Rob Lowe recorded a demo with Toto while on a bunch of drugs
Rob Lowe's Brat Pack era antics are infamous, but here's a bit of lore you probably haven't heard before: for a brief moment, he could have been a yacht rocker. Yesterday, Lowe had a conversation with Bill Simmons—creator of The Ringer and producer of Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary—for his podcast Literally! With Rob Lowe. Around 30 minutes in, he dropped the following revelation (via Stereogum):
I got one for ya. There was a minute in the ’80s where I was definitely doing too much Bolivian marching powder and just being a fucking lunatic. And also coming at the time in a young actor’s career where they’re too old to play the roles they’ve been playing but they’re too young to play the roles that will last you for the rest of your life, which are really the great ones, and you can kind of feel it. And I love music so much, as evidenced by this talk and all of that. I got it into my head that maybe I should think more about music, and I cut a demo with Toto.
"Wow," Simmons responded, after pausing for a moment to take it all in. "This is one of the reasons you're the world's most interesting man." Simmons seemed a bit too stunned to ask any followup questions, so for the time being we don't know any more about the evasive demo or the dissolution of Lowe's musical dreams. It's a shame—there might have been another "Africa" on there.
In the meantime, we'll always have Lowe's other big musical moment—that disastrous "Proud Mary" performance with Snow White at the 1989 Oscars. You can listen to a 2020 conversation about the incident between Patrick Gomez and Alex McLevy for The A.V. Club here.