“When I heard those two guys, I was going, ‘This is it for me. I have no career. I should consider something else.’”
Steve Lukather may have lent his chops to a thousand albums. However, before he ever got to accept one of his many Grammys or cash his first royalty check, he knew he had a lot of learning to do to become the guitar powerhouse he is today.
“I love to put on Allan Holdsworth‘s records and listen to him rip,” he told Guitar World in 1988, “because as far as that style goes, he’s the guy for me.”
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As he puts it, the British fusion ace was “Yngwie before there was an Yngwie, but he played with such taste that people thought, ‘God, how does he do that?’ I remember hearing the Tony Williams Lifetime album [Believe It] 10 years ago, and going [yells], ‘How the fuck is this guy playing?! What the hell is this?!’”
This was around the time a certain Eddie Van Halen was emerging. “Allan’s was a completely different style from Ed’s, but when I heard those two guys, I was going, ‘This is it for me. It’s over. I have no career here, and I should consider something else.’”
Lukather admits that the comparison “was really depressing.” At the same time, it made him work even harder.
“I’d started getting a little overconfident before I’d heard these guys, and then I realized, ‘Fuck, man, I suck. I’d better go take a really good look at myself and get back into the woodshed.’”
The guitarist ended up channeling the results of his woodshedding into Toto’s 1988 album, The Seventh One. Back then, Guitar World described his playing on the record as “tempering Holdsworthian energy with Carltonian emotion and Claptonian simplicity,” which, even by 2026 standards, is a job well done.
