Incomes a nod of approval from the Jimmy Web page is the type of once-in-a-lifetime trophy second most guitarists would brag about for many years. For Steve Lukather, that second unfolded beneath much more surreal circumstances – with Eddie Van Halen standing proper beside him.

Talking to Forbes, the Toto legend and session ace shares the story of the one time he ever met the Led Zeppelin icon and the way the evening had left an unexpectedly deep mark.

“I’ve a shaggy dog story about Jimmy,” Lukather begins. “It was the one and solely time I ever met him. I went over to this Guitar Middle factor honouring Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Faucet. In actual fact, I ended up producing 4 tracks on their subsequent file due to that evening.”

Lukather arrived with Eddie Van Halen, anticipating nothing greater than a enjoyable cling and an opportunity to satisfy one in every of his heroes. However what occurred subsequent caught him utterly off-guard.

“I confirmed up with Eddie and my boys,” he remembers. “Hey, we’re going to satisfy Jimmy Web page, an enormous deal, proper? Jimmy’s standing there greeting everybody. He factors at me. I feel he’s pointing at Ed, after all, but it surely’s me, and he motions for me to return over.”

Then got here the praise of a lifetime.

“He mentioned, ‘You’ve one thing that these different guys right here don’t.’ And I’m going, ‘What’s that, Jimmy?’ He mentioned, ‘You perceive and I perceive, however these different guitarists don’t. We had been studio gamers. They don’t know what meaning.’”

Web page then defined that he knew folks typically dismissed Lukather as a result of he was a “studio man” – a notion he shut down immediately, talking as somebody who’d carved his personal profession within the studio trenches.

“‘That’s the other of absolutely the fact. That units you above these different guys,’ Jimmy mentioned. I requested if I may give him a hug, and inform folks he had mentioned that,” Lukather continues. “He laughed, gave me a hug and mentioned, ‘Certain.’ That meant the world to me.”