Toto - Turn Back

Turn Back is the forgotten gem in Toto's catalogue. It is probably my favourite album by the band. Oh, I have favourite songs from most of their albums - although I never did manage to gack down the four songs Jean-Michel Byron sang on their Past to Present collection. I did try ... man, I really tried - hence the most thing.

At the time I had no idea how pivotal an album this would end up being despite being shoved into a corner by most people. After Hydra, an album I really liked, I was pretty stoked when a new TOTO album would drop. Half the fun would be reading the reviews that were often clipped and filed with the records. I have no idea why one of the stores I went to as a kid did this - not exactly a great selling feature but I didn't care. I figured the more hate the better the album.

Back in 1980 when Journey dropped Discovery, Geoff Workman was the co-producer, and I happened to really like that album. Didn't hurt at all that Caddy Shack featured "Anyway You Want It" so it was all good. It was a nifty time for music when rock and roll steeped in '70s riffage was making the transition into the '80s. Foreigner, Journey, Styx and Toto all seemed to be keeping rock alive while everyone else went new wave or techno.

Right off the bat Geoff Workman was making a statement with the band: the guitar tones are different. More processed, but still thick and meaty, and the band comes out charging. Jeff Porcaro's drums are HUGE! I always thought it was so cool that in the credits Jeff calls out Paul Jamieson for tuning all of his snare drums. I was always partial to Steve Lukather, and while he often gets saddled with the heart wringing ballads, on Turn Back he delivers what I would still argue is one of his finest moments ever with "Live For Today" a great mid tempo song with a killer riff and great delivery. Bobby Kimball is also in fine voice through out, and he wasn't subtle either - in the best way. At one time he really did have one of rock's great voices.

David Paich was still very much in the driver's seat with the songwriting here as he either wrote or co-wrote six of the eight songs on Turn Back, although he was less prominent on lead vocals which isn't a good or bad thing. I like his voice, but in a band where you have Bobby Kimball he was pretty astute, and knew when to pick his spots. 

Toto is often maligned as being overly serious and a bad that had no sense of humour. Which I always thought was unfair. I offer as exhibit A) "I Think I Could Stand You Forever" a song that is delivered absolutely straight but there's an underlying absurdity to the song that is so outrageous it's like the band deliberately wanted to give extra fodder to their critics. This is also a song that confused me in terms of who could play what on a record. Steve was a guitar player, David Hungate played bass - he wasn't supposed to play guitar - yet on this song he played acoustic guitar. It messed with me. You mean David could actually play guitar too? 

This was Toto making a play for recognition in the rock world, and frankly it should have worked. The one song that was different than the rest was the title track, a strange hybrid of rock and electronic that I always really liked. Oddly enough it was the only song I ever heard on the radio - and that was a few years after this had come out. The FM rock station in Bellingham played it a couple of times. They were a great station and broke a lot of really cool music for me. Most notably they were the first station I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" played on and it seemed like ages before it caught on everywhere else.

Anyways, Turn Back is an album I've picked up more than once. When I got the CD it was okay, but it just didn't have the punch I remembered, and then a few years ago when Elliot Scheiner remastered all of the band's early albums. It was awesome.

The album went gold in Japan, and apparently hit number one in Switzerland ... so much for being neutral. However the album pretty much went unnoticed everywhere else. So much so the band didn't even hit the road ... their label Columbia took notice, and offered their words of encouragement to the band. "Give us a hit record, or look for a new label." Really supportive stuff. 

The band would go back to the drawing board so to speak, and taking everything that worked from Turn Back they would apply the lessons learned to what would arguably be their most successful album: Toto IV. An album I believe would not exist without Turn Back.

Now to be fair, I'd not really sat and listened to this one in a couple of years, but as soon as I dropped the needle I was transported back in time and all of the feelings and emotions I felt back then I was feeling now. There's a turn back thing buried in here somewhere that I should probably pull out to tie it all together with a rather uninspired zinger.

Seems like a lot of work for very little pay off.

Let's just say I still get a kick out of playing the record, and I'll keep plodding along, as there's no turning back now (oops, sorry that just sort of slipped out).

Now, to be fair this isn't perfect. If there's a complaint it's that there are only eight songs here, and while it clocks in at close to forty minutes it feels like it was cut short.