In a recent sit down chat with Sunset Sound Recorders, Toto’s Steve Porcaro recalled working on Don Henley’s ‘Dirty Laundry.’ The rocker gave details about the recording session that his brother also was a part of. He explained:
“My brother Jeff [Porcaro] was standing there. Now Jeff had put up with a lot, as far as me and the technology, the whole band had. The whole band had seen me do this deep dive in the synthesizers. This is pre midi when it really wasn’t convenient and a lot of stuff didn’t work.”
Steve reminisced about his wanting to figure out synthesizers and how it finally clicked during the recording of ‘Dirt Laundry.’ He recalled:
“Toto spent a lot of studio hours with me messing with this stuff and a lot of times Jeff and most of the guys being the pure musicians they were, they were like, ‘What are you doing? Won’t you just play and stop messing with that crap?’ There was a lot of that but for ‘Dirty Laundry’ Jeff saw me come in and especially because [producer, Greg] Ladanyi had recorded the sync track everything just clicked.”
The rocker added that it was ‘great’ that his brother could see that all the time he had spent working on synthesizers had worked. Steve expressed:
“He [Jeff] got to see all this stuff that I’d learned put it into practice and how useful it was in the studio. It was just bing bang boom and it was so great that my brother Jeff was there to kind of see that you know what I mean all working.”
Besides Steve’s contribution to the track and despite the controversy around an incident that involved Henley and an underage girl, ‘Dirty Laundry’ became Don’s first No. 1 hit as a solo artist. It reached the top of the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart and No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.
You can watch Steve Porcaro’s interview with Sunset Sound Recorders and listen to ‘Dirty Laundry’ below.
