The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (17 page)

I wish I could say that my next two years at Mission got better. But I would show up in the morning and sign in, then spend more time with my friends and music than I did in the classroom. That was pretty much my routine. I wanted to be living life, not studying it. But what Mr. Knudsen told me was the most important lesson I took away from my first year of high school.

That’s when I really started thinking that no matter what I did, it would have to be the best I could do. I could not be another Lightnin’ Hopkins or Gábor Szabó or Michael Bloomfield. They were already in the world. They had their own sounds and integrity. I needed to get mine together. I would have to be Carlos Santana and do it so well that no one would mistake me for anyone else.

In 2010 I came back to Mission High with my wife, Cindy, to help celebrate the school’s academic achievements. I think I spent more time in the school that day than I did in my last two years there. I visited various classrooms and other parts of the school, and they held a big assembly for all the students. When I spoke to them, I said, “Turn off MTV. Get into real life. Participate.” I hit them with the same kind of message that Mr. Knudsen had given me.

“If you can remember only one thing today, remember this: you are significant, you are meaningful, and you matter. The best is not ahead. The best is right now. Enjoy it, don’t hurt anyone, and live with supreme integrity.”

Then with some of the students, we jammed on “Oye Como Va” and “Europa.” We were plugged in and playing guitar in the Mission High auditorium, something I hadn’t done in almost fifty years.

The Santana Blues Band, first time at the Fillmore, 1967. (L to R) Danny Haro, me, Gus Rodriguez, and Michael Carabello.

You know how you’ll be in a theater watching a movie so amazing that you don’t want it to end? How sometimes you have to pull your eyes away from the screen and focus on the seats in front of you or the popcorn on the floor just to remind yourself that it’s a movie?

That was what the ’60s were like in San Francisco. During those days it was a drag to have to sleep. So much was happening that I wanted to stay awake all the time. I didn’t want to miss anything. Everyone was feeling that way. For me, the ’60s created a thrust of compassion and grace that everybody was feeling at the same time. The decade propelled us out of the orbit we’d been in for generations and generations.
If you believe in gravity and you drop something a hundred times, a hundred times it’s going to fall. But if you believe in grace as strongly as you believe in gravity, then a hundred out of a hundred times you’re going to get a miracle. I loved the ’60s because it made me believe in the law of grace.

When I talk about the ’60s I’m talking about the second half, really—from ’66 on. That’s when San Francisco became the epicenter of multidimensional consciousness—it was the place where you could dive into all this multiplicity. It wasn’t just music or clothes or politics or drugs or sex or colors—it was everything together. And everything changed—the way people were walking and talking and what they wanted to talk about. Instead of the world dragging its feet to catch up with the way people were thinking and feeling, a whole new generation was in sync. It was like that song by the Chambers Brothers—“Time Has Come Today.”

That Chambers Brothers album,
The Time Has Come,
was released later, in ’67, but to me it was a perfect snapshot of what was going on in ’66. On the cover the band wore striped bell-bottoms and brightly colored shirts. They had Afros and were a multiracial band. The title song was more than eleven minutes long—it was becoming increasingly common for songs at that time to be extended past the usual three or four minutes. Songs were starting to resemble jams and grooves—the music I was getting into. “Time Has Come Today” was soulful, and it was filled with the flavors of rock—feedback, lots of echo, heavy guitar, and a hip lyric. It fit the time: “My soul has been psychedelicized!”

Never mind the hair or the drugs or the beads. That wasn’t what made someone a hippie. A hippie was a rainbow warrior, a reincarnated American Indian. You know who was the original hippie? Jesus—the ultimate multidimensional, multicolor, nothing-but-love hippie. He never said, “It’s my way or the highway.” A hippie was not someone stuck in one perception.

I was the only one in my family you could really call a hippie. I let my hair grow long and smoked weed. Later I would leave home and live in a communal kind of situation in a house on a hill. I wanted to play
my music—not other people’s songs, no matter how popular they were. Many times my parents looked at me as if I were crazy.

You know what I miss most from the ’60s? It was the idea of emphasizing individuality. The ’60s were important because it was a time when you were allowed to carry your own bumper sticker. The more different you were, the more people respected you.

I miss that. Nowadays friends pull me aside before I speak, or sometimes afterward. They warn me, “People are going to think you’re a hippie.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I
was getting to know the San Francisco bands the way I got to know the scene in Tijuana—by knowing musicians and finding out where the gigs were. There were bands that came from electric blues—Chicago and Texas styles. There were electric bands that came from acoustic styles—bluegrass and folk. There were bands that were into Paul Revere and the Raiders, and wore old-style costumes or military uniforms. There were R & B bands influenced by Motown and James Brown that wore sharp suits and skinny trousers.

At the start of 1966, we didn’t cross paths too much with these groups. Many came from different parts of the Bay Area. I started to hear about the Grateful Dead, who came out of Palo Alto. There was the Jefferson Airplane—they helped start a new club called the Matrix in the Fillmore area. Later that year some members left and formed Moby Grape, and they got big fast. There were groups like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Carabello turned me on to a group called Sly & the Stoners, which had members from all over—San Francisco, Daly City, and Oakland. They later became Sly & the Family Stone, of course.

I want to say that we were all like one big family, but there were times when other musicians, especially those from the other side of town, looked at us like we were stray dogs who wanted to steal their bones. Even when we were headliners, that’s the truth. We
were in alliance with Sly and bands from Oakland, and we—well, we were from
the Mission
. There was a racist element to it, but we were so young I think it was just a matter of competition and insecurities. It took a while for all of us to grow up and drop our guards. I will say from the start that some bands stood out because they were really, really cool. Jerry Garcia was very gracious and embracing. The guys in Quicksilver and Janis Joplin—always supportive.

The common denominator for all these bands was a guy from New York City who had been in San Francisco about as long as I had—Bill Graham. In ’66 he started producing shows that put all of us to work. We started to meet each other at Bill’s place, and never mind putting us all on equal footing—he put us in the stratosphere.

If anyone ever makes a movie about Bill Graham—and someone should—it would have to be called
Bigger Than Life,
because that’s exactly how he was. I saw him at the very beginning in San Francisco, just when he was starting, and I watched him become a legend around the world. He could do anything and would do everything. He was a promoter and event producer. He managed bands and ran record companies. He put together international tours and did things at the Fillmore with the same focus and intensity as he would do them in huge stadiums around the world. By the time of his death, he was the Cecil B. DeMille of rock, directing a cast of thousands. But he could also be a gaffer or a grip. “What the fuck is this?” he would scream at his people if he noticed something out of place. If no one was around, he’d move it himself or pick up the offending piece of trash. Then he’d go for the clipboard he always had with him, make a note, and move on to the next thing that needed fixing.

I have much to say about Bill because he was so important in my life and had such a huge effect on my career. If I had to bring it down to just one thing I would say this: he respected the music and the people who made it. He was the first promoter I knew who fed
the bands—and he didn’t feed them just sandwiches, either. It might have been before or after the show, but he would always have catering ready for all the bands. Believe me, back then some of us really needed to be fed. He created a standard that put musicians first. He made sure the toilets were clean—backstage, too.

I remember seeing him at the Fillmore at the end of a show. Everyone was gone from the place except a few stragglers. He was doing one last round, closing doors, turning off lights. First one there, last to leave.

Bill was passionate about music, and he could be profane. I have never heard someone use the word
schmuck
as many times as Bill did. I didn’t even know it was a word until I met him. Nothing intimidated him. To him, confrontation was foreplay. He would stand on the street in New York City and yell at taxis for passing him by with the same energy and language that he would use to negotiate multimillion-dollar deals for the biggest acts and largest venues in the world.

Bill did not look for trouble—he looked for what was wrong or could be better. His thing was what was fair and right. I saw him argue at top volume with armed guards in Moscow who could not understand a word he was saying. In 1977 in Verona, Italy, I was surprised in a hotel lobby by a TV interviewer who wanted to know how I could be so spiritual when the concert tickets were so expensive. Bill stepped right in front of me and told me not to answer that question, then turned to the interviewer and said, “Ask the Italian promoter”—who was standing just a few feet away. Bill continued, “We had a contract saying what the ticket prices should be, but he added all these expenses and jacked up the price.” That guy ran for cover like a rat when you turn on the lights.

That same night, Bill jumped off the stage in the middle of our set to stop a riot. I’m not exaggerating. You could feel the excitement all around, this huge energy. We started our set with “Jingo,” and the crowd started pushing to the stage. For security, there was a line of policemen with machine guns right in front of the stage,
which created a kind of DMZ that kept the audience yards away from the band—they still do that at many rock concerts.

The crowd was excited and running to get closer. It wanted to feel the music and boogie. Bill saw what was about to happen, and he hustled out right between us and got down in front of the guards, screaming at them to make room, to pull to the side, to let the crowd come down. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. He defused the situation all by himself and stayed there for most of the show, policing the police.

His real name was Wolfgang Grajonca. It was a good thing he decided to call himself Bill Graham. He was a Jew from Eastern Europe who had escaped World War II and grown up in New York City. He spent a lot of time in Spanish Harlem, going to hear Tito Puente and other Latin groups, dancing salsa. He was a great ballroom dancer. He loved jazz, and when you look at the shows he used to do in the ’60s, you can see that he brought together all those passions in one place and turned on a whole generation with his good taste—Charles Lloyd, John Handy, Bola Sete, Gábor Szabó, and of course Miles Davis.

Bill trained as a waiter up in the Catskills, and around ’63 he moved to San Francisco for a straight job before he started working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He ran their shows and put together benefits with local bands to raise money. That’s how he got started, and he learned very fast about hippie culture from Chet Helms and other people—the light shows, the posters, the kind of music that hippies wanted to hear.

Bill still dressed like a square—he never was one of us in that way. He never let his hair grow long; he never wore beads or the full hippie attire. What he did was bring a businessman’s sense to consciousness-revolution culture when it was just getting started, and he did it in a way that preserved that culture’s spirit and intention.

In February of that year, Bill started booking nights on a regular basis at the Fillmore Auditorium, as it was then called, on Geary Street, not far from the Mission. They weren’t just concerts—not
like any I had been to—and they weren’t club gigs, either. Each was a really special event that showcased two or three acts on the same night. Very soon after he started, he was putting together different styles of music on the same bill—rock, blues, jazz, even Brazilian. Then he started bringing in national groups like the Butterfield Blues Band, and local groups would open for them. Then he brought in British groups like the Who and Cream and Fleetwood Mac.

All the bands would play for five nights, Wednesday through Sunday—two sets a night. Usually a matinee on Sunday. The sound system was great, and there were special light shows going on behind the bands. The posters looked like glowing paintings—bright colors and weird letters. They were on lampposts all over town. You had to stop and check them out closely to figure out what they were saying. It was mysterious and fun.

Before I got to play for him, Bill’s concerts became my high school and college studies all rolled into one. I studied everything he put on at the Fillmore Auditorium and then the Carousel Ballroom—which he called the Fillmore West. You want to talk about a diploma? The Fillmore was where I really got my higher education. You can take that any way you want.

The Fillmore was like a sanctuary. At the time, things were feeling a bit desperate and very divided—Vietnam was starting to happen. I knew some people were getting drafted, and
boom
—they were gone. There was all that racial tension and rioting in black neighborhoods. At the Fillmore I could escape from all that. At the shows, there would be hippies and brothers and Mexicans. People were doing what they wanted—smoking, tripping. It was like a big, safe party.

I had no choice but to pay attention, man. How could I ignore it? I was in the middle of it. It started with the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood around 1965 or ’66. The Haight was just a dozen blocks from where I lived in the Mission, just past Buena Vista Park. Hippies’ hair was long, and their style of clothes was a different kind of hip. They were wearing things and colors that
suddenly made turtlenecks and tight trousers and anything that was Italian seem old. I knew about weed from Tijuana, but in San Francisco people were smoking it openly. And they were taking a new drug called LSD. It was legal then. I mean, it wasn’t illegal—not yet.