Jim always comes and sits in with Ringo when we’re playing LA. Jim just brightens up the room, he walks in, and magic happens. Who doesn’t revere Jim Keltner? He’s not like any other human being alive today. He’s just a different kind of cat.
When Toto was starting out, he used to come down and listen to tracks with us. Nothing was finished until Keltner gave it the thumbs up. He’d come into the sessions when we were winding down and we would play him what we’d done. He would just sit there and listen, he’d really take it all in. Jim and Jeff were like brothers, they had a special bond. It was wonderful to see them together. There was such a love that exuded when you had the two of them in the same room.
Some of the sessions that Jim and I have done together were fun and maybe a little weird, and many of them were not super famous. We did a Dolly Parton record; we did a Cheryl Ladd date in the late
70’s...When Jim plays, he plays with his whole body, he just comes from a different space. I can’t really articulate what I’m trying to say—he’s one of the special ones. He’s got a pocket as deep as anybody, but then there’s all those little finesse things that he does. I remember vividly on this Dolly Parton session we did in ’78. It was double drums with Jim and Ed Greene. Even back then Jim was always putting weird things on his drums (like a lot of guys do today.) We were cutting the song “Two Doors Down” and in the middle of the take suddenly you hear a bicycle bell on the hook, and nobody knew where it was coming from, it really made the lyric pop. When Jim did that there was no facial acknowledgment at all, he just grabs for a little something and drops it in, it’s always so musical.
