Session players who became a band and named it after a dog

Long before Toto had a hit, its members were already on hit records. David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, who met at Grant High School in Los Angeles, played on sessions for Sonny & Cher, Seals & Crofts, Steely Dan, Boz Scaggs and many others. Paich co-wrote much of Scaggs’s Silk Degrees. After years of working together they began to talk seriously about forming their own band.

They added bassist David Hungate, guitarist Steve Lukather, Jeff’s brother Steve Porcaro on keyboards and singer Bobby Kimball, and signed with Columbia Records. The name has a tidy legend: Jeff Porcaro wrote “Toto” on demo tapes to tell them apart, and band members told the press it came from Toto the dog in The Wizard of Oz. The debut album in 1978 was led by the top 5 single “Hold the Line”.

Their fourth album, Toto IV, in 1982, made them famous worldwide. “Africa” topped the Billboard Hot 100 and “Rosanna” reached number 2. The lineup shifted as Hungate left before it, Mike Porcaro took over on bass and Kimball left during the next album, Isolation, with Joseph Williams eventually becoming the longest-serving replacement. After Jeff Porcaro died in 1992, Simon Phillips took his place on drums. In 1984 they also recorded the soundtrack for Dune.

The band has combined pop, rock, soul, funk, prog, hard rock, R&B, blues and jazz, with 14 studio albums and more than 50 million records sold. They received several Grammy Awards and were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2009. Their last release was Old Is New in 2018, and in 2022 they opened for Journey on the Dogz of Oz tour. Steve Lukather is the only original member still touring, but a catalog built by session players keeps playing.