Toto
Through The Looking Glass

The technique, taste, expressiveness, and originality of every musician in the world are the result of their personality, sensitivity, passion, curiosity, and application. The first step in creating one's own style and musical attitude is always the proper assimilation of others' works and creations, a phase that is essential to moving on to developing everything into one's own (hopefully) personal and effective style. There's no escape: every musical glory in the world, even the most alternative and transgressive, like Zappa and Nick Drake, the Beatles, or Weather Report, listened to, loved, and assimilated hundreds of artists and thousands of songs before coming up with their own unique and unmistakable music.

Playing in cover bands or tribute bands, as well as releasing albums of only covers, is an activity that is inherently limiting and confined: creating one's own music is the true and only artistic objective capable of fully satisfying every musician's inspiration, pride, sacrifice, and even narcissism. This is, in my opinion, the great original sin of the classical, symphonic, operatic, or chamber environments, which are solely engaged in the pernicious repetition of insights, studies, and creations devised in a quite remote past, which has had its time and can therefore only be proposed today in terms of revisitation, not of development and regeneration.

This trend has now arrived with force even in the field of so-called popular music, i.e., pop and rock, demonstrating that after the enormous initial drive and the fruitful decades of glory (let's say from the sixties to the nineties of the last century) the engine of creativity and genius has greatly slowed down, and the old things before the two-thousands are gaining the stature of "classics," simply because the present is, evidently, much more asphyxiated and less interesting than the glorious years of the explosion and affirmation of those genres.

And so here is the phenomenon of cover albums, a market that simply did not exist twenty years ago; a trend, as already mentioned, with evident roots and reasons in the current paucity of the international musical offering in the pop and rock fields compared to a still alive and recent past, a phenomenon that can hardly stimulate anything more than curiosity, the fleeting satisfaction of comparison, the easy but superficial pleasure of hearing melodies already known and established again, the judgment for its own sake that can ultimately resolve itself into three possible verdicts:

1) It's (more or less/quite/definitely) the same as the original

2) It's different, but worse

3) It's different, but better, well done!

In 2002, Toto decided to join this fashionable race for a cover album, to have fun, to pay tribute to some of their masters and reference points, to bring to the surface something that already existed in their rehearsal room... in the sense that they, too, like every band in the world without exception, have always performed covers during rehearsals: to warm up, to mess around, to test new musicians, to get inspired...

Using the parameters 1), 2), and 3) mentioned above, my absolutely personal judgment directed at the eleven tracks of the album is as follows:

1) "Could You Be Loved" (by Bob Marley) = 1): reggae bores me greatly... original or covered.

2) "Bodhisattva" (by Steely Dan) = 1): awesome piece, but Denny Dias's solo was better than this good Lukather's: more fluid, more bebop.

3) "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" (by the Beatles)= 1): better George Harrison with Clapton, come on.

4) "I Can't Get Next To You" (by the Temptations) = 1): well done, however.

5) "Living For The City" (by Stevie Wonder) = 1): there can be no contest between the blind genius's voice and Kimball's, though.

6) "Maiden Voyage" (by Herbie Hancock) = 3): magnificent, perfect sounds, fusion by unattainable professionals, the work of Lukather on guitar and David Paich's piano solo are marvelous. The best of the bunch.

7) "Burn Down The Mission" (by Elton John) = 1): spitting image, but excellently done, with powerful and enveloping sounds made possible by the thirty years since the original. Bravo Kimball for singing Elton, bravissimo Paich for playing Elton, the myth of every rock pianist.

8) "Sunshine Of Your Love" (by Cream) = 3): to break the monotony of the riff, Toto invent odd measures here and there. Simon Philips does justice to Baker's unfortunate drumming in the original, ensuring adequate drive and dynamics.

9) "House Of The Rising Sun" (by the Animals) = 2): unrepeatable the beat and psychedelic air of the original, a true symbol of dated 1964 pop, itself a cover anyway, as the song is considered a Traditional by an unknown author.

10) "Watching The Detectives" = 1): I don't like Costello, I don't like this cover.

11) "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" (by Bob Dylan) = 2): see above.