In his one-star review of David Lynch’s Dune, Roger Ebert wrote, “This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time.” In his new book A Masterpiece in Disarray, the author Max Evry writes, “When seen through the lens of today’s tentpole films, whose four-quadrant aspirations render them hopelessly homogenous, Lynch’s Dune is a unique oddity, equal parts baroque and philistine.”
Nearly 40 years after Dune hit the big screen, both sentiments ring true.
Especially when compared to director Denis Villeneuve’s epic recent Dune adaptation, Lynch’s 1984 take on Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction book is beyond strange. Filled with jargon-y voice-overs, Atari-age special effects, and performances that range from unusually stilted to hilariously over-the-top (including a memorable turn from Sting as a punky villain with spiked hair), the big-budget affair often feels like an arthouse curio. It’s no wonder the film confounded critics and audiences at the time—even Lynch, who didn’t have final cut, has disowned it.
With A Masterpiece in Disarray, Evry reevaluates the movie by telling its full story with the help of those who were there, including stars Kyle MacLachlan and Sean Young, and even Lynch himself. Every aspect of Dune is put under the microscope, including its surprisingly quiet and moody score courtesy of the 1980s rock band Toto, best known for their No. 1 hit “Africa.” In the following excerpt, members of Toto recount their experience working with Lynch, Brian Eno’s involvement in the soundtrack, and why they maybe should have just written a song for Footloose instead.
David Lynch looked at numerous musicians and bands to do the film’s music, including Giorgio Moroder, before he went with Toto, the rock group led by David Paich and also consisting of Steve Lukather alongside the three Porcaro brothers, Steve, Mike, and Jeff. The group had just released a triple-platinum album, Toto IV. Singles like “Rosanna” and “Africa” catapulted them to mega-stardom. Then their lead vocalist Bobby Kimball left the band, which helped push them in a new direction.
Steve Lukather (Toto guitarist and vocalist): We’d just won the Album of the Year Grammy. We won every accolade we could get! A really wonderful time. Then our singer kind of went south, so we took a break and had to regroup. We were looking for something to do to buy us some time before we got back to our own thing. Another project to be creative, make a few bucks, and have a laugh until we found somebody to replace our singer. Opportunities came up.
Ultimately, Toto had to choose between two plum projects: Dune and Footloose.
David Paich (Toto keyboardist and vocalist): Footloose was definitely in our wheelhouse.
Lukather: Footloose wasn’t a score; they just wanted some songs from us because we were the big band at the time. Who knew that soundtrack was going to sell 12 million copies? You never know with this shit. You hear actors all the time say, “I turned down the part that won the Academy Award!” We could have done a track for Footloose, because I sang lead on a bunch of stuff. David Paich sang lead on fucking “Africa,” one of our biggest songs.
Paich: Dune was just a stroke of luck. Ridley Scott was originally directing it when we found out about it. I was a very big Ridley Scott fan. I knew of David Lynch because he had done Elephant Man, which was a great movie.
Lukather: When I heard the name “David Lynch” I had to stop, because I had been a fan since Eraserhead. I used to take everybody to see this thing at the Nuart Theatre in Santa Monica every couple of weeks. One of the times we went, Jack Nance was sitting two rows behind us. I turned to one of my buddies and said, “Look, it’s Eraserhead!”
Paich: When it passed hands from Ridley to David, the band got together and said, “Should we still pursue this?” Jeff Porcaro said that was a definite “yes.” It would be a very cool thing to do.
Lukather: We were sold on: “It’s going to be the new Star Wars.”
Paich was invited to fly to Mexico City during production to meet with David Lynch and play the chords that eventually became the movie’s signature theme.
Paich: I was able to play my main theme for David Lynch. They loved it and hired us on the spot. He had a Walkman, and put this set of phones on me and said, “Tell me if you can make this kind of music for my movie?” He put on two Shostakovich symphonies. He made me listen and said: “I want this music low, and I want it slow.” I thought, Well, I can handle that. This isn’t Star Wars. He’s making the anti-Star Wars movie. He wanted me to avoid anything that’s uplifting, that’s happy, that’s joyous, that’s compelling. He hates popular movies that make people come and eat popcorn and stuff. Super-nice guy, though. He wanted it low and slow.
Lukather: Sometimes we wanted to rowdy it up a little bit but we thought, It’s too much. It’s too much. It wasn’t about us. That’s the thing about scoring films—it wasn’t about, “Oh, let’s dig the Toto music.” A lot of people were like, “Who’s scoring the film? Those guys?” Like we’re going to write “Africa” for the film or something. They didn’t realize that we can do all kinds of shit. We worked with Miles Davis, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Steely Dan. We were all over the map.
Paich: Everybody was getting a little anxiety, a little stressed by the time we got involved. It was the end of the movie, and they wanted the music to be put in there. Lord knows people have differences of opinion about music all the time, but I got along with Lynch great. We had no problem with David.
Lukather: He’s such a unique filmmaker and a unique human being. We were working on stuff on-and-off for about three months together. The weirder it was, the more David liked it. He didn’t like real busy stuff, he liked more ominous sounds. We did it all in L.A., and David would come a lot when he was starting to cut the film. We weren’t around when they were actually filming anything; it was all afterward. Some of the actors, like Kyle MacLachlan, would come around. It was a positive experience in terms of the hang.
Toto wrote no lyrical songs for Dune, instead conjuring a big, sweeping orchestral sound with only a few guitar chords here and there.
Paich: That’s where my head was at because I grew up with orchestras. My father was an orchestrator for [film composer] Jerry Goldsmith. He did some movies and a lot of TV and constantly conducted orchestras all his life. I come from the old-school orchestra scoring of a movie. When Queen did Flash Gordon, I thought, Wow, that’s interesting to have a band score a movie. We took it that way and kind of Toto-ized it, trying to follow David Lynch’s instructions, which put limitations on what we’re trying to do.
Lukather: David Paich gets to scratch his itch to write an orchestral score with all of us contributing compositional ideas, but—in all fairness—Paich was really running the show on this one. I got to give credit where credit’s due. We were still in our 20s. I was 25 years old. I’d never done anything like that before. It was a new experience for me, and I learned a lot.
While Paich and Lukather were always the main composers for the film, another artist Lynch considered bringing in from the get-go was British ambient pioneer Brian Eno. The filmmaker ultimately decided to supplement the score with a single 12-minute synth track by Eno (alongside Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno) known as the “Prophecy Theme,” which caused a bit of tension with the members of Toto.
Lukather: He temped a scene with Brian Eno’s music, and we tried to fucking satisfy him, and nothing would do it until he finally said, “I’ll pay Brian to do this.”
Paich: It was a little touchy at first, because we thought that he wanted to go in a different direction, that he wasn’t satisfied with Toto. We read that wrong. All they wanted was to be more inclusive with the music and bring in some other elements to it. Now that I look back on it, it was the perfect call. I was lucky to be part of all that.
Lukather: I’ve never met Brian. Love his work, but he wrote a 30-second theme and basically got the same credit as us. They used him because of his name value, so people attributed our work to him and his work to us, and it was confusing. It was much hipper to say Brian Eno wrote the score than Toto at the time. If they didn’t like the movie, they’d go after us. If they liked it, they’d give Eno all the credit. I have no beef with Brian Eno, I have no beef with David. That’s what he wanted so he should have it. I love Brian Eno.
Paich: When I look back on it, the sound design aspect was Brian Eno. He brought in those luscious and compelling and haunting voices that were in some of the scenes. It was a great mixture to have both elements, between Eno and Toto. He pre-recorded stuff he just thought would be good for the movie and sent it to David Lynch, and that was the music. Toto did all the percussion in L.A. here, and Steve Lukather did some of the guitar backward sounds.
Penelope Shaw Sylvester (Dune assistant editor): David had a strong audio vision too. The sound. He had one of his sound designers, Alan Splet, who unfortunately isn’t with us anymore, come on the film, and he was on David’s wavelength for that.
Paich: There was a lot of sound design going on with Lynch at the same time this orchestral stuff was being conceived. Lynch is very into the combination of those things. I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. He puts it on all of his movies. This low wisp of a sound. It’s almost like a foghorn. David Lynch was one of the champions of sound design and movie music going together.
The Toto score for Dune was Wagnerian and powerful, yet the band never composed the soundtrack for another movie.
Paich: Working on that film discouraged me a little bit from working on films. I thought, If this is the way it’s going to be… I wanted it to be a blockbuster like Jaws, and it wasn’t. It was met with mixed reviews.
Lukather: It was a one-and-done for us, as far as I was concerned. It was a great experience, but it was not something I wanted to do for a living. There are guys that do it so well. I just want to stay in my lane, if you will. I’m not the right guy to spend the rest of my life doing that. It’s very difficult, tedious work, and I just want to run on stage and play my ass off and get paid and go home. I spent a lot of time in recording studios from 1976 to 1992, doing 20 sessions a week… and having a band.
I saw Dune a million times when we were doing it. I could move my lips to the dialogue. Oftentimes, some of the phrases from the film we still use to talk to each other—it just comes out of nowhere. That’s part of our history.
Released in 1984 by Polydor, the Dune soundtrack album was, according to the band, not a bestseller. The label reissued the soundtrack on CD in 1997 with previously unreleased cues. In 2020, Jackpot Records reissued it in a limited 2,000-copy “spice-colored” vinyl run.
Lukather: The soundtrack wasn’t a blockbuster, I can tell you that. It’s not like there was a hit single. It’s a quirky little weird thing.
Paich: It’s an oddity for Toto. The one guy that came up to me was Billy Idol, who told me, “By the way, I love the Dune album. That’s my favorite Toto record of all time.” Made me feel really good.
Lukather: Billy Idol was a friend of mine and said, “My favorite Toto album is Dune.” [laughs] I said, “I love you for that, Billy!” For our last live video, on our 40th-anniversary tour, we put together a medley of the themes of Dune, in a Pink Floyd-y sort of way. Our super-fans get it, like, “I can’t believe they’re playing something from Dune!” We didn’t play the main theme; that would have been too obvious and kind of silly. We aren’t John Williams, but we gave it a go! The irony is the singer in our band now, Joseph Williams, his father is John Williams.
You can definitely hear hints of Paich’s Dune theme in the memorable themes for 1988’s Scrooged and 1989’s Batman by Danny Elfman, another rocker-turned-composer. Shades of it occur in the track “Stillsuits” from Hans Zimmer’s score for the 2021 version of Dune.
Paich: There’s another one, from Star Wars, where they blatantly use that theme in it. I just take it as flattery, you know?
Lukather: I’ll tell you the funny story: On the last tour we did with Jeff Porcaro before he sadly passed, we were headlining these big-ass festivals, and we were on one called Rock am Ring in Germany for 50,000 people. It was 1991, and Sting and Toto were the headliners. I had never met Sting before. I was a big fan. We went on before them, and we killed it, had a great show. At the time, I was still boozing it up a little bit and had this cheap fucking bottle of German schnapps. I walked up to Sting with a little bit more bravado than I would have if I’d been completely sober. I put my arm around him, holding the bottle, and I went, “DUNE.” He looked at me and he goes, “Hey man, at least you didn’t have to wear the blue Speedo!”
