Jeff Porcaro Was All About Time

Friday is music day - and there's always a playlist. Or two.

Last week, I was on holiday – I think I told you this every day that I wrote to you from Melbourne/Mt. Eliza. What a jerk. Just rubbing it in. Anyway, it was great to get a bit of extra reading done. One of the books I finally finished was It’s About Time. Seems like an appropriate title just based on my sentences about being on holiday and wanting to read more and finally finishing a book. But it’s actually a book about the life of Jeff Porcaro. And he was one of the greatest drummers that ever lived.

But he lived a very short life. Dead at 38.

Porcaro was part of a musical family. His father was a great drummer too, in fact Joe Porcaro died just a couple of years ago at the age of 90. And Jeff was in the band Toto with two of Joe’s other sons, three brothers united through music.

I’m not a huge Toto fan – there are some big hits and a few deep album cuts I like, and mostly for Jeff’s drumming, but overall I’m not a fan. But the Toto musicians were also on mega-selling albums by great artists. They played on Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Boz Scaggs’ Silk Degrees; huge albums from, respectively the 1980s and 1970s. And Jeff Porcaro’s drumming legacy extends to him being one of the most prolific session players – all the more impressive given his short time on this earth.

Look, the book – It’s About Time – isn’t even that great. It’s a very perfunctory biography. It’s poorly written, actually. There probably just isn’t enough material to justify a full-length biography when it comes down to it. But I was pleased to read it because it gave me a reason to go back through the songs. And that’s what reading about music is for; that’s the special magic you get from it I reckon.

I’m grateful for my time learning the drums – and I’m enjoying playing them again now with more regularity than has been the case over the last decade. One of the things I love about playing an instrument (and I know I’m not great, and I know that doesn’t really matter) is how it gets you listening to music in new ways, it (hopefully) gets you listening wider and more broadly. From joining bands or jamming with people I’ve been turned on to new genres and styles, to particular players and songs, I’ve found ways to appreciate albums or artists I wouldn’t normally care about; wouldn’t usually be my thing.

And it gets you listening in to specific parts of songs, or to specific parts being played on songs. I can listen to an album for the guitar playing, or for the production, for the violin or cello or almost any other instrument. But I absolutely adore listening to music for the drums. It's one of the first things I’ll always notice – or I’ll notice (and appreciate) the absence of drums. I’m a huge fan of drummer-less jazz trios for instance. And string quartets. Solo piano. Solo guitar…

When you listen to a particular instrument you start to spot certain types of playing, certain key players and what they bring to the sound, what they take from the instrument – and of course what they give back.

Jeff Porcaro is a great drummer to listen to. His clean playing drove so many classics across the 1970s, 1980s and very early 1990s.

I mean, for his work with Toto alone he’d be recognised. For one song from that band alone he would forever be mentioned in drum circles (not actual Full Moon Drum Circles, btw).

Rosanna by Toto is a song written about Rosana Arquette. She was dating the band’s keyboardist and the writer of the song. It’s a staple of FM radio – and even if you’re sick of it (as I often am) its half-time shuffle is the key to the song. And the brilliant thing about that half-time shuffle, a signature of Porcaro’s, is, and if you’re a drumming-nerd you’ll know this already, Porcaro basically took “The Purdie Shuffle” – that being the half-time shuffle that drumming great Bernard Purdie invented – and the John Bonham version of that half-time shuffle from the Led Zeppelin song Fool in the Rain (cf. I wrote about Bonham just a couple of weeks ago) to make his own version, now referred to as “The Rosanna Shuffle”.

There are other great Toto drum-grooves. And even as someone not that interested in the band’s catalogue, I can acknowledge that there’s some magic there. As a kid I was a big fan of the band’s first, self-titled album and the mega-hit fourth album, Toto IV – which features not only Rosanna, but the other ubiquitous monster-hit, Africa. And I’ve listened to every Toto album – which is sorta ridiculous, but then that’s what you do when one of the greatest modern rock/pop drummers plays in a band. You follow the work.

There are so many great tracks that Porcaro played on outside of and away from Toto though.

When I first started the book, a few months back, I keyed in to some playlists on Spotify and YouTube. There were some 10-hour playlists giving me dozens of songs by Leo Sayer and everything by Toto and too much by Scaggs and several artists I really hadn’t heard of and wasn’t too interested in when I did. Porcaro’s drumming was great. But it was hard to care about all of it.

So I made a playlist of the best examples I love. It’s not everything – how could it be? – but it's a couple of hours of magic. And it’s chronological – from the early-70s through to the early 90s; pretty much 20 years of music. And it is a wonderful sampler, brimming with classic hits.

Porcaro started off as a teenager in the Sonny and Cher band and working with Seals & Crofts. From there he appeared on records by Joe Cocker, Tommy Bolin, Jackson Browne, and Three Dog Night. Very quickly he is playing with everyone.

He is on almost the entire Katy Lied album by Steely Dan. Which, again, even if you don’t like Steely Dan, should come as a marker of quality and ability. The Dan guys didn’t keep many players on for more than one song. Jeff’s playing on several key Steely songs is a big part of his legacy as a great drummer.

He plays on a couple of Thriller songs, he’s on up-tempo 80s gems by George Benson, he subs for Dire Straits on their final album (he’s on the title track of On Every Street) and he plays on Bruce Springsteen’s Human Touch (again, the title cut). And this is just a few drops in the vast ocean.

At one point, in the early 1980s, Jeff is so busy, that Peter Frampton agrees to make his Breaking All The Rules record in the middle of the night because Porcaro is booked solid during the day. He’s busy recording The Girl Is Mine for Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, or the Theme from Arthur with Christopher Cross. He’s working with Aretha Franklin, Al Jarreau and The Bee Gees. All in the same week. It’s ridiculous!

Porcaro would diplomatically sit in for big name bands with established drummers, sometimes they just couldn’t get the feel right for their own song – famously it’s Jeff on the Pink Floyd song Mother from The Wall because Nick Mason wasn’t getting it right. Porcaro would continue to tour with Toto in and around all of these obligations and ad-hoc recording spots.

And so, he was cooking with gas, constantly. A heavy smoker, a prodigious cocaine user, he died of a heart attack. The writer of his biography barely mentions this. Wanting to celebrate the work, I guess. But the work came at the expense of healthy living, at the cost of a life. A life gone far too soon. Those that lnew Jeff Porcaro speak of him as a gentle soul, a kind and caring person and a consummate musician. Taste for days and a huge pocket – a masterful groove player.

But he died at 38.

I was sad when I finished the book – that staggering punchline wasn’t even quite there in the text, but I knew that part of the story already. So when I finished the bio I pawed through the extensive discography listings (easily the very best bit of the book) and I put together that playlist while on holiday last week.

If you watch the clip where Jeff breaks down his Rosanna groove – or you see him talking about drums (and I recognise that’s a lot to ask if you’re a non-drummer, if you’re not a Toto fan, if you’re not up for it at all for whatever reason – and fair enough) you will feel the joy and love he gave and took from drumming; from music.

So, enjoy the playlist – if you do check it out. It’s an amazing run of songs. And it’s nice to sometimes think of the session guys, the people in behind the song helping to drive it home.

But if you just want a playlist of songs that don’t necessarily feature one of the world’s greatest drummers, then I have you covered too, with our regular Friday feature, Volume 75 (!) of A Little Something For The Weekend…Sounds Good!

Happy Weekend!