I’d love to tell you that I sit around all day and listen to Robert Johnson 78s from 1936, but I don’t. Guys my age started out with The Beatles, obviously, but I got to blues music through the British invasion. Clapton. Beck. Page. That’s what hit me hardest. Even though it was white-man blues, what did I know? I was a white boy from LA. So I devoured that.
I’d just gotten an electric guitar and I jumped on that shit. I spent countless hours lifting up the needle, painstakingly trying to learn Clapton’s Crossroads solo. Then you found out where it was all coming from. So all that modern stuff, I went backwards from it. Who were these old guys, y’know?
The thing about blues is that we live in a time of sanitised, overbuffed, computerised, time-corrected music that makes Toto sound like the fucking Sex Pistols. People say, “Oh, those guys are slick and soulless,” but we sound raw compared to the shit that comes out now as pop, rock, even metal. At least we sat in a room and played at the same time.
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Now, everything is put on a grid. It’s an unrealistic view of perfection, like women who get plastic surgery to look beautiful and they go too far, and you think, “You should’ve left well enough alone.” But you can’t do that with blues and jazz. You can’t program it.
Nobody’s gonna go, “Yeah, Toto is a great blues band.” But there are aspects of the blues in all my improvisation, and a funk, R&B undercurrent that sets us apart from a regular rock band. We have a lot more harmonic content; we have a lot more grooves. And it’s all based in the blues.
Led Zeppelin – Dazed And Confused (1969)
The summer between sixth and seventh grade, I got the first Led Zeppelin album and I probably played it 20,000 times. It was the first time I got my hands up a girl’s shirt, too. I told Robert Plant that once and he just rolled his eyes.
That was such a blues-based record, and Jimmy Page really touched me, man. Dazed And Confused was more of a psychedelic blues: you had tape slap and it was kinda following in Hendrix’s footsteps. I loved that first album. I mean, they stole everything. But every permutation of notes has already been done a thousand years ago, so you just gotta put new clothes on it.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience – Third Stone From The Sun (1967)
The first Hendrix song I ever heard was Purple Haze, which was like aliens had landed in my backyard. But I remember when I was about 10 years old, I was playing the first Hendrix album, and my father walked into the room right in the middle of Third Stone From The Sun, when there’s feedback, and Jimi is going, ‘You ain’t never gonna hear surf music again,’ and all that shit.
Now, this is 1967, man, you understand. My father looked at the album cover, shook his head, threw the album at me and said, “I don’t understand this shit. I mean, what the fuck?” Then he walked out of the room. This song almost scared me when I was a little kid.
Stevie Ray Vaughan – Little Wing (1991)
I love Stevie’s slow, emotive stuff, and I love his take on the Jimi stuff. His Little Wing is great. That’s a favourite song of mine that I’ve played a million times, but his take is just really neat. He was a game-changer. You never know how things would have gone.
If you die at the top of your game, your life is freeze-framed forever, so you never get old and your shit never dies. It was a big loss for the music community. You gotta look at life like everything is supposed to happen for a reason and therefore we have to make the most of it. And, y’know, that’s what the blues is all about, brother.
Cream – Sunshine Of Your Love (1967)
When I got to play Sunshine Of Your Love with Jack Bruce – God bless his soul – for the first minute, I played the exact solo that Eric Clapton played, and Jack was looking over at me. But it was like, “How can I play anything else, man? That solo is tattooed to my soul.”
I was playing that song in a band when I was 11. I was one of the first kids on the block that had a vibrato and I didn’t even realise what I was doing, but I was able to make the shake, emulating what I had heard on the record, and it sounded good. I’m never gonna be Eric Clapton – but I got to that because of him.
B.B. King – The Thrill Is Gone (1969)
I mean, this was his biggest commercial success, and it’s his calling card to the white folks who don’t know much about what he does. But it’s the stinging notes, the way he makes a statement with the most simple but soulful thing. The phrasing, the economy of notes, the vibrato… everything the guy does, there’s a soul to it. You can learn the notes, but that doesn’t mean you’ll move people the same way. Without B.B. King, you wouldn’t have any of us.
Steely Dan – Kid Charlemagne (1976)
When I got older and I heard The Royal Scam album, that was a life-changer for me. Kid Charlemagne is a classic, the way Larry Carlton plays through the take and improvises over the chords. The way he plays jazz licks, but with more of a rock sound, that resonated with me in a deep way. I sorta took that and made it my own, and it helped me create whatever style I’m supposed to have.
I’m, like, a second-generation Carlton guy. I listen to him play the blues and he comes at it from a different point of view. But it’s still all based on the blues. It all comes down to playing that right blue note at the right time. That’s what kicks you in the heart. You’re like, “Ah, there’s the money note!”
Jeff Beck – Where Were You (1989)
If you want to go modern blues, and hear what a genius the guy is, listen to Where Were You. Those beautiful chord changes that Tony Hymas wrote… it’s like angels singing, man. Jeff Beck is an alien. The funny thing is, from a schooled point of view, he doesn’t know what he’s playing – he just plays from the heart.
When I was 26, I jammed onstage in Japan with Carlos Santana and Jeff Beck. But when they recorded it, they only recorded the effects side of my channel, so it sounds like I’m playing through a goddamn kazoo, and I get the shit beat out of me on the internet, like, “This fucking sucks.” It was the loudest thing I’ve ever done onstage, and it caused me a lifetime of tinnitus. Because of that gig, I’ve had a ring in my ear since 1986.
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock Presents The Blues 20, published in March 2015. Steve Lukather was speaking with Henry Yates. Steve Lukather & Friends’ 2003 Christmas album Santamental has just been reissued and is available to order now.
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