Two great and very different bands: Toto and Pink Floyd
The accumulated value anyone derives from their favorite music is far in excess of whatever price tag it had, if any
The modern Santa Claus is largely a product of the television era, the advent of which soon began delivering dynamic visual advertising to the American senses at an unprecedented scale. A magical figure capable of single-handedly (excluding the elves, eight or nine reindeer, and the indefatigable Mrs. Claus) delivering toys to every household on a single night could only have been the result of a coordinated effort by Madison Avenue brainstormers.
When I was a child, I got everything on Christmas I asked for. This seemed easier once I was around six years old and understood that I could pester “Santa Claus” directly on a daily basis starting in September for whatever I hoped to appear under the tree.
I might argue that they things I wanted—mostly things I could build cities with, often kludge-settlements constructed from a blend of Legos, Erector Sets, Lincoln Logs, and other brands my parents discovered, along with Star Wars stuff and sledding gear—weren’t all that pricey and were limited in scope. But those Legos were exorbitantly priced, especially in the 1970s, when the cost of petroleum-based products was volatile. And Star Wars crap was always expensive.
Did I make these toys last? Sure. Some of them. When I was around eleven or twelve, I developed a short-lived habit of climbing into trees along the road I lived on and launching Star Wars action figures—which in 1980 cost over $20 each in 2022 dollars—into the beds of passing pickup trucks, which were and remain plentiful along Mountain Road. I stopped this practice after bouncing Greedo off some hilljack’s windshield, an insult that finally compelled a beleaguered motorist to screech to a halt. I was on the ground and deep into the woods before he was out of his truck, but from that day on, I and my friends shifted operations such as these to Sanborn Road, where a different cadre of youngsters was likely to be blamed for any monkeyshines erupting from trees.
I had a vague idea throughout my childhood that my parents weren’t made of money. I failed, however, to connect this to the fact that they never had been. My father grew up in a shithole town on the Ohio River and lost his own dad, a construction worker, when he was sixteen. He was lucky to own a decent baseball glove, as were all of his friends. He never once complained about or even referenced this fact; it was something that slowly bled out of him after I asked enough questions. And my mother had a father who was an unreliable provider at critical times, and hectored her about bullshit until the day he died.
Whatever I picked up explicitly from my family’s orientation toward finances and holidays seems to have been dwarfed by the implicit impact this has had on my own psychology. I’ve never been in a position to spend tons of money on presents for people, and thanks to attitudes exempt from holiday-related ruminations, I have mostly tried to keep people from giving me anything in recent years by advertising that I do my best to ignore the Christmas holiday season. Yet I’ve never been disappointed or resentful after they’ve ended.
Thinking about the association between money and contentment has me returning to a familiar theme: The enormous amount of lifetime value anyone gets from whatever their favorite music is. These days, most people don’t shell out any money at all for music. But consider the joy a single $20 compact disc can deliver, over and over and with stoic reliability, for as long as you have the machinery to listen to it. Give a moment to all the times you’ve used music to amplify good moods or transform awful ones into a manageable funk. Think of how many times your own private tears have taken you by surprise on long drives when an old pop clunker from your teenage years or your own wedding comes on the radio.
In recent years, I’ve spent a lot of time—maybe too much—learning to play and better understand music as well as just listening to it. This compels me to talk about music from time to time in a didactic way, which is iffy because my elaborations are probably of little interest to people who aren’t cursory students of music while being boring to those at higher levels of musicianship. I am the ultimate earnest wannabe.
If you’re familiar with Toto, you probably know them for “Hold the Line,” “Rosanna,” and “Africa,” and may conceive of them wryly as a yacht-rock band. But despite being a mainstream rock-and-roll act of the day, Toto wrote some intricate music.
The syncopation of the piano part in the intro and chorus of “Hold the Line” is tricky and beautiful. And the rare use of three consecutive notes (C#-C-B) in the bass line of the verse is bluesy and fun.
The guitarist in the paisley-style shirt is Steve Lukather. You may not know his name, but you’ve heard him play. He played guitar on most of the songs on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and collaborated with artists ranging along the style spectrum from Aretha Frankin to Warren Zevon.
I listened to Toto IV over and over when it was released in 1983. The album won six Grammy Awards and is noted for “Rosanna” and “Africa.”1 The former reached #2 on the U.S. singles charts for five weeks in a row, but “Africa” gave Toto its only #1 U.S. single despite the band claiming, credibly, that it was supposed to be a throwaway to complete the set of Toto IV. The band members say they wrote the lyrics while looking at things like atlases and National Geographic magazines, and frankly, you can tell. But the song has one of the catchiest and most triumphant choruses of the 80s, with an F# minor-D-E-A progression that make countless shy kids in Izod shirts and Converse sneakers get onto the gyn floor and dance forty years ago.
Still, “Rosanna” is Toto’s magnum opus. An ode to the advent of high-tech synthesizers, it is an unconditional and unapologetic tribute to the perfect woman, who exists both for and within everyone if you listen to the song for long enough.
“Africa” is tricky to play even without the synth section in the bridge because of the fingering. Some four-note chords are just awkward, and David Paich can play any of them while standing on his head.
The verse of “Rosanna” (which is in the key of C, with the rest in B-flat) includes chords that roll from sus2 to base to sus4 and back in a way that brilliantly harmonizes with the lyrics. Also, listen to the shuffle-beat Jeff Porcaro plays, which is almost but not quite unique in rock music.
Toto started bleeding members in 1984, when Bobby Kimball left amid drug problems. Porcaro died in 1992, probably as a result of chronic cocaine use. Lukather is the only remaining member of the band.
Pink Floyd, formed in 1965 (twelve years before Toto), hasn’t existed in decades. Rick Beato, my and any sane person’s favorite YouTube music analyst, recently dedicated a show to choosing his favorite Pink Floyd song.
I’m not sure how many people appreciate the impact Pink Floyd has had. 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon established the group’s prog-rock status and, according to sources, more units of this work have been sold than any other album in history other than Thriller, Back in Black by AC/DC, and Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard.
My own favorite Pink Floyd song, “Learning to Fly,” is not even really a Pink Floyd song but a David Gilmour song, as the still-voluble Roger Waters had already left years before the 1987 release of A Momentary Lapse of Reason and tried taking the name of the band with him. I have an emotional connection to the song because of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986; you never know when such things will form and you don’t question them.
I think that most people familiar with Pink Floyd’s enormous body of work would pick “Wish You Were Here” as the band’s greatest. I predicted that Beato, as a guitarist, would pick “Comfortably Numb,” which has not one but two of the greatest-ever guitar solos and might be a perfectly written and arranged song. The only other musically perfect song I can think of is “Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harum.
Beato in the end had a hard time choosing between “Comfortably Numb” and another track from 1979’s The Wall, “Another Brick in the Wall Part II,” the band’s only #1 hit. The contrast between them is stark: “ABITW Part II” is in D minor and among the darkest number-one songs in history, maybe the darkest. “Comfortably Numb” is in B minor and starts off in a haunting way, but the long, long chorus is a roll of D-A-C-G and then A-C-G-D, all major chords and accompanied by enchanting keyboard rolls from Richard Wright.
“ABITW Part II” only has one incredible Gilmour guitar solo, so there’s that.
Below is a Waters-less 1994 performance of “ABITW Part II.”
This is a 2005 performance of “Comfortably Numb” that included all of the members present for The Wall. (By then, co-founder Syd Barrett had succumbed to schizophrenic illness, maybe LSD-induced but maybe not, and was one year away from dying in isolation in Cambridge, England. “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” and “Wish You Were Here” were both love letters to Barrett by Waters.)
“Comfortably Numb” really is an amazing composition. And now that I have started playing with a way to mine people’s personal thought-data, I will solicit your opinions.
I hope all of you are enjoying the holidays as they are. The main reason I wrote this is because I felt like it and will again. But it also helps to assure readers that I don’t spend all of my waking time wringing my hands over the fallen state of the world, cheating joggers, or people I’ll never meet who blurt out absurdities they think make sense. I spend a huge part of every day immersed in activities with my dog and my musical equipment, and these things keep me somewhat forward-thinking and intent on not unraveling as much as I often want to. In fact, I wish it were as easy for everyone else as it is for me to find chemical-free escapes and indulgences, some of them guaranteed to regularly provoke the right kind of tears.
Thanks to everyone who forever reason has helped keep me and this project afloat. I often have to remember which of these is fundamentally more important, but I’ve made a surprising number of new friends thanks to this place.
An unlikely number of bands achieved spectacular success with their fourth albums, provided they were already famous and titled the work appropriately. In addition to Toto IV, there’s Led Zeppelin IV, which completely revamped metal; Vol. 4 by Black Sabbath; compilations titled 4 by Foreigner, Beyonce, and the Stone Temple Pilots; and plays on the theme like Forth by The Verve and Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News.