The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (25 page)

Carabello used to go to the beach and play there with whoever was hanging out. While we were waiting to find out what was happening with Marcus, Carabello met a guy who played percussion and was part of a group called the Aliens. Carabello went to a club called Nite Life, just off of San Bruno, where they were playing, and called us. At first we didn’t want to be bothered. “Aw, Carabello—what are you talking about?” He wouldn’t let go. “There’s this guy I met today at the beach, and he’ll blow your mind. I think we need to add him to the band.” Gregg and I came down—our place was just up the street—and man, we couldn’t believe it.

The guy, José Areas, played congas on one tune, then timbales on another—then soloed on trumpet, too! He was incredible—he sounded as good as anyone on any record we had been listening to.
His rhythm was so strong and firm, like the steel beams of a huge building before they start putting the floors in. It felt like his playing could support
anything
. He was from Nicaragua and kind of small, and they called him Chepito. He looked like he just came into town—straight clothes and hair, and he didn’t speak a word of English. I spoke to him in Spanish and asked him to come jam with us the next day.

Chepito fit right in. Gregg and I felt it right away. I think it took a little longer for David, but we all realized how much he added to the music—a precision, a stability without being stifling. In just a few rehearsals, Chepito knew all our music, and it felt like no matter how good the rest of us were, the wheels would fall off without Chepito. His right hand on the cowbell was like Tony Williams’s hi-hat—pure and steady. He was serious, too, not gentle at all; if you suddenly had a “To be or not to be” moment with the music, he’d give you a look like, “Get it together!”

Carabello was really happy, of course, to have Chepito helping with the rhythm—he had been complaining for a while about Doc Livingston, that he couldn’t get a lock together with him and get a good groove going. Doc had been part of the problem in Los Angeles—he isolated himself from the band and didn’t want to talk about songs or band business or anything. He was being a lone wolf and a bit of a rebel when we needed someone to get into the huddle more than ever before. We had an album to do: we needed someone who was going to bring all his spirit and contribute.

By the time Santana went back to the studio in May for a second try, Chepito was part of the band. CBS said we didn’t have to use their producer, but we had to have somebody producing, so we asked around and kept hearing about Brent Dangerfield. We had worked with him at the Straight Theater, where he had been the soundman. He had never worked in a studio before, but he had a reputation around Haight-Ashbury for being able to “get around a knob.” We needed someone we could feel good with and who came from our scene.

We also needed someone to help us in the studio, to help us
arrange our jams into songs, and that was Alberto Gianquinto, a friend of David’s who lived with him and played keyboards with James Cotton when he came into the city. He was an older, very stout, no-nonsense gutbucket kind of piano player who had grown up in the Mission, and he could handle blues as well as jazz and classical. Although you wouldn’t know it from his name, he was a white dude—but with a black militant attitude. I remember he had a big poster of Huey P. Newton in his home, and his wife was black, from the Caribbean. He was a very assertive guy—he had to be to go up to Chicago and play with those blues bands and not get his ass whipped. We needed that in the studio.

I had gotten to know Alberto from playing around town, and I think it was Stan who came up with the idea of using him. His contribution to the Santana sound was enormous—he became our producer behind the scenes on our first three albums. We lost touch after that, and he ended up another drug casualty after having battled an addiction for many years. I heard he passed away in an accident in 1986.

We decided to use Pacific Recording Studio—a new facility in San Mateo that also had rehearsal space. The Grateful Dead had been there, and some jazz groups, too. We had definitely learned a lot from our experience in LA, like getting right into it and not wasting time, which was good because once we were in the studio we would only have a week to make the album. We went in and started rehearsing some new tunes, but nothing was coming together at first. This was when we decided to let Doc Livingston go—he kind of fired himself, really. Gregg asked him to leave, then we had a jazz drummer, Johnny Rae, with us for a few gigs—he played often with Cal Tjader and Gábor Szabó.

We weren’t the only band getting it together in that building at that time—Vince Guaraldi was rehearsing there, too. At one point, he came over to our room and said, “I got to tell you, man, I was listening to your music, and I can tell the direction you guys are going—you guys are going to be big, man. Big.” That was an amazing confirmation of what we felt. I used to see Guaraldi a lot
because we played in a lot of the same benefits. I also saw him play at an outdoor show at Stern Grove with his trio, and Bola Sete and John Handy were on the bill, too. It was my first love-in, and everyone was smoking weed, but the music was amazing. It felt like Guaraldi stepping in and giving his approval helped turn things around.

Then it all seemed to come together. We figured out how to get the sound we wanted on each instrument. Day by day, each song sounded better. Gianquinto helped us eliminate wasted hours and figure out how to make the jams shorter—showing us how one section of a song went into the next and how to not lose the flow.

One day I saw Michael Shrieve come into Pacific looking to get some studio time for his band. He was a drummer I knew who hung with some of the guys in Jefferson Airplane, so I invited him to jam with us. We played “Fried Neckbones” together, and then he played on a tune we were putting together called “Waiting,” which became the opening tune on our first album. Shrieve was really open to what we were doing and was flexible—he didn’t use the same pattern every time, and we could tell him what we were looking for. We kept playing into the night. He had a looser, more jazzy feeling than most rock drummers—a kind of hummingbird energy, like bubbles bubbling. It was a little like Mitch Mitchell’s playing with Jimi Hendrix, but more on top of the rhythm.

We felt a chemistry right off the bat. We asked Michael to join the band almost immediately, and he said yes. He wanted to play and jump in with us and hang out. He was from the white area of Palo Alto but was not afraid to come to the Mission. It was like Gregg all over again. Carabello and I wanted to know what kind of house his family had, what kind of cars they drove, and I got the feeling he wanted to know what kind of places we were hanging out in and what food we were eating. He started coming to the house and looking through our records, and he said, “Man, I got to turn you on to Miles and Coltrane.” He did just that soon afterward, and my life would change—again.

Santana had its first stable lineup together, the one the world
would get to know from our first three albums—Gregg, David, Carabello, Michael, Chepito, me, and a few people we added later. It came together like it was waiting to happen, and the music felt like that, too. You can tell we all contributed by the fact that everyone in the band shares credit on almost all the tunes. Except for the two covers we did—“Evil Ways” and “Jingo”—there’s only one song, “Shades of Time,” that was written by just two of us. Marcus got his credit on “Soul Sacrifice.”

If I had to choose one tune from that first album that still sticks out for me, it’s “Treat,” which was Santana doing its version of B. B. King meets Eddie Harris. To understand that, you have to know just how big Harris’s tune “Listen Here” was in San Francisco, especially up and down Potrero Hill—everybody had that album and played it all the time. You couldn’t escape that groove, and that’s what inspired “Treat” in a big way. I’m very proud of that one.

It was during the sessions for our first album that the ideas came together for “Incident at Neshabur,” which ended up on our second album,
Abraxas
. We wrote it bit by bit, pulling a little from here and there and putting it together with all its tempo changes. One part in the first section was inspired by a bad groove in a TV commercial for Ajax that showed a white knight blasting people clean—“stronger than dirt!” Alberto came up with a vamp for the second part, which was basically Horace Silver’s “Señor Blues.” He played piano on that, going between two chords, which set me up for a solo that sounded to me like the divinity that comes after sex, when you’re just lying there after giving it all you got and you both arrive at the same time and she’s happy and you’re happy. “Incident” had to wait to come out—it was a little too long for the first album, so we kept it safe for the next one.

We recorded the first album in five days. It took a little longer to mix it—we didn’t get everything right, and we didn’t feel like it captured our sound perfectly yet—but it was close and was much better than the LA session. Some genius at Columbia decided that “Jingo” should be our first single, and we had no power back then, so we went along with that. When it didn’t really go anywhere I
think it was Clive Davis who stepped in and chose “Evil Ways,” probably with some push from Bill—it was his choice all along. That’s when everything took off—we had a hit single on the radio and a bestselling album.

I picked out the cover for the album—I wanted to use the poster for the show we played at the Fillmore West with the Grateful Dead and the Staple Singers, so the artist Lee Conklin designed it again, and it really worked. When our first album came out, my favorite thing on the cover was the line “Produced by Brent Dangerfield
and Santana
.” We’ve worked with various producers over the years, but if you look at the albums we’ve done after that very first effort, you’ll see that we have always produced ourselves.

Santana at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, Bethel, New York, August 16, 1969.

In 2013, when President Obama welcomed me as a Kennedy Center honoree along with Herbie Hancock, Billy Joel, Shirley MacLaine, and Martina Arroyo, what was the first thing he said when my turn came? Something about my being twenty-two and playing in an altered state of mind at Woodstock—not the usual stuff people talk about at the White House. Everyone laughed, and so did I. Obama’s not alone—to most people that’s the Santana moment. People still see it in the movie about Woodstock—Santana playing “Soul Sacrifice”—and writers still ask about it. Yes, I was tripping, and yes, the guitar felt like a snake in my hands. No, I still can’t remember much about it, but I’ll tell you everything I do remember and what I think about it today.

I’ll also tell you this: having the president talk about you is a true opportunity to accept with nobility and humility the greatness of your own life. At the same time, it’s a rare moment when you can see that, with humility, you must accept that you do not control your own life—that you are not separate but connected to a bigger whole. At Woodstock,
I think Santana played a great show, but I do not think Santana was responsible for all that happened afterward. That’s like a cork floating on top of a wave in the middle of the sea, bobbing up and down and telling itself it’s controlling the entire ocean—that’s an ego out of control.

There were a lot of things that nobody planned at Woodstock but that made it work for us. If we hadn’t stayed in the town of Woodstock for the week before the festival, we probably would have gotten stuck in traffic and showed up late or not made it at all. And if some groups hadn’t been late getting up there, we wouldn’t have gone on early in the day and we could have gotten caught in the rain later that day and had our show messed up or even been electrocuted or forced to quit. And if any of that happened, maybe “Soul Sacrifice” would not have made it into the Woodstock movie and nobody would have seen us.

There were a lot of angels stepping in and making a way for us—the more time goes by, the more I can say that with clarity and confidence. I’ll say it again: the one angel who deserves the most credit is Bill Graham. He got us the gig when nobody had heard of us. We had just finished our first album, but it hadn’t been released. When Michael Lang, who was producing the festival, asked Bill for his help, Bill told him, “Okay, this is a big endeavor. I’ll help you with my connections and my people. They know how to do this. But you need to do something for me—you need to let Santana play.”

“Okay, but what’s Santana?”

“You’ll see.”

Most people cannot think of Santana without thinking of Woodstock at the same time. I don’t mind being linked to it—in fact I’m really, really grateful. But people need to know that Woodstock had everything stacked up against it—and that against all odds three days of peace and love and music prevailed.

B
ill called a meeting for everyone in the band. It was sometime in July of 1969. He was living in Mill Valley then, the white side of the Bay Area, where the hoity-toity rich people were.
We all went over, looking at the houses—he had put together a nice outdoor buffet for us. We were all impressed. Then he sat down and told us why we were there. Usually he was always hurrying, but he took his time—he had a lot to say.

“Some groups are not doing so well right now—Hendrix is not selling; Jim Morrison’s in trouble for exposing himself. I hear that Sly is doing too much coke.” He gave us the full picture of what was happening in rock right then.

“I’m sending you guys to the East Coast, and when you come back everything will be different. First you’ll go to Atlantic City and New York City, then Boston and Philadelphia, and finally a big festival in Texas—you’ll play there with Sam and Dave, Led Zeppelin, and B. B. King. You’ll go from playing small halls that hold fifteen hundred to two thousand people to festivals where there are fifteen thousand to thirty thousand people, then a huge festival in upstate New York where there will be maybe eighty or ninety thousand people. You’ll do great.

“The festival in Woodstock is going to change everything for Santana. After that, people are going to recognize you everywhere, and it will totally fuck up your head. You’re going to think you’ve always been famous. People are going to treat you like you’re a god. The next thing you know you’re going to need a shoehorn to walk into a room because your head’s going to be so big.” Bill was being direct. “Keep your feet on the ground—don’t get swept up by all that.”

We were like, “Oh, man, don’t bring us down with that hippie shit. We’re from the ghetto, we’re real. We don’t think like that.”

Bill got serious. “Believe me: as true is true, it will happen.”

Our first album was about to come out, and before we left California Columbia Records had one of their annual conventions in Los Angeles, and we went down there and played a special show for all the sales and marketing people and publicists and bigwigs like Clive Davis. I didn’t get to meet Clive that time, or at least I don’t remember meeting him then.

The point of the show was to get the record company people all excited about the label’s bands and their new records—to get them
to give us an extra push. It was there where we decided on an obvious name for the album—
Santana
. I always felt like a cat in a dog pound at those so-called industry events because of the way certain people would wear their suits and walk and “Hey, baby” you. People who’d take all the credit and the money from your music and tell you that without them you wouldn’t be who you are. Clive was an exception to that rule, I later found out.

The night after we played the convention we were in New York City, playing the Fillmore East, the hall that Bill opened the year before so he could bring the San Francisco magic to the East Coast. We were back at the bottom of the bill—in fact we weren’t even on the marquee, because it could only accommodate so many names and we were opening for Three Dog Night, Canned Heat,
and
Sha Na Na. That’s a lot of letters. I remember Bill telling me that once he booked Rahsaan Roland Kirk there, and Rahsaan insisted that his name be on the marquee, so Bill built an extra wooden sign to hang from the bottom to accommodate him—and Rahsaan was blind!

We could feel immediately how different the crowds were from those in California—a different kind of energy, a little intimidating. New York City people don’t come to you; you have to go to them. They’re very astute, like sharks. They can tell if you’re feeling out of place—they can smell fear. That first time we weren’t anything but polite: “It’s nice to be here, and we hope you like our music.” Then we just played.

The other bands were looking at us like, “What is this kind of music?” and we were looking at them the same way. Three Dog Night had a smooth rock sound from Los Angeles with very radio-friendly songs. Sha Na Na was a kind of parody act of ’50s doo-wop—they might as well have been a Broadway show. Canned Heat was closest to what we were doing, and you could hear they had that John Lee Hooker boogie in their music, and that was okay with me.

It was helpful to be in that kind of show so we could learn not to be afraid of competition or new audiences. Back then we were
constantly monitoring ourselves to see how we fit into the music of the time—what do we like? And, just as important, what do we want to stay away from? Everybody in our band was really vigilant about not letting the band be talked into something we didn’t want to be. It was fun playing with that kind of freshness—audiences still not knowing who we were, opening up for everybody, then grabbing the audience and pulling them our way. I really dug the reaction of the people to our sound back then.

Even though Bill had called it, we didn’t
really
know that our first trip east was going to be our last chance to be that anonymous—that after the next few weeks we would never again be the new and unknown band coming into town. That was going to change forever, thanks to Bill, who really, really nurtured us meticulously. With that first tour he prepared us psychologically and physically for all that was going to happen.

Santana stayed in New York City for a while, playing a few shows after the Fillmore East gigs—a festival in Atlantic City, the World’s Fair in Queens, and a gig in Central Park. We got to know the city on that first visit—we stayed in some hotel on 5th Avenue and walked around a lot. Bill turned us on to Ratner’s, a kosher restaurant next to the Fillmore East. We took a cab up to Harlem and saw the Apollo Theater. It was August, and if you know New York City, it has its own smells in that heat, and you especially notice it if you’re coming from California. It’s different: the pizza joints and the sandwich shops and the garbage and the sewers—everything. It’s all mixed up together.

It was amazing how fast things moved in New York. I remember walking down the street and seeing a taxicab that had been in an accident and was upside down. You could feel that energy pulsating with a kind of audacity and insanity. I would be telling myself, “You don’t scare me. I’ve walked your streets and now I’m one of you and I smell like it.” Once you claim New York you draw energy from it—it doesn’t drain you and it doesn’t scare you. The next time Santana came through was in November, and it was already feeling like home.

Then we played a college up in the Catskills and ended up in the town of Woodstock. Bill had rented a house for us, and that’s where we stayed almost a whole week before the festival. There wasn’t that much to do—so we all found people to hang out with. I remember Chepito complaining—he was sharing a room with David, who was meeting chicks and bringing them back to the house. “I’m like a mouse smelling the cheese,” Chepito said. “But he’s not sharing.”

There were other people hanging around up there—Bob Dylan lived near there, and Jimi Hendrix had rented a house, too, but I never saw any of them. I was really shy about hanging out because those kinds of guys didn’t know me then. It made me feel like a fly in the soup, and I didn’t want to be a groupie for anybody—I don’t want to show up unless I’m invited personally. So I said, “No, I don’t think I want to go and just hang.”

We saw Bill around once a day, but he was mostly on the phone, and we could tell there was a buzz going around about the festival. It was going to be big—
really
big. Some people were getting scared—people who lived around there—because many of the hippies who were coming got there early and started camping out. I remember a rumor that Governor Rockefeller was thinking of sending the National Guard in to make sure it was safe or even shutting down the festival altogether. The newspapers started talking about it like it was a disaster waiting to happen. It wasn’t a disaster for us. The disaster would have been if Rockefeller had taken over and turned it into a fire drill with the police regimenting it.

Then Friday came, and we heard it was an incredible mess—people stuck in traffic on the highway, abandoning their cars, technical problems with the sound. There was no way we could go and see for ourselves. We were scheduled to play the next day and were told we’d have to be ready early to be sure we could get there on time. So we got up at five on Saturday morning, waited, and finally piled into some vans and drove to a place where there were green helicopters that looked like the kind the army used in Vietnam—they were flying people in and out. Next thing we knew we lifted
off, and a few minutes later we were swooping over a field, looking down in the morning light at a carpet made of people—flesh and hair and teeth—stretched out across the hills. That’s when it dawned on me how big this whole thing really was. Even with the noise of the helicopter we could feel the people when they started cheering after somebody had finished a song or had said something they liked—a huge roar came up from below.

I remember turning to Gregg and saying, as a joke, “Nice crowd!” I also remember thinking about something my dad taught me—if you’re a real musician, it really doesn’t matter where you are or the number of people in front of you. You could be playing Woodstock or Caesars Palace or an alley in Tijuana or at home. When you play, play from the heart, and take everybody with you.

My father’s relationship with music was on a purer level than mine is. Yes, there was the money side—he did it to provide for us, but he wasn’t distracted by volume. Volume is when you collect a royalty check that’s so big you think somebody made a mistake. My father made a certain amount, and that’s what he knew. He never heard of Carnegie Hall, so he did not factor that into the equation. Any place where he could play and where people were receptive, that was fine with him.

Woodstock was all about volume. First we were above all those people, then we landed and were in it. Right away you could smell what New York State smells like in the summer—very humid and funky, plus five hundred thousand sweaty bodies and all that pot. They dropped us off behind a big wooden stage that looked like workers had just finished building it that day—and from the look of things they still had more to do. They showed us where to put our stuff and where to wait, and I started looking around for someone I knew, and I saw Jerry Garcia having a good time and laughing. He came up to me and said, “So what do you think of this? We’ve been here a long time already—what time are you supposed to go on?” I had been told that we’d be going on three bands after the Dead, so that’s what I told Jerry. He said, “Man, we’re not going on until later tonight.” That meant we were going to be there all day
and into the night. So I thought, “I might as well get comfortable.” It was just after noon, and the first band of the day was on.