The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (22 page)

California was a conservative place in general, but it seemed like anyone talking about politics at that time was from the left. People were supporting things like public performances and food banks and Cesar Chavez and the Black Panthers. Either you were against the war in Vietnam and against exploitation of workers and against anything that was racist or you were old and part of the problem.

It wasn’t just San Francisco. You could take LSD, turn on the news, and see people dying in Vietnam. They kept showing Buddhist monks pouring gasoline over themselves and burning to death to protest the war. How could your mind not expand? Later you saw the motel balcony where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot. Robert Kennedy lying on a kitchen floor, dying.

The ’60s were in your face, and there was no remote control to turn it off. That came later. When Santana did its first national tour in ’69, you could see the whole country was going in that direction—thinking and dressing differently, experimenting. Talking liberation. The thing is, this all happened in just two years. When Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar were playing the Monterey Pop festival in ’67, I was just getting started, happy to be opening for the Who at the Fillmore Auditorium. By ’69, I was playing Woodstock.

I was almost eighteen when the world started to ask questions that had not been asked before. Is there a better way than what we’ve been doing all these years? Why are we fighting here at home, and over there in Vietnam? Can we make this world a better
place—can we infuse spiritual principles in everyday life? I had my own questions. What does that mean—tune in and drop out? What am I going to do? Where do I fit in all this?

San Francisco was the perfect time and place to experience the ’60s. The combination came at just the right time—a gift. I was a guitar player who had the conviction to make music his life. I was working with songs and vibrations when the sound of the electric guitar was what people were gravitating to. That instrument became another way to take people to new places, to make beautiful paintings. The electric guitar was the new storyteller. Suddenly, with musicians like Hendrix and Clapton and Jeff Beck, it was possible to go deeper into the guitar and transcend its actual construction. Something like the Fender Strat? As Jimi said, “You’ll never hear surf music again.” The electric guitar was able to transcend what it was supposed to do and communicate a state of grace on a molecular level.

It wasn’t just the way the instrument sounded: guitar solos were getting longer, too. The music all around us was starting to get longer. Even on the radio, songs were not just three minutes anymore—some FM stations would play a twenty-minute tune if a band put it out. Creedence Clearwater Revival was just getting started. They were already big in San Francisco and came out with a long version of “Suzie Q.” It was that “East-West” influence, and from the jazz world, too—Chico Hamilton, Gábor Szabó. Hendrix had “Third Stone from the Sun”—jamming with all the psychedelic studio stuff going on and talking about “majestic silken scenes” and landing his “kinky machine.” If you played guitar, you couldn’t just make up something to go with a short section of a song and work it again and again. I had to open up to going on with an idea, having your own discussion. It wasn’t that difficult—I could talk. I had to just learn to listen. To hear the music and know when to go higher, when to jump, when to bring it back.

I would embellish a little even when I was playing violin, though my father discouraged that. He wanted me to stay true to
the melody, put the feeling into that. This was different. I was opening up to thinking about energy and sound, not just notes and scales.

After leaving home and the Tic Tock, I had more time to listen and really dissect records—listen to them again and again, maybe twenty times. I’d listen alone with my guitar or with the other guys in the house. We would sit around and smoke weed and get fuzzy and hazy. Some music sounded like it was made for that. John Lee Hooker, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix—all weed music. Definitely Lee Morgan. I used to love to smoke to
First Light
by Freddie Hubbard. If it was Bob Dylan or Miles Davis, you’d get twice as high. When I started really listening to Coltrane, I’d get high, but after a while his music sets you straight, like he had some kind of regulator tone that doesn’t allow for fuzzy and hazy.

I remember talking with a lady who used to live in Mill Valley. She told me, “I heard you play, and I brought you some records.” One of them was by the Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. She told me he learned to play even though two of his fingers were stuck together. As soon as she left, I started listening—“Minor Swing” with both guitar and violin! Hearing Django go off on a solo gave me a whole new idea of what to do.

One night the Santana Blues Band was opening for James Cotton. Sometime in ’67, we had begun playing regularly at an old movie house in the Haight that some hippies fixed up and called the Straight Theater. The place was a little raggedy, but it felt right for us. We played Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By”—“There is nothing I can do / If you leave me here to cry…” My turn to solo came, and suddenly it was like opening a faucet. The water just flowed out. It was the most natural feeling. I wasn’t repeating riffs. I wasn’t repeating anything. It felt like I had turned a corner.

A writer once asked me what I think about when I’m soloing—this was in the early ’90s, when all three of my children were just kids. I told him I thought about combing my daughters’ hair before they went to bed, how careful I had to be so I didn’t make them cry. Playing a good solo is about being sensitive and not rushing, letting
the music tell you what and when and how fast. It’s about learning to respect yourself by respecting the music and honoring the song.

Another time, my mom approached me and said, “
Mijo,
can I ask you something? Where do you go when you’re playing your guitar and you look up? All you guys look up. What’s up there?” I love my mom for having that childlike curiosity and just coming out with that question. I know she’s not alone. People want to know. “What’s it like in there? What’s it feel like?”

It’s difficult to explain—Wayne Shorter calls it the invisible realm. I call it a state of grace, a moment of timelessness. Playing a guitar and getting inside a groove and finding the notes is like the power that lovers have—they can bend time, suspend it. A moment seems like infinity, and then all of a sudden time meets you around the corner. I began to feel that when I was playing in Mexico—not a lot, but sometimes.

I don’t know if my solo on “As the Years” was recorded, but the band was starting to record ourselves in concert, asking the sound guys to do that so we could listen to our performances, study them. At first it was pretty painful—it always sounded different from the way I’d remembered it onstage, and
everything
sounded rushed. I’d go home and listen to it by myself, never with anyone else. In fact I still do that—I won’t listen to recordings of Santana in concert if there are people around me unless we’re working on a live album or I want to show somebody something we need to fix.

We also learned to play high. Gregg usually stuck to his beer, and the rest of us would smoke weed when we played—and we tripped a lot. Without a doubt, hallucinogens had a lot to do with the Santana sound. That’s the way it was with many groups then—there wouldn’t be the Jimi Hendrix Experience without them or the Beatles’
Sgt. Pepper
. There would only have been electric blues and “In the Midnight Hour.” Even the Beach Boys moved on from surf music because of LSD.

LSD was legal until sometime in late ’68. I also took mescaline and peyote—ground ayahuasca buttons—which was a really nice
trip except for when you had to go to the bathroom. It wasn’t as electric as LSD, which could be a little intense because we cut it with speed.

Then we’d play.

Hallucinating is another word for seeing beyond what your brain is programmed to see. That’s what those drugs did for me with music—they made me more receptive to ideas and heightened my sensitivity. Normally your brain is on a leash, with built-in filters. When I tripped and played, those filters went away, and the leash was off. I could hear things in a new way. Everything became more watery—thoughts were more fluid, and the music was more flowing. I would drop, and the music didn’t sound so fragmented. It sounded like beads on a string that would go on and on.

That was the deal: it took courage to surrender and trust that when you had those hallucinations you were not in total control—and if you got afraid and tried to get that control back, you were going to have a bad trip. I always did surrender—I knew that it was going to get intense for a while but that in twelve hours or however long it took to finally pee it out, everything was going to be cool again. You learn that you can have fear or trust, but you can’t have both.

We started to really hear each other, get to know one another’s musical signatures. We were a collective, and everyone found a role—everyone had a chance to be lead sometimes. In rehearsals, Gregg was the stable one—he had his six-pack to drink, but he wouldn’t do anything else. He was the rock in the band when all of us were doing stuff, going to extremes. The rest of us could go out with the music or go a little crazy and depend on Gregg to be the stabilizer, holding the beat together with his left hand. Somebody had to be the string on the kite.

From the end of ’67 through the summer of ’68, the Straight Theater gave us Friday-through-Sunday runs and put us on bills with Charlie Musselwhite and various local bands, including one called Mad River. Once we played after a Fellini movie. We started noticing people coming back to hear us, especially women—some
we knew from high school and others who were new to us. They started to bring their friends, and we started to get our own crowd.

We did a few shows at the Avalon Ballroom and a few benefits at universities. We got better in front of an audience, and people started to hear about the Santana Blues Band. Then we got our first review. It was Sunday in Sausalito, and we were playing outside for spare change. Someone came up to us and said, “You’re Santana, right?”

“Yes, that’s us.”

“You know you guys are in the Sunday pink section.” That was the entertainment section of the
San Francisco Chronicle
. Ralph J. Gleason—the newspaper’s top music writer, who also helped start
Rolling Stone
magazine—had named the top new bands coming out of the city. There were around twelve, including the Sons of Champlin, and we were the first he mentioned, saying that we had the X factor of excitement. I had no idea what that meant. I asked Carabello: “Hey, man, I’m still learning English.
Qué es
‘X factor’?” He laughed. “Man, fuck. I don’t know, either. But who cares? We
got
it.”

I like the fact that even one of the best music writers in the country didn’t know what to call what we had, but he found a way to write about it. It was like the question of where Miles was going with his music by 1969—you couldn’t call it jazz. Miles wasn’t just jazz, and we weren’t just rock. We were listening to jazz records and African and Latin music—which is really all from the same African root—learning things, getting inspired.

At the Fillmore shows, I started to hear how loose the time feel could be when I heard certain drummers—like Jack DeJohnette with Charles Lloyd or Terry Clarke with John Handy. I couldn’t believe the elasticity. I started hearing words about making time more liquid, not so wooden. I heard how drums could be played very fast and light, the way some drummers could roll, and
wow
—everything hit just right. It wasn’t like some bands—
clang, clang,
like a cable car. I got to hear that jazz drumming on records: John Handy had a great live album from the Monterey Jazz Festival with
“Spanish Lady” on it. I would listen to a percussion solo on
Bola Sete at the Monterey Jazz Festival
that showed me how you can add colors with cymbals and textures with percussion.

I think the most effective thing we were doing was mixing blues with African rhythms—and women really love that because it gives them another way into the music. Most men like the blues, and if you just play blues, like a shuffle, women will move a certain way. You’ll get through to guys and a few women. But when you start adding a more syncopated thing—also some congas—it’s a different feel, and people start opening up in another way. Now women can dance to it. They start swaying like flowers in the wind and sun after it’s been cloudy for a whole month. Something happens with that mix.

There’s another name for this mix—Latin music. All those African beats come through the clave rhythms that became part of the Santana DNA. That’s really what you’re hearing when you listen to Mongo Santamaría and Tito Puente and Santana. It’s Africa.

If you said “Latin” to me at that time, I would think about what I saw on TV—Desi Arnaz and “Babalu” and guys in puffy sleeves shaking maracas—and I knew I didn’t want to go there. To me, Latin music was very, very corny. The music that I did like before I really knew it was called
música tropical
or
música del Caribe
long before it was called salsa or boogaloo. I discovered Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri the same way I discovered Babatunde Olatunji and Gábor Szabó—from just listening.

Latin music was everywhere in San Francisco—it was on the radio and jukeboxes, and later on, when I was hanging with Stan and Ron, I was getting it in the clubs. I knew that Ray Barretto had a humongous hit with “El Watusi,” but I didn’t know he had his own band until I started going to the Matador. That’s where I heard Mongo Santamaría with his band. I had never really thought about these percussion guys having their own groups, as Chico Hamilton did. I was learning. Then I heard the percussionist Big Black—Daniel Ray—who had his own thing happening in San Francisco, more jazzy. I used to go see him at the Both/And, where Miles Davis used to play, too.

Everybody was listening to Latin music—my family, too. Irma and Maria still tell me that they used to have parties at our home on 14th Street because my mom wouldn’t let the girls go out. They would invite friends over, and they wore out the rug dancing to albums by Barretto and later El Gran Combo. Maria tells me that the folks who ran the grocery store downstairs would get angry because bottles would fall off their shelves from all the dancing. And poor Jorge—it was like what my sisters did with their Elvis Presley records ten years before. He says he’d go crazy hearing them play the hell out of “Bang Bang” by Joe Cuba.