Former Toto bassist Shem von Schroeck sat down with Blaze News Tonight and discussed his role in the band. The bassist also revealed that he received a threat from the band’s guitarist Steve Lukather.
Schroeck opened up about the difficult atmosphere within the band. “This is the first time I’ve ever talked about this publicly and the only thing that the only people that know what I know how I know it is, immediate family, close friends. So this is this is huge for me. First of all, the last year of my time with him the infighting in the band just got toxic,” he revealed.
He continued, explaining his decision to avoid getting involved in internal band issues. “I stayed I kind of la la la la about all that because that’s not for me to say there were some legal issues with Jeff’s widow, Susan, and head-to-head with Lukather. It wasn’t my department. I certainly wasn’t hired in the band to have an opinion about anything, I was there to play bass and sing and show up on time with a smile on my face. but there was just like hate and animosity going on. this guy won’t ride in a van if that guy’s in it, this guy won’t share a dressing room with this. I started to go, ‘It was the best of times and now it’s the worst of times.'”
In March 2019, Schroeck decided to reach out to Lukather about the situation, hoping for a resolution. “I wrote him a letter, a very nice professional letter that I delivered in two forms — one text and one audio. I guess things can get lost in translation and the written word just wanted to be clear. It was basically a cry for help like, ‘Hey, we’ve got 3 months until the next run starts. I’m not sure I can continue with all this hate and stuff going on amid the band, it’s hard for me. I’m appealing to the top to try to see if there’s we maybe should have a band meeting or something.'”
However, the response wasn’t anything he expected to hear. “The response I got which I won’t disclose because that’s private, So I won’t say what it said. It did not say, ‘Yeah we need to fix this, we need to. Let’s see what we can do, maybe we should see if we can work it out. Let me handle it,’ nothing like that. It was, I’m paraphrasing, it was basically a threat that says, ‘If you don’t finish out the calendar year and if you quit your professional reputation will suffer.’ So I had a decision to make — quit or put your big boy pants on, finish out the year, hoping that maybe things would get better. It got worse.”
The bassist was in the band for only two years, from 2017 to 2019, but he contributed to the band’s album ’40 Trips Around the Sun.’
Though Schroeck wasn’t involved in it, Toto and Lukather has been involved some drama with other band members too, including a lawsuit.
The lawsuit began in 2018 when Susan Porcaro-Goings claimed that Toto — owned by Lukather and co-founder David Paich — ‘refused to account and pay for Jeff’s interest in the Toto name’ after he died in 1992. Lukather said the lawsuit cost the band $1 million and caused a change in their lineup, leaving him as the only original member.
“There was a mix-up with the name that goes back to our original management,” Lukather told Rolling Stone in an interview. “I was victimized by that bullshit, too. And then she went public, without any corroboration, to say that David and I were stealing from her family. Like I would do that! As if I suddenly turned into an arch-criminal when I was 60!”
Porcaro confirmed that he gave up his rights when he left the band in 1987, but he suggested that his late brother, Jeff, never did. “To be honest with you, I think Lukather and the guys were ill-advised. I don’t blame them. I blame their representation for not telling them how the world works. They were ill-advised by shysters who didn’t know what the f*ck they were talking about.”
Lukather said the final shows were ‘miserable and hard,’ but the band tried to do their best as the tour ended. He also mentioned that it made him feel isolated and blamed for things he didn’t do.
