Toto guitar champion and renowned studio musician Steve Lukather talked about the debilitating effects the hand injury he suffered about two years ago has had on his guitar playing, explaining on No Guitar Is Safe (transcribed by UG):
“It’s a life-long injury. I tore all the muscles from the top of the very point of my shoulder all the way down. The very fact that I didn’t take out my forearm and my pectoral muscles is the only reason why I can play the guitar.
“I can’t pick up a coffee cup with my left hand, I have no strength. None. It’s tough for me to hold my iPhone up to t*ts level.
“And it has caused me to change the way I play to where I’m trying to play weirder notes and a little bit different phrasing. Say a little bit more and playing a little bit less, making different choices.
“It was a tour bus accident. We were coming into a small town in Europe and some Smart car pulled in front of our double decker tour bus just as I was walking down the stairs… And I went flying!
“I hung on with my left arm and all my muscles got twisted up and I had to do five-and-a-half more weeks on the road like that and sleep in a little coffin that you get. Even as nice as a tour bus is you’re still sleeping in a moving coffin. Unless you have one for yourself, and we don’t have that.
“I had to play every night and I f*cked it up so bad it can never be fixed. They said, ‘Sure, we can replace the shoulder.’ And I said, ‘Can I play again?’ ‘Well, probably.’ Well ‘probably’ is not gonna help my nine dependants. N-I-N-E, nine. Plus, the government takes half of my money.
“I have people in my family that are sick and f*cked up and don’t have any money and I take care of them. And my ex, I have chid support payments until I’m 71 [Steve is currently 60]. And that’s fine with me, because I don’t want anything for me. I’ve got a little house in the hills, I’ve got a car, I’m fine. I’ve got guitars, I can go and make a living.
“I don’t have a relationship, I’m not with anybody, my kids get all my free time, I play the guitar, I manage the band now which takes a lot of time because we’ve been screwed over by so many people before. All the ‘Nos’ became ‘Yeses’ and our careers have never been better.
“So that’s good on one hand, I do all by myself, I have a great staff. I saved the band a lot of money, it gets done right because I’m the only client. I don’t know how you can manage a band and have 20 acts. Do one well – it’s hard.
“And I found out a lot of them just pick up PAs and go book a tour and they put their hand up for the money. That’s when I said, ‘Enough of this sh*t.’ What have you done for me and my career? If you’ve done nothing then there’s no use for you at all.
“And everything we were told couldn’t happen is now happening. You know why? Because I don’t take ‘No’ for an answer.”
Focusing on how his soloing style has changed since the injury, Steve said:
“It’s not flashy, I didn’t really play anything flashy. I hurt myself, I can’t be Mr. Fast Guy anymore. It changed the way I play. And I changed my whole thinking about playing guitar.
“It’s also liberating to be 60 years old and not be in the competition anymore. You have no idea what a drag it is and how useless the energy is to sit around and worry about where you are in the standing of a group of musicians that all want the same thing – to be really good musicians.
“There’s no best anything. Nobody has the best looking wife, nobody is the best guitar player, nobody is the best drummer, nobody is the best singer, it’s all what moves you! It’s all what touches you.
“People are like, ‘Oh, I want to be famous!’ No, you don’t want to be famous. It is the scariest weirdest most bizarre thing in the world, even to have a low level fame like I do.
“I have friends who are movie stars who have TMZ parked outside their houses and sh*t like that and their kids are being tailed. I mean, that’s famous, that has nothing to do with money. That means you have no privacy and you can’t put your hand up and go ‘That’s it, I’m done!’ Once you open that door it’s there forever until they don’t give a sh*t about you and they’re on to the next guy.”