TOP 40 DEBUT: February 9, 1980
PEAK POSITION: #26 (March 15, 1980)
Toto’s epic Eighties run—two massive, multi-generational hits, with a top-to-bottom Grammy sweep in the middle—almost didn’t happen. The Los Angeles sextet first vaulted to national attention in the wake of 1978’s “Hold The Line,” one of a handful of AOR classics to imagine a world where pianos rock as hard as electric guitars. (Shout-outs to “Cold As Ice” and “Jane.”) “Hold The Line” (an 8) was a pretty stellar debut single in a year notable for its stellar debut singles (“Roxanne,” “You Really Got Me,” and “Just What I Needed,” to name three), plus it crossed over to the pop charts—reaching #5 on January 13, 1979—in a way few rock-centric hits of the time could manage. One song into their career, Toto already seemed poised for breakout success. It would take three-and-a-half years for that success to finally arrive.
In between Toto (double-platinum, three Top 50 singles) and Toto IV (triple-platinum, three Top 10 singles, six Grammies) lay a long, barren commercial wilderness. From February 17, 1979 to May 1, 1982, Toto disappeared completely from the Billboard Top 40—save an eight-week stretch in the spring of 1980, when a jazzy near-ballad with the confusing title “99” underachieved at radio, dooming its parent album’s commercial prospects in the process. The lone charting single from Hydra is many things to many people: a forgotten classic, a pit stop on the road to pop ubiquity and Grammy glory, and (supposedly) Steve Lukather’s least favorite Toto song. It also offers a fascinating alternate history of sorts, suggesting a timeline where the biggest band in studio-rock winds up making fascinatingly weird, knotty music for a cult fanbase in the absence of actual hits.
Toto were not the first, nor the greatest, session-musician supergroup. (Pretty sure Booker T. & The MG’s have them beat on both counts.) But with more than forty million records sold worldwide, they’re almost definitely the biggest. The idea for Toto originated when keyboardist David Paich played alongside bassist David Hungate and drummer Jeff Porcaro during the recording of Silk Degrees, Boz Scaggs’ 1976 landmark of tastefully suburban white-boy soul. All three were well-established L.A. studio pros who’d previously crossed paths during sessions ranging from Seals & Crofts to Steely Dan. But the massive success of Silk Degrees raised each of their profiles in a big way, particularly that of Paich; not only did he handle the album’s arrangements, but he’d also co-written all four singles, including the #3 “Lowdown” (a 7) and the #11 “Lido Shuffle” (a 9). Midway through Silk Degrees’ 115-week Billboard run, Paich started receiving label interest. That’s when the keyboardist reached out to Porcaro and suggested they form their own group.
The Paich-Porcaro connection dated all the way back to Grant High School in Van Nuys, where both musicians first performed together in a band called Rural Still Life. Three classes behind them were Jeff’s younger brother, keyboardist Steve Porcaro, and his pal, guitarist Steve Lukather. The two Steves kept Rural Still Life going (under the shortened name Still Life), and upon graduation, they immediately followed their older classmates into session work.
Less than two years out of high school, both Steves joined forces with Paich, Porcaro, and Hungate in this as-yet-unnamed unit. Three of the five members sang, but none could hit top tenor notes, so they cast around for a vocalist with higher range. Michael McDonald was the first choice; unfortunately, four days earlier, he’d joined the Doobie Brothers. (That sound you hear is a million yacht-rock fans collectively crying out in agony.) The band eventually settled on Bobby Kimball, a Cajun singer recently migrated to L.A. and the only group member from outside the studio musician world. Five different people would eventually sing lead across Toto’s ten Top 40 singles, but Kimball would be the voice on their three biggest.
Even after completing their debut album, the six-man outfit still didn’t have a name. “Toto” was initially a nonsense word written by Jeff Porcaro on the band’s demo tapes to identify them at the recording studio. The name stuck once Hungate offered a more cerebral (and wonky) argument, suggesting that “in toto” translated to “all encompassing” in Latin, the perfect moniker for a group of session cats capable of playing any number of musical styles. Once critics reframed Toto’s genre-hopping as a liability, that particular “we can play anything” explanation quickly got downplayed in interviews. Within a few years, group members started taking the easy way out and simply referenced the dog from The Wizard Of Oz instead.
“99,” the first single from the band’s second record, Hydra, inspired even greater confusion upon its release in late ‘79. On the surface, the garden-variety lyrics fit comfortably within the romantic pantheon: “I never thought it would happen/ I feel quite the same/ I don't want to hurt you anymore/ I never knew it would work out/ No one to blame/ You know I love you.” But why were Toto singing to a number and not a person? “99/ I keep breaking your heart/ Oh, 99/ How can we be apart/ Oh, 99/ I love you.” This was strange, mysterious stuff, especially coming from a band not known for being either of these things.
Conspiracy theories abounded. Some decided the narrator was always breaking his lover’s heart because he was only giving 99%, rather than the full 100. Others speculated “99” was code for a girl who was “1 short of perfect.” (It was 1980. Toto’s fanbase was almost entirely male. Let’s keep moving.) The prevailing theory argued that “99” was a clever ode to the gorgeous Barbara Feldon, who played Agent 99 on the television sitcom Get Smart. As plausible as that explanation sounds, it would take Toto a few more years to start using real-life actresses for song inspiration. Paich wrote “99” after being smitten by a different Hollywood legend: George Lucas.
Half a decade before Star Wars turned him into a household name, Lucas made his feature-length directorial debut with a distinctly darker brand of science-fiction. 1971’s THX 1138 was a Kubrick-indebted head trip, set in a dystopian future where sex is prohibited, drug-enhanced compliance is mandatory, and names have been replaced with numbers. (The movie’s title comes from the assigned designation of the main character, played by a shaved-head Robert Duvall.) In many respects, THX 1138 works as the anti-Star Wars, a bleak and chilly inverse to the exhilarating thrills of Lucas’ later blockbuster. It was also, at the time, a tremendous commercial flop.
Like so many other box-office failures, THX 1138 eventually developed a cult following, particularly after the gargantuan success of Star Wars inspired fans to seek out Lucas’ earlier, more experimental efforts. Some of those fans included the members of Toto—or at least David Paich, the sole composer behind “99.” (Between this song and the band’s 1984 soundtrack for Dune, I’d like to think Toto are all, secretly, sci-fi nerds.) Inspired by the movie, he wrote lyrics that, ostensibly, tell the tale of a “sterile society in which names are forgotten and love forbidden.” For the music video (see below), the entire band doubled down on the THX 1138 connection, donning identical white jumpsuits while performing on a barren set meant to emulate the film’s “white void prison” scene.
As the son of a huge sci-fi nerd, I tend to appreciate any artist willing to use futuristic dystopia as a jumping-off point for a Top 40 ballad. The problem with “99” was that almost no one caught the reference. Very few people saw THX 1138 during its original theatrical run. Tracking down the movie on VHS wasn’t yet an option. Nor did the group bother to clarify the song’s origins until years after the fact. (That above summary from Toto’s website only appeared in 2010.)
But in all honesty, most people missed the connection because Paich didn’t actually make one. There’s nothing in perfunctory lines like “99/ I’ve been waiting so long” to suggest any deeper meaning whatsoever; for the vast majority of listeners, this was just another love song, only the girl happened to have a stupid name. (And it wasn’t even the right name: In the film, THX 1138’s love interest is actually LUH 3147. Not that I’m suggesting that “LUH 3147/ I’ve been waiting so long/ Oh, LUH 3147/ Where did we go wrong” would’ve been an improvement.) There’s a difference between being cryptic and willfully obtuse. “99” falls squarely in the latter category because its writer got lyrically lazy.
In fairness, words were never really David Paich’s thing. The son of legendary arranger Marty Paich, he had an Emmy by age twenty (“Best Song or Theme,” shared with his father), a Grammy three years later (“Best R&B Song” for “Lowdown,” bizarrely), and a co-write on a real R&B #1 a year after that, thanks to Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real” (an 8). And just one week after Lynn’s song reached the top spot on Billboard’s “Hot Soul Singles” chart, “Hold The Line” cracked the Top 5 on the Hot 100 proper.
Paich wrote that one, too, along with most of the material Toto would release over the next ten years. He was certainly not the band’s only talented composer—Lukather and Jeff Porcaro both contributed some huge hits over this same time frame—but Paich steered the band’s identity as much as anyone, especially early on. The driving piano hook from “Hold The Line,” the island funk flourishes decorating “Georgy Porgy” (with a returning Cheryl Lynn on guest vocals), the peacock strut of underrated single “St. George And The Dragon”: These were all Paich creations, smart and tricky and way more harmonically complicated than your average pop song. His strength—and Toto’s secret weapon—lay in making all that music theory sound effortless.
“99” boasts some big-boy compositional skill, worlds removed from conventional arena rock, more beholden to George Benson’s contemporary jazz than anything on AOR radio in ’79. Dense chord clusters—F# (+4)/E, G#m7/F#—pass in a flash, as befitting a tune written by the piano player. The solo section hides a modulation so subtle, I’d never caught it before researching this article. (You probably haven’t either, but try comparing the first verse to the last. Totally different keys.) All those floating 7th chords keep the overall vibe melancholy, but not heavy; there’s actual air in the track, a breeziness built on whispered bongos and the world’s most subdued slap bass.
Moody keyboard ripples set an initially somber tone, but they’re merely place setting, the opening course before that lithe, supple pulse takes over. Everyone plays with a light touch; even the syncopations sound like laughter. Paich’s recurring, dancing piano hook cascades like Dom Pérignon down a champagne tower. Steve Porcaro sprinkles twinkly bits in the margins, while his swirling synthesizer solo splits the difference between steel drums and a broken carousel. This is adult-rock at its most immaculate and expensive: Michael McDonald’s Doobies minus the gruffness, Steely Dan with none of the cynicism and half the cocaine. “99” could only exist within a five-year window from roughly 1978 to 1983. It’s a song both extremely dated and, also, strangely timeless.
Hydra appeared on October 30, 1979 to savage reviews, penned by critics still in the thrall of three-chord punk and openly hostile towards the band’s unapologetic studio perfectionism. Even after the hits arrived, that initial perception—Toto as soulless, sterile, session hacks—persisted. And it kept a lot of listeners (including yours truly) from diving into the murkier corners of their back catalog. Maybe that’s why “99,” like much of Toto’s “difficult” second album, now sounds secretly great, if incredibly insular: Like most music made by musicians for other musicians, it offers insane instrumental prowess offset with deeply confusing (or just extremely dopey) lyrics. Yet the same odd, angular qualities that made “99” a bust on Top 40 radio also endeared the song to generations of Toto fans—with one major, intra-band exception.
Scour the Internet, and you’ll quickly learn that Toto “rarely performs ‘99’ live,” because Lukather “has hated it from the very beginning.” This seems strange, if not downright inaccurate, considering that “99” is one of Steve’s earliest—and greatest—showcase songs. His warm, understated vocals steer the track, while the last ninety seconds (of the album version, not the radio edit) basically serve as one long, extended guitar masterclass. (If you’re counting, Toto repeat that final chord sequence five times in a row. I could listen to Lukather drop super-tasty jazz licks for another five more, easy.)
These days, the guitarist chalks up those circulating comments to “talking out of the side of your mouth,” as he explained in 2014. “It’s an example of how the Internet is so viral… We played it on the last tour—just to prove that I was kidding.” Lukather’s opinion towards the song might’ve softened over time, but again, if you’re counting, “99” started disappearing from Toto setlists in the early Nineties. It’s been off-and-on ever since. Over the last three decades, “99” has been performed more than some of the group’s other mid-tier singles, but significantly less than certain deep cuts, including Hydra’s epic, prog-adjacent title track, the first album’s equally fantastic ”Girl Goodbye,” and (ahem) “Jake To The Bone.” Is Lukather still throwing “99” under the bus after all these years? Not even the Internet knows for sure.
In that same interview, the guitarist made sure to pinpoint the song’s “cheesy lyric,” which simply underlines my one frustration with Paich’s otherwise stellar composition. Musically, “99” remains one of Toto’s best slow jams, maybe the (second?) best one they ever recorded. But the high-minded concept does it no favors. “99” would’ve worked perfectly as a straight-ahead, uncomplicated love song; too bad it got weighed down by unnecessary sci-fi baggage. Yet despite that not-insignificant flaw, “99” remains a favorite—and, I’d even argue, an important step in Toto’s rise to pop stardom. To see their shoulda-been-big single undone by impenetrable lyrics taught the band a valuable lesson moving forward. When we next hear from Toto, they won’t be penning odes to obscure cult films. They’ll be singing about girls and continents.
GRADE: 7/10
I WANT MY MTV: Credit Toto for trying to spice up the standard “performance piece” trend of early music videos with an all-white concept—which, as noted above, deliberately alludes back to THX 1138. But again, there’s no real chance of making that connection unless you’re already aware of it. (Should Toto have shaved their heads for the sake of art? Would the world have been a sadder place absent those glorious, early ’80s mops of hair? Discuss.) No such problem figuring out the title, though, thanks to a very confused—or very literal—set dresser. (Did anyone suggest changing one of the hanging “99”’s to a “THX 1138”? Just sayin’...)