Toto - Rosanna - Rosanna Shuffle or Porcaro Shuffle

It was during my teenage years I came to know about TOTO. The song which I liked of TOTO back then was a cover of the song written by The Beatles Legend - Sir George Harrison, called While my guitar gently weeps. 

I so much liked the song, back then I had never heard of the song by The Beatles or Sir George. The year being 2002/2003, I did not have much info back then on ToTo or youtube or Wikipedia or online music.

Somehow I realized Toto had couple of other hits - Rosanna and Africa - which I genuinely liked. Now with so much of online info available, I realized they have a lot of hits to their name.

But what impresses me the most was not the only the song Rosanna but Porcaro Shuffle.

- Imagine, you write, play and record a song and you end up creating a legendary drum shuffle which is so hard that even after 30 years of the drummer legend Jeff Porcaro passing away people to this day still struggle to play it neatly without mistakes. That is TOTO

- Imagine you are a bunch of guys, who are the first to be called for any artist as session musician, that is TOTO.

- Imagine you end up raking 12 Grammy awards over 2 albums, that is TOTO - TOTO IV  won 5 and these guys worked with Micheal Jackson as session musicians, and that album won 7. I may have figures wrong, but the thought of having that kind of achievement itself is remarkable, back when you had legends contending for Grammy's.

- Imagine, Porcaro Brothers (Jeff, Mike, Steve), Page, Hungate, Kimball, Lukather all together in one line up, the amount of creative juices flowing (well apart from the ego), thats TOTO.

- Rosanna is a very complicated song to record and sing, just count the number of instruments being used in the below song. All of these instruments could have created noise, but they create music, why, that's simply because its TOTO :)

And all of this I realized only after having known TOTO for more than 15 years as just a band!

Makes you realize so much of time spent drooling over unnecessary things and playing in mud while legends were out there entertaining the world live!

Cheers,

PS - It would be better to use a good set of headphones or speakers, because the song Rosanna is really enjoyable if you can decipher all of the instruments (drums, sax, bass, keyboard, piano, guitar, trumpets, congo)


PPS - I had to post this comment. Thats Rosanna shuffle or Porcaro shuffle!










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