Never Walk Alone (Live 1993)

You are locked into Los Lobotomys featuring Steve Lukather, and the cut is "Never Walk Alone," the live take that rides on the album In Concert. Studio version first: Lukather and keyboardist David Garfield wrote it, and it landed as track five on Candyman, the record cut mostly live in the room between March and November 1993 and issued in 1994. Europe got it under Luke's name. Japan and the States got it under Los Lobotomys. Same band, same tapes, two labels on the spine. On the album the song runs nine minutes and forty-two seconds, with David Paich of Toto sitting in on organ. On In Concert it stretches past that, because the four-piece on the stage in Baden-Baden, Germany, refused to play it like a single.

The In Concert performance was filmed June 29, 1994, for the German television series Ohne Filter, out of the SWR studios. Steve Lukather on guitar and lead vocal, David Garfield on keys, John Peña on bass, Simon Phillips on drums. The DVD and later audio issues, put out by in-akustik around 2002, carry seven songs from that taping: "Hero With A 1000 Eyes," a Hendrix "Freedom," "Extinction Blues," the old Lobotomys jam "Dismemberment," this one, Joe Walsh's "The Bomber," and the gag title "Party In Simon's Pants." "Never Walk Alone" sits in the back half, right where a guitar player who has already warmed the room can stop singing pretty and start talking with the instrument.

What you hear is blues-rock with a fusion spine. Garfield lays a slow, humid bed. Peña walks it instead of thumping it. Phillips, who had stepped into Jeff Porcaro's chair in Toto after 1992 and did the same for this band, plays time like a carpenter, not a showoff, until the solo section opens and he starts answering Luke phrase for phrase. Lukather sings it in that slightly frayed, conversational voice he uses when he is not trying to be a pop frontman. Then the guitar takes over. Fans of the clip still point at the stretch past the four-minute mark, where the tone goes thick and the phrasing turns Hendrix-adjacent without turning into a costume. Robin Trower gets named in the comments for a reason. Luke has said for years that Hendrix, Beck, and Clapton are the bookshelf. Here he pulls one book down and reads it out loud.

Los Lobotomys was never a band you joined. It was a hang that got a name. The root is Karizma, David Garfield's outfit out of the L.A. studio scene, with guitarist Michael Landau in the family tree. Lukather had already played on a Karizma record. He sat in one night at the Baked Potato, the little jazz club and baked-potato joint on Cahuenga in North Hollywood that every session cat in the Valley treated like a living room. One song turned into a full gig, billed as David Garfield and Friends, with Jeff Porcaro, Nathan East, and percussionist Lenny Castro in the room. After a few of those, Castro looked at the chalkboard and said he had a name: Los Lobotomys, a wink at Los Lobos, the East L.A. band everybody in town already knew. They kept it. First public shape of the group, mid-1980s: Lukather, Garfield, Porcaro, Castro, East, saxophonist Brandon Fields.

The 1989 album, recorded live at the Complex in West Los Angeles on April 29 and issued on Creatchy, is the document of that hang. Dismemberment, a Hendrix "Purple Haze" and "Little Wing," a Miles Davis "All Blues," plus originals with titles like "Smell Yourself" and "Lobotomy Stew." Credits read like a session-date roll call: Will Lee, Joe Sample, Carlos Vega, Vinnie Colaiuta on double drums. Jeff Porcaro painted one of the later cover versions. Then 1992 hit, Porcaro died, and the chair went to Simon Phillips, same as it did in Toto. By the Candyman sessions the hang had slimmed to a four-piece road band, with Castro and Chris Trujillo still around the edges on percussion, Fee Waybill and Richard Page on background vocals, and Paul Rodgers stepping in to sing the Hendrix "Freedom." Luke told the German magazine Fachblatt that Candyman started as a solo record and turned into a band once they took it out. Billing on the road flipped between "Steve Lukather" and "Los Lobotomys" depending on the poster. He wanted the second one.

Steven Lee Lukather was born October 21, 1957, in the San Fernando Valley. Uncle Paul Lukather was an actor. Luke came up through Grant High with Michael Landau, figured out early he would rather be the guitar on everybody else's record than wait for a band to call, and by the late 1970s was already on Boz Scaggs dates. Toto formed in 1977 out of that same studio circle: the Porcaro brothers, David Paich, Bobby Kimball, Lukather. He is the only founding member still in the band across the whole run. Session log runs past a thousand albums by his own site's count. The one civilians know is Michael Jackson's Thriller, where his guitar is on "Beat It" alongside Eddie Van Halen's solo and on "Human Nature." He co-wrote George Benson's "Turn Your Love Around" with Jay Graydon and Bill Champlin and took a Grammy for it. First solo album, Lukather, arrived in 1989 with Eddie Van Halen, Steve Stevens, Richard Marx, and Jan Hammer in the credits, because that is how his phone worked.

Candyman is the second chapter, and the one that belongs to this band. Recorded with little overdubbing, produced by Lukather and Tom Fletcher, mastered by Arnie Acosta. "Borrowed Time" was the European single. "Song For Jeff" closes the record. "Never Walk Alone" is the long walk in the middle, co-written with Garfield, no Fee Waybill lyric credit, Paich on the organ. Live, the Ohne Filter version drops the studio polish and lets the vocal crack. German television in 1994 still booked players like this for an hour with no audience chatter track laid on top, which is why the tape still feels close. The DVD later carried a 5.1 mix, an interview with the producer, and a short artist bio. Collectors rate the In Concert issue high because it is one of the few official looks at the Candyman road band before everybody went back to their day jobs.

Trivia worth keeping in the booth. The Baked Potato is still there, still small, still the room where half the fusion records of the eighties were rehearsed between takes. Lenny Castro's band name stuck so hard that later reunions still use it. David Garfield's nickname in the credits is Creatchy, which is also the label. Simon Phillips has a song on Candyman named after his trousers. John Peña is the quiet one on the DVD and the reason the low end never wanders while Luke is out on the ledge. And the billing confusion is the whole story of the record: if your copy says Steve Lukather, you bought it in Europe; if it says Los Lobotomys, you bought it in America or Japan. The German TV date says both.

Luke kept going. More solo records, Luke in 1997, a Christmas album called Santamental, Ever Changing Times, All's Well That Ends Well, Transition. Toto never really stopped. He has spent long stretches in Ringo Starr's All-Starr Band, which is where a Valley session guitarist ends up if he stays friendly and stays good. Official home base is stevelukather.com. The man is on Instagram as stevelukatherofficial, on Facebook under his own name, and on X as stevelukather. The West Coast archive at westcoast.dk still keeps the cleanest short history of the Lobotomys hang, names and all.

Spin it loud. This is the sound of a studio rat who already had the hits, standing in a German TV studio with three friends, refusing to walk the song home in under ten minutes. If the room feels bigger after it ends, that is the point of the title. More of this kind of deep cut lives over at THE ZOO, the listener-supported rock room that still plays the album track and the live one back to back. Luke's own pages: stevelukather.com, Facebook, Instagram, X, and the fan archive at westcoast.dk.