‘People Were Pounding on the Wall, Yelling at Me to Stop Playing’

In Session

A Vulture series in which studio musicians select their best performances.

David Paich has grown comfortable with the term “yacht rock.” The keyboardist and singer-songwriter was, at first, unwittingly ruddered into the subgenre due to his all-around honors of the era. He co-founded Toto and steered his way into becoming a deft session musician — a catamaran of a man, let’s say, who got all of these hits to safe passage on the top of the charts in the ’70s and ’80s. The release of Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, now streaming on HBO Max, features Paich as one of the most amusing talking heads, an experience that helped change his perspective on the term. “I thought it was kind of funny, considering it was a silly concept before,” he now says. “I have to admit I was a little bit leery about participating, but it turned out to be an informative undertaking.” His fellow Toto bandmate Steve Lukather also has a great sense of humor about it. Donald Fagen, not so much. And don’t even get Daryl Hall started.

For every “Africa” and “Rosanna” in Paich’s mast are dozens of other songs he put his wind into. Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees and Michael Jackson’s Thriller, for starters, are imprinted with his keys, as are Steely Dan’s early records and Cheryl Lynn’s grooviest hit. To this day, there’s nothing for Paich quite like kicking back with his friends in the studio, and here he recalls the most memorable sessions of his career. “There’s this connectivity and synergy that happens when musicians play. It’s like having a conversation with five different people at the same time, but no one’s interrupting anybody,” he explains. “Everybody is able to speak and get along together. We share DNA when everybody who’s making music makes music together.”

Seals and Crofts, Diamond Girl (1973)

It all started with this one. I had just graduated high school and got a job playing with Seals and Crofts, which ended up being the first hit record I ever got. My father was the musical director for The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour, and he hired a guitarist, Louis Shelton, who happened to be Seals and Crofts’ producer. This was before “Summer Breeze” became a smash. This launched my session career from then on, because sessions were mainly word of mouth in Hollywood. There was no music involved — just everybody learning their parts from Jimmy Seals, who was sitting there playing whatever he wanted in front of us. Clearly, I did something right.

Steely Dan, “Black Friday” (1975)

I had first met Walter Becker and Donald Fagen because Jeff Porcaro and I had a chance to play on Pretzel Logic. I ended up playing on the song “Night by Night.” But “Black Friday” is my favorite. It’s my most memorable moment with Steely Dan. There was another keyboard player who wrote and arranged a lot of the Steely Dan stuff named Michael Omartian, so they had two keyboards in the studio. I was on a Hohner electric piano and he was on a Wurlitzer. We were facing each other about six inches apart. I started playing one riff and he started playing Donald’s riff, and then we started swapping the riffs every two bars. We traded just to confuse the engineers for our own entertainment, who were trying to get the sound. We ended up using that type of back-and-forth, question-and-answer playfulness in this serious blues song. It really encapsulates Steely Dan in their blues proficiency.

They had this very subtle New York kind of dry humor. If they said they liked something, it means they really didn’t think it was great. They’d say, “That’s okay. That’s fine.” One of the things I observed about them was when I went and saw them record vocals on the song “Green Earrings” from The Royal Scam: Walter and Donald were English literature majors, and Donald was an English teacher, so they’re very articulate and well versed at, just, material. Donald would sing something, and Walter would be in the booth saying comments like, “A little more of Act Three of Hamlet. A little more of that attitude.” And Donald knew exactly what that meant. Of course I was in the corner and had to look up what they meant. A lot of the sarcasm in their comments and critiques of things were hysterical to me and Jeff. We always found ourselves laughing a lot when they would converse, even though they were very snootish.

Boz Scaggs, “Lowdown” (1976)

I was playing a Fender Rhodes augmented with two Leslie speakers from a Hammond organ because I like that “churning” sound. I wrote the beginning of the song, that little riff, inspired by Boz during one of our demos Toto did for a record company we tried to get a deal with. It was called “Tale of a Man,” which ended up on our Toto XX record — it’s this rock-and-roll, R&B-ish song inspired by Steely Dan’s “Don’t Take Me Alive.” Boz heard the ending. That little ending vamp is the beginning of “Lowdown.” It’s literally the same changes. He said he heard the fade and thought, I want to write a whole song based on those changes. So we took the changes and made the chords to “Lowdown,” at least the first two chords that mainly go back and forth. Then I added the bridge on it, which goes into another transitional section where the horns come in. It goes through a guitar solo, which I modulated up a whole step for the guitar solo.

It was something that happened naturally with these players. Jeff was there on drums and David Hungate was on guitar. We started thinking, Hey, maybe we should get our own band together after this? It’s so magical to play with good players who you know, because we have this shorthand in the studio where everybody looks at each other and we instinctively know where to go to the next section. It had this jazz feel to it harmonically. We always thought it was going to be way too musical to ever make the charts. Lo and behold, it became a hit. A lot of the dance scenes to Saturday Night Fever were filmed with the song “Lowdown” as the background. Boz was thinking about two different movies. He got offered Saturday Night Fever, but it was instead decided that the song would be put in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I don’t know if anybody remembers that film, but it starred Richard Gere, and it hardly made any noise whatsoever as opposed to selling 40 million soundtrack records. That was one of those ones that got away.

Toto, “Hold the Line” (1978)

Me, Jeff, Steve Lukather, and Steve Porcaro had been in a high-school band together, so we knew some of these cover songs from our school days. One that had inspired me was a Sly and the Family Stone song called “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” I really liked the feel of it, so I wanted to write something that felt like that with triplets. It’s got old Fats Domino “Blueberry Hill”–inspired triplets in the keyboard. The rest of “Hold the Line” became this riff that I caught for the intro. I had just got my first apartment and I bought an upright piano. I played this riff. I got it in my head and I wouldn’t stop playing it for about three days. People were pounding on the wall, yelling at me to stop playing. The landlords almost evicted me for not stopping the piano for 24 hours. When we finally got in the studio, it happened just like butter. It was our first song for our first session, if you can believe it.

Toto, “Georgy Porgy” (1978)

It crossed over into the R&B charts and became a hit record, which kind of surprised me. I had been strongly influenced by people like Quincy Jones and Marvin Gaye, and I wanted to write something that just made me feel great. I needed to feel fresh and new, so I started writing this riff. When I first met Walter from Steely Dan, he was reading a book. I said, “What are you reading right now, man?” And he said, “A book of children’s nursery rhymes.” I said, “Wow, that’s interesting.” So I went to the store and I bought a book of nursery rhymes. Sure enough, the first page I opened was “Georgie Porgie.” I thought, This would be a hip Earth, Wind & Fire–ish kind of R&B song. So I wrote the song very quickly. I tried to find inspiration from that book again but couldn’t strike gold twice.

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Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, “The Girl Is Mine” (1982)

This all started with a phone call from Quincy Jones. He asked me to be an arranger for this song called “The Girl Is Mine.” I said, “Tell me more, what’s going on with it?” And he responded, “Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson are going to sing it together. Paul wrote it for him and Michael to do a duet.” I said, “Um, that sounds fantastic. Two of my heroes I get to play with?” He also called Steve and Jeff to help with the arranging. So we got in the studio and it was just like a dream-team session right there. There was Quincy with his engineer, Bruce Swedien. There was George Martin with the Beatles’ engineer, Geoffrey Emerick. And then Paul and Linda McCartney walked in with Michael Jackson arriving right after. It was a real pinch-me moment. That’s when I allow myself to get a bit fanboyish and ditzy, you know what I mean? When I see huge stars like that, I even still get butterflies.

Quincy asked me to sit down and play the song. Paul was playing it when I entered the room, and he said, “Paul, get up and let David lay a groove on it.” I’m like, “Gee, thanks, Quincy, for introducing me to a great piano player who’s playing it already.” It didn’t have a lot of meat for us to dig into because it was such a simple little ballad. Which is fine, but we thought it was going to be a lot more ambitious in its musical architecture. It was a simple song, and we knew how to do that. Mainly, when you play on a song like that, the objective is to stay out of the way of the vocals. Don’t play around with a man singing. Ninety percent of the time, less you play is more.

Toto, “Rosanna” (1982)

Cutting “Rosanna” was a real milestone for the band. We knew we were onto something as far as being able to raise the bar and keep the standard high as far as hits go. I knew it was going to be a hit record when we cut it. I actually think it’s Toto’s best record — you hear each of the musicians step out on their own. I remember we had once played with Chris Squire, the bass player from Yes. I noticed how his bass sound was mainly getting through. He didn’t do it through a normal bass amplifier, which is an Ampeg amplifier and a direct cord, but he played through a Marshall amplifier, which is indicative of Jimi Hendrix and loud guitar players. It’s got this little bit of distortion on it. So David switched to a Marshall on the “Rosanna” section, which gave it this extra rock grit and power.

Toto, “Africa” (1982)

We thought the whole Toto IV album was done. We had everything we needed on the album, but thought about maybe adding one more cut. In those days, you could only spend so much time on vinyl, so time was a consideration. You could only do, like, 20 minutes a side. I started messing around in the studio, because I had just gotten a new synthesizer from Yamaha called the CS-80. I wrote this riff and it sounded so good on that synthesizer. I wrote down words that inspired me. “I hear the drums echoing tonight.” I started getting into this geographical transition for a place I had never been, but always wanted to visit: Africa.

I romanticized a story about a gentleman who’s a social worker there, or a missionary, who needs companionship and strikes up a long-distance love affair. The band told me I should save that for my solo album. But it ended up evolving as we started playing it all together. Jeff came up with a great drum loop that we cut to, and then Al Schmitt, our engineer, cut the tape up and made a loop out of it — old Beatles style. It’s commonplace for people to loop stuff now because they have computers. But back in those days, you had to cut a two-inch tape and then run it around the room because it would be so long. You had to put it around mic stands just to hold the tape up. It was a funny process to endure for a song.

I had always been fascinated with these commercials from UNICEF and the Red Cross when I was a kid. They would show starving families and starving children in Africa. I watched a lot of Hollywood films set in Africa, but I always wanted to go there. I was a big fan of National Geographic and I used to read everything I could about Africa. It was very stimulating to me. The chorus came out of me just like it is on the record. “It’s going to take a lot to drag me away from you. There’s nothing that a hundred men or more could do. I bless the rains down in Africa.” I stopped and knew something had happened, magically, that I wasn’t responsible for. I knew there was a higher power helping me compose at that moment.

It took me a few months to finish the rest of it, as I wanted to do a little bit of research. I was also inspired by local people writing poetry in Africa and I wanted to take full advantage of immersing myself in that kind of culture. My main source of inspiration was a book by Kahlil Gibran on Hindu prayers called The Prophet, as well as National Geographic. A lot of the text I was inspired by came from those monthly magazines that came out, because it was the prime source of information for people like me — students of geography. Anyway, the success came out of nowhere. They called from CBS Sony and said that it was getting played at some dance places in New York, and then it started getting picked up at other stations. We were baffled because, to us, it was very much a “Here’s the 11th-hour, late-bloomer song that went on the record.”

Toto, “Don’t Stop Me Now” (1986)

We got Miles Davis to play on a Toto record. Jeff was a very good artist and he used to do charcoal paintings. Miles saw a painting that he did and said, verbatim, “I’ll trade you a solo for that painting right there.” No lawyers were involved, no deals, no money, no anything. That was quite a feather in our cap to get the great Miles Davis to play in the style that he used to on the album Sketches of Spain, which was the old Miles, not the new Miles — the classic stuff he’s known for.

Miles always looked angry when he was looking at you. It was kind of funny, because we asked to show him “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Steve and I wrote the song together on piano. Both of us had different sections. I had two pianos in my living room, so I sat at one piano and Steve played at the other one. We started playing and Miles stopped us immediately and said, “What the hell is this, Ferrante and Teicher?” They were a known tuxedo-society-playing duo that used to be very popular — very white and high-collar society kind of thing. We immediately moved over and sat on the same piano bench after that. We’re very blessed to have rubbed elbows with the legend. I won’t mention any names, but I know there are producers who have offered Miles up to $100,000 just to play one solo. He always turned them down. He’s never played for like anybody else, but he did it for Toto.