"HOLD THE LINE"
Toto's first single ever immediately became an international hit, selling 2 million singles worldwide. Jeff Porcaro said about the succes of this song: "'Hold the line' was a perfect example of what people will describe as your heavy metal cord guitar licks, your great triplet A-notes on the piano, your slide-hot-fun-in-the-summertime groove, all mishmashed together with a boy from New Orleans singing... and it really crossed over a lot of lines."
David Paich about writing the song: "It started out with the piano riff that is in the intro. I started playing this riff and I just couldn't stop playing it. I played it for days, and I started singing, "Hold the line, love isn't always on time." It was a phrase that just came into my head. . . . it was a blessing. (The words) came to me in the night, and then I went to the verse. I wrote it in 2 hours. Sometimes songs come quickly like that, and sometimes I spend 2 years trying to finish a song."
Jeff Porcaro on "Hold the line", in a 1988 interview with Modern Drummer:
That was me trying to play like Sly Stone's original drummer, Greg
Errico, who played drums on "Hot Fun In The Summertime." The hi-hat is
doing triplets, the snare drum is playing 2 and 4 backbeats, and the
bass drum is on 1 and the & of 2. That 8th note on the second beat is
an 8th-note triplet feel, pushed. When we did the tune, I said, "Gee,
this is going to be a heavy four-on-the-floor rocker, but we want a Sly
groove." The triplet groove of the tune was David's writing. It was
taking the Sly groove and meshing it with a harder rock caveman
approach.
"I flipped the first time I heard myself on the radio. My mom called me up and said, "Turn on KLOS." It was the song "Hold the Line," and I started running around the house in my underwear, screaming, "I'm on the radio!" My wife was cracking up. It was just a thrill." (Steve Lukather, Guitar Player magazine, April 1984)
=>Bobby Kimball had a similar experience when he heard Toto for the very first time on the radio:
I was asleep, I had my alarm clock set for noon because we were gonna do something in the studio, some promo
and when the alarm came on there was the radio and "Hold The Line" was playing. And my room was totally black
and I was looking for the telephone and I called Paich and I heard him scream, he was living over there with his
girlfriend and he was screaming around and falling over trying to get to the radio.
Luke: I remember one of you guys called me. I actually sat there in my first house by myself a little tear in my
eye "Wow, we're on the radio in LA, man", it was a great feeling. (Toto99.com interview, 2002)