TOTO
Toto is an American rock band formed in 1977 in Van Nuys in Greater Los Angeles, California. Toto is known for a musical style that combines elements of pop, rock, soul, funk, progressive rock, hard rock, R&B, blues, and jazz. The band enjoyed great commercial success in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, beginning with the band’s eponymous debut released in 1978. With the release of the critically acclaimed and commercially successful Toto IV (1982), Toto became one of the best-selling music groups of their era. The band has released a total of 17 albums, and have sold over 35 million albums to date. (More from Wikipedia)
For their fifth album Isolation (1984), Toto asked Fergie Frederiksen (formerly with Trillion) to join the band as their primary vocalist. While he was with the band only a short time, he also performed on the soundtrack album Dune for the 1984 science-fiction film Dune, Toto’s only soundtrack experience. Frederiksen has said that his time with Toto was the highlight of his career. He even started touring under the name “Toto”, which angered other bandmembers who filed suit to stop him; they reconciled in 2007, and Frederiksen now sometimes appears as a guest star at Toto concerts.
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The newest member of Trillion, CJ Vanston has also performed on the last two albums by Steve Lukather of Toto and the recent tour by Tears For Fears, as well as a remarkably varied list of other artists like Joe Cocker, Ringo Starr, Bob Seger, Prince, Tina Turner, Barbra Streisand, Richard Marx, Celine Dion, and ’NSync.
(October 2012)
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People who don’t use Wikipedia regularly probably don’t realize that, in addition to articles on the band, there are also individual Wikipedia articles on all or most of the members of second- and third-tier rock bands like Toto and Survivor, as well as articles on many of their albums and individual songs. For major rock bands like Led Zeppelin, there are Wikipedia articles on virtually every song that they have ever released. The Trillion post gives the reader a hint of the breadth of coverage that Wikipedia has in the world of rock music within its 4,000,000-plus articles. In any case, I finally counted up the (W) symbols in the Trillion post this morning, and there are 53 of them – and 3 of those are articles on bandmembers in Trillion itself. As I mentioned in the post, there would have been dozens more if I had also marked albums and songs having Wikipedia articles with a (W).
(Year 3 Review)
