Toto - Turn Back
#5
By Brian Kushnir
January 1 1981
Toto
Turn Back
Genre - Toto Takes Arena Rock for a Spin
Allen’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Brian’s Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Highlights:
Goodbye Elenore
Toto was mad that Columbia wanted to release boring ballads like ‘99’ as singles. Among the most recorded session musicians in history, the boys were also not content with their status as hired guns and wanted to become an Arena Rock band (with a capital A).
Like Queen. So they hired Roy Thomas Baker’s right hand man Geoff Workman to be their producer and engineer, and set out to make their “Fuck You” record.*
Unfortunately, Toto had no Freddie Mercury, the record buying public returned serve with a hearty “Fuck You Too!” and the album tanked, almost costing them their band.
If you have time this is worth a quick listen, and while you’re doing so, you can go through the patented Toto checklist as a reminder of what you should expect from this band.
- Chops, on display by everyone? Check.
- Soaring vocal harmonies? Check.
- Ripping, tasteful guitar solos? Check.
- Songs with dubious meaning? Check.
There’s 8 songs over two sides but let’s cut straight to the chase and talk about “Goodbye Elenore.”
A wise man once said, “it’s easy when you’re big in Japan” and this was Toto’s big hit in Japan. Why did “Goodbye Elenore” climb the Japanese pop charts? Possibly because David Paich nicked the tune from “Lido Shuffle,” a song he wrote a few years earlier for Boz Scaggs. And we know Boz had played Lido in Japan to massive enthusiasm (video below).
Moreover, from the vantage point of 2020 could “Goodbye Elenore” have also been a response song to the Turtles “Elenore,” which itself was a parody of their own “Happy Together?” Check out this Turtles / Toto “Elenore” mashup that I just conflated:
Turtles:
“I really think you're groovy
Let's go out to a movie
Whadda you say now, Elenore, can we?
They'll turn the lights way down low
Maybe we won't watch the show
I think I love you, Elenore, love me”
Toto:
“I want to give her something she'll remember
And she say, "No, no, no, no, no"
I want to squeeze her tight and not offend her, yeah
She said, "No, no, no, no, no"
You broke my heart for the last time, goodbye Elenore”
Like this one all of the songs on “Turn Back” are generally about a dude that is frustrated in his loving. The rockstar life was apparently not so hot for the Toto guys. Maybe that’s why the face on the cover of the album is just like, ‘meh.’ Of course they’ve got chops and they know how to use them. Throughout, there are sonic nods to other bands that came before them from the flanged out guitar in “Gift With a Golden Gun” (Queen), to “Live For Today” which has a ‘carpe diem’ attitude exemplified by a guitar solo straight out of the Boston how-to-play-a-melodic-guitar-solo franchise binder.
“Million Miles Away” is regrettably *not* a ‘requisite 80s cover’ of the Plimsouls song which came out a few years after this, unfortunately, instead you’ve got a smoldering ballad, not sexy smoldering but rather the kind of smoldering where the fire is already out because you’ve dumped a bunch of water on it and you are just inhaling sooty damp smoke.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3jGdfUMsS63FBYhBidKX3J?si=i0dTEdYMSXKnfwTpPLW1iQ
*Footnotes
Steve Lukather Interview https://ultimateclassicrock.com/steve-lukather-interview/
Boz Scagg’s Lido Shuffle Live in Japan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDD5L3gfD-o
The Turtles Elenore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeAtre3Bxg8
Green Day Covering A Million Miles Away
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