The Gospel According to Luke Hardcover – September 18, 2018 by Steve Lukather (Author), Steve Vai (Foreword), Paul Rees (Contributor) (Post Hill Books #posthillbooks)

An interesting and, at times, sublime memoir from one of my greatest rock heroes, this is a tome that I immediately jumped on, wanting to discover how this sensational guitarist came to be and how, particularly, two of my absolutely favorite Toto songs came to fruition (“I Won’t Hold You Back” from Toto IV and “I’ll Be Over You” from Farenheit). Learning of these songs, unfortunately, in the midst of an overwhelming profusion of name dropping and mind boggling session assemblages that offered absolutely no context or, importantly, history of these ground breaking toones, I was left completely disillusioned with what was going on and when. This book severely needed an editor to reign Stevie in, if for nothing more than to catalogue the book’s timeline.




We learn very early in the narrative that Lukather became a very talented and influential studio/session guitarist while he was at an early age. The very early problem with this book though is that he is immediately hell-bent on naming, thanking and accolading each and every person that he came in contact with on his rise to stardom. The list of people, the studio sessions he becomes involved with and the songs that he participates in quickly become mind numbing…there is just no way to keep track of the who/what/where/when or how of his accomplishments other than to marvel at the aggregate whole. I’d known some of these prior to undertaking this work but had no idea of the volume or quality of folks that he actually assisted in the studio…Lukather was seemingly everywhere, every night and every day, playing on “every” track during the 80’s, whether getting credit or not. Again, it was so much that the reader just loses track and is literally forced to go along for the ride.

The redeeming qualities here are when he describes the forming and subsequent evolution of Toto as a band…David Paich and the Porcaro brothers are initially untouchable in his mind but it is his conversations about lead singers Bobby Kimball, Fergie Fredericksen and especially Jean Michel Byron that are hilarious and meaningful. He truly paints a consequential part of Toto’s history here. But just as he seems to settle in for a focused discussion about the band’s myriad problems, he tangents off into multiple side tours with “great cats” who become “lifelong friends” and who he “loves to this day,” all personalities that certainly mean a lot to him but have zero context to us…as a result, we’re reduced to page after page of great musicians and heroes that he’s played with that mean, really, absolutely nothing to us. And this is a shame because Stevie, from the beginning, has vehemently taken the literary stance to make the book sound like him having a conversation with the reader…a very nice touch but one that loses much in terms of explanation and context. If someone would have taken even a little bit of space to explain who we were talking about and added what these names meant, this memoir would have taken on a much more meaningful feel. But as it is, it’s largely a massed jumble of names and events rolled up into Lukather’s emotional gratitude at having worked with so many great people.
And so in summary, this is a book that could have been so much better with just a little editorial help; admittedly The Gospel According To Luke is a useful work for fans of Toto and of Stevie Lukather in particular but it is still overly emotional and completely saturated with names and sessions without context; it will take only the true fan to get through this. Winding my way past the drudgery of the sessions/names/tours, I did find myself seriously liking Stevie at the end of this work…he really does appear to wear his emotions on his sleeve and if you’ve been a fan of Toto, I will say that this book deserves a read and I do recommend it to those that have loved Toto, as I have, all these years.