yacht rock” was coined by the creators of a 2005–2010 comedy web series called — what else? — Yacht Rock.
Members of Toto in the recording studio.
Warner Bros.
The series celebrated the very same music it lampooned; Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary is 100% reverential. In addition to yacht rockers like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross, the three surviving members of classic-era Toto all appear in the documentary.
After the success of their self-titled 1978 debut, the band’s two follow-up albums performed less than spectacularly. In many ways, Toto IV represented a make-it-or-break-it release for the group. Then along came Rosanna — and “Rosanna.”
“I’d written a song, and the day that I was finishing the song, [Toto bandmate] Steve Porcaro walked into the house, and he was with Rosanna Arquette,” David Paich, 70, recalls in the documentary. “And of course, she charmed everybody. Everybody fell in love with her, including me.”
Toto’s Steve Lukather in ‘Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary’.
Warner Bros
“And I just said, ‘Rosanna, huh.’ I think her name just fit perfect,” Paich continues.
Porcaro, 67, adds, “And I’m sure he had a little crush on her. Everybody else did at some point, probably.”
Steve Lukather, 67, chimes in: “Rosanna is the Toto track. We knew we had something there, and when it came out and was a hit, it was like, phew.”
The single, the first from Toto IV, set the stage for the album’s enormous multi-platinum success. “Rosanna” went to No. 2 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 and won four Grammys, including Record of the Year. It helped establish Toto as one of the most successful acts in the genre that would come to be known as yacht rock more than 20 years later.
“Yacht rock to me is a very relaxing feeling,” comedian Fred Armisen says in the documentary. “It’s like the singers are all saying, ‘Hey, it’s going to be OK.”
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary is now streaming on Max.
