Never Walk Alone

You are locked in with The Zoo, the station that still believes a guitar solo can say more than a press release, and if you have not swung by the home base lately, the door is open at https://thezoorocks.com/. What is coming out of the speakers right now is not a hit single, not a radio edit, and not something the charts knew what to do with. It is "Never Walk Alone," the long, slow burn in the middle of Candyman, credited in America and Japan to Los Lobotomys and featuring the man who wrote it, sang it, and tore the guitar open on it, Steve Lukather.

Candyman landed on March 29, 1994. Columbia put it out overseas. Viceroy Music put it out in the States. Depending on which pressing you pulled off the rack, the name on the spine changed. Europe got a Steve Lukather album, the follow-up to his 1989 solo debut. The American and Japanese editions carried the Los Lobotomys name, and the Japanese disc threw in a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Red House" as a bonus. Lukather himself said the record started as something like a solo deal and turned into a band once they took it on the road. On that tour the marquee flipped between Steve Lukather and Los Lobotomys and just plain Los Lobotomys, which drove promoters half crazy and suited the musicians fine. Keyboardist David Garfield later spelled it out: Luke had a Sony contract, he loved the Lobotomys enough to build the record around them, the company shipped it under his name, and then the band walked onstage and insisted they were a group. In the States they put it out on Viceroy and changed the billing to match.

"Never Walk Alone" sits fifth in the sequence, written by Lukather and Garfield, clocking in at nine minutes and forty-two seconds. No chorus written for a jingle. No three-minute compromise. Luke cut the album, on and off, from March 1993 through the mastering in November of that year, at Capitol in Hollywood and Devonshire in North Hollywood, with Tom Fletcher producing alongside him. His own note from November 1993 is the best liner you will ever get: the record was cut about ninety percent live, solos and all, vocals overdubbed later, maybe a keyboard or a percussion pass after the fact. He called it a group effort and told anyone who had heard of Los Lobotomys that this was pretty much the band, intact. On this particular track the organ chair belongs to David Paich, Luke's Toto brother, sitting in with Garfield's keyboards. Simon Phillips is on the drums, the same Simon who had stepped into Toto after Jeff Porcaro and who co-wrote the next song on the album, the smirking "Party in Simon's Pants." John Peña holds the bass. Lenny Castro and Chris Trujillo handle percussion. The background voices are Fee Waybill of the Tubes, Kevin Curry, and Richard Page. Larry Klimas is the sax voice elsewhere on the record. Paul Rodgers turns up on the Hendrix cover "Freedom." That is not a pickup band. That is a room full of people who had already spent years making other people's records sound expensive.

The lyric is a grief song wearing a rock arrangement. He is staring at a picture. He still feels the hand and the look in the eyes. The tears start, the heart turns to stone, and the refrain keeps insisting he never walks alone. It is the kind of ballad the session elite used to slip onto albums when nobody from the label was timing the reels. The guitar does not enter like a celebrity cameo. It enters like a man who has been in the room the whole time and finally has something he cannot say with the vocal. If you know Lukather's touch from "Rosanna," from "Hold the Line," from a thousand uncredited rhythm parts, you will recognize the sustain and the way he leans into a bend instead of flashing past it. Nine-plus minutes gives him room to do that without the clock clearing its throat.

Los Lobotomys did not begin with Candyman. The name came out of a circle of Los Angeles friends in the middle 1980s, an offshoot of the band Karizma. Garfield and Castro were at the center, with Jeff Porcaro, Lukather, bassist Nathan East, and reedman Brandon Fields in the early lineup. They were an instrumental outfit at first, fusion that could tip into heavy rock when the mood hit, the sort of private blow you got if you knew which club in West Los Angeles was dark to the public and open to the cats. On April 29, 1989, they recorded a live album at The Complex in West Los Angeles, produced by Garfield and Alan Hirshberg for Creatchy. Jeff Porcaro was on the drums. Will Lee played bass. Joe Sample sat in on piano. Vinnie Colaiuta double-drummed with Porcaro on one number and later called it one of the high points of his life. The set included a "Purple Haze" that ends right after the intro because nobody knew the lyrics, a "Little Wing," a Miles Davis "All Blues," and a Lukather tune called "Smell Yourself." The cover painting on one reissue was done by Jeff Porcaro himself. That record stayed an insider classic. Candyman was the moment the same circle decided to sing.

By the time they made Candyman, Porcaro was gone. He died in 1992, and the album carries "Song for Jeff" as a closing gesture on the fuller editions. Phillips had the drum chair. The European singles were "Hero with a 1000 Eyes," written with Garfield and Waybill, and "Borrowed Time," which carried "Red House" and "Freedom" on the back. None of that made "Never Walk Alone" a household title. It remained the deep track, the one the people who bought the disc for the name on the cover ended up wearing out. A 2002 DTS edition, mixed in 5.1 by Elliot Scheiner, later gave the whole album a second life for the surround crowd, still produced by Lukather and Fletcher.

Steven Lee Lukather was born October 21, 1957, in the San Fernando Valley. He came up playing with Michael Landau before either of them had a reputation, fell in with the Porcaro brothers, and in 1977 became a founding guitarist, singer, writer, and producer in Toto. Parallel to that he became one of the most recorded session guitarists alive, the kind of player producers called when the track needed to feel like a record instead of a demo. His first album under his own name arrived in 1989. Candyman was the second, whether the sticker said Lukather or Los Lobotomys. He has kept both lanes open ever since: the band, the solo records, the side projects, the road. The official home for all of that history, the discography, the tour notes, and Luke's own words on this album, is https://www.stevelukather.com/. The Candyman page on that same site, with the track list and his November 1993 note, lives at https://www.stevelukather.com/music/discography/1994/candyman.aspx. His official Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/stevelukatherofficial/. The official Facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/p/Steve-Lukather-61562501747969/.

What you are hearing is a 1994 document of a Los Angeles habit that never quite fit the format clocks. Friends who already had famous jobs booked a studio, cut a long song about not walking alone, let the organ and the guitar argue with the lyric, and then let the record company decide what name to print. On The Zoo we do not need the argument settled. We just need the nine minutes and forty-two seconds. Stay with it through the solo. That is the whole point of a station like this one, still spinning at https://thezoorocks.com/.