Luke

Steve Lukather

There’s a whole bunch of things that I wish I could go back in time and not do, but I think everybody feels that way. When I came into this [business] I was a teenager and still pretty innocent. I was always playing with guys that were much older than me. When I was 9 years old, I was playing with guys who were 13, so I was probably exposed to things way too early. I was playing on the weekends and making money by the time I was 11. Twenty bucks a weekend made me a rich man for a little kid [laughing]. I was this skinny, dorky kid that couldn’t play any sports to save his life, but I could play guitar at a time when it was almost freakish for a little boy to be able to play rock-n-roll. I was instantly doing stuff ahead of my time just because I could play, and I could play better than the older kids so I’d end up teaching them their parts. I was a quick study and it was the only thing that I could do so it’s a good thing that music turned out the way that it did for me, otherwise I’d be saying, ‘Would you like fries with that?’ [laughing]. My dad figured I’d grow out of this music phase someday and thank god I never did!

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Of course, if I could go back, I would immediately avoid any use of hard drugs and alcohol. I would also really keep an eye on my money. Those are the two major things that I would really seriously advise myself on if I could go back now and rewrite things. It was the mid-’70s when the band started and by the end of the decade everyone around us was doing blow, Los Angeles was frozen. I was really innocent at first. I’d be knocking on the door asking what people were doing. I would be really tired and they’d say, ‘Try some of this shit, it’s just like coffee and not addictive’. When you see all of your heroes doing it you think, okay, and at first it was fun. Then it quickly became not fun and instead turned into a real thing that took over the decade.

Fortunately, I was working so much that I couldn’t get too crazy, but it was a really strange time for anyone in the music business. It was acceptable behavior, that’s what was messed up about it. It was out in the open, even at ten in the morning there would be piles of stuff there for anyone that wanted to do it. I’m not glorifying it because it was such a stupid thing to do, but if you were there back then you’d understand how it happened and how people ended up with problems. Now looking back, I wonder how I could be so stupid but again, it was acceptable behavior. Restaurants would bring you out a “special” dessert, that’s how normal it was.

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I look back and wonder how we did that because we were also in bands and playing on so many records that came out of LA. Our singer got busted in 1982 and made it sound like we all had pounds of cocaine in our houses and we didn’t. One thing that’s really important, I was never messed up on a gig or so trashed that I couldn’t play. If I was then how would I have had a career? Just because there was tons of stuff available, that doesn’t mean that we did tons of it.

We would buy a gram and share it after the gig. If anything, it made me drink too much and drinking really is my poison. One thing facilitated the next. It caused me to really screw my life up and hurt the people that I loved the most. There’s a great deal of shame in that even to this day.

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I stayed at the party way too long and I almost ruined everything. My marriage crashed, I had a baby as I was getting divorced, my mother died from alcohol. I quit smoking and drinking on the same day more than ten years ago and I never looked back.

You give a teenager a whole bunch of money without training and it’s a bit overwhelming. I got totally ripped off, didn’t do my taxes, I had a three-month-old baby and was on every record coming out of LA and I had no money. I wasn’t spending it all on drugs, but my first wife and I were young and figuring things out. Money and substance abuse really cover a broad stroke because there are a lot of things that I wouldn’t have done had I not been high or drunk.

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I’ve made it right with the people that I needed to make things right with, but a lot happened that I can never take back. It’s the hardest thing in the world to just forgive yourself. I have a great life now and everything became so much better once I stopped hurting myself, but I needed to figure out why I was doing it. That’s a personal journey that I’m still on. I was given another chance and I take that chance very seriously. I was pulled out of the depths of shit and I believe that I had to go through these things. Beating addiction was part of my life’s’ journey. No matter what else I could have done, it was going to be waiting for me to have to conquer.

I hang around with a lot of people that are staunch AA. We hang around and talk about these things and that’s like a meeting. If more than one person is gathered together then technically, you’re having a meeting. I don’t go to a specific place on a regular basis, but I do hang around with people that have experienced what I have and we talk about our issues and things.