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Producer Rick Beato releases a fantastic new interview with legendary guitarist Steve Lukather. Steve recalls stories of drumming greats Steve Gadd and Jeff Porcaro, one in particular is when Steve recorded the tracks for Steely Dan’s Aja.
Steve Gadd shows up hours late for the session, after a night of celebrating and suffering the effects from, he opens the difficult 12-page chart and within 1 or 2 takes nails the song, and those tracks are what you hear on the record. In the interview Steve tells this story at start time marker 38:47. Below is the isolation drum tracks of Gadd’s performance on the song Aja.
For the Michael Jackson song “Beat It” he recounts how both he and the late Jeff Porcaro had to rerecord the section of Eddie’s solo. The time in the video where he says this is starting at 41:14.
Steve reveals a full account of just how challenging it was to make the timeless classic. Below is a transcription of what he said about Eddie Van Halen’s famous guitar solo in “Beat It” and that Eddie didn’t adhere to the recorded time code causing a re-edit of the song. Quincy Jones insisted on its repair and this is how Steve and Jeff Porcaro blended the “time code-less” solo into the version we know today.
Steve: “Like anything like that, if you cut that it will not lock up. So what happened was, Ed didn’t want to play through the section that they wanted him to so he cut the tape and played the part that’s now the record. So what happened is he sent that back to Quincy and it wouldn’t sync up. So you had Eddie’s first generation [take] and Michael’s first generation vocals and the SMPTE code. And the only thing else that was on the track was Michael hitting a trap case on two and leakage through four of five takes of Michael’s vocals through the headphones where you could hear what the track was:”.
Steve recalls that Quincy said, “So Quincy called me, Jeff Porcaro and an engineer called Humberto Gatica to go to Sunset Sound and fix the track. He said, ‘… I don’t want to do Michael’s vocals again, I don’t want to transfer them – I want to keep it first generation with Eddie’s solo on this – you’ve got to make it work.”
“So me and Jeff went down there and Jeff, the musician that he was, he goes, ‘I’m gonna go out and I want you to crank Michael’s vocal so I can hear the two and four.’ And he went out there and two drumsticks and a mic, and he made his own classic Jeff “click” that he would do with drumsticks – I miss him so f#%king much, he was the best. He got that together… so of course he goes out and it could have been the first, no more than the second take and he was done. He goes, ‘You’re up.’”.
Jeff Porcaro was an American drummer, songwriter, son of Joe Porcaro, and record producer. He is best known for his work with the rock band Toto but is one of the most recorded session musicians in history, working on hundreds of albums and thousands of sessions. While already an established studio player in the 1970s, he came to prominence in the United States as the drummer on the Steely Dan album Katy Lied.
Jeff Porcaro performed his own take of the “Purdie Shuffle” with the Toto song “Rosanna”. He created this shuffle by combining Bernard Purdie’s “Purdie Shuffle” and John Bonham’s “Fool In The Rain”.
Porcaro died at Humana Hospital-West Hills on the evening of August 5, 1992, at the age of 38 after falling ill while spraying insecticide having an allergic reaction to inhaled pesticide in the yard of his Hidden Hills home. The coroner ruled out an accident and determined a heart attack due to occlusive coronary artery disease caused by atherosclerosis resulting from cocaine use. Bandmate Steve Lukather and Porcaro’s wife stated they believed that Porcaro had also been suffering from a long-standing heart condition, and a smoking habit, both of which contributed to his death. Lukather noted that several of Porcaro’s family members had indeed died of young age due to heart disease.
Watch the full interview below.
Additional resources include Musicradar.com and Wikipedia.
