The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (28 page)

We started work on the second Santana album—which would become
Abraxas
—in Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio in June of 1970. It had been a little more than a year since we recorded the first one, so we had been working on new songs and thinking about what we wanted to do differently this time or keep the same. We wanted Gianquinto to help us again—in fact, “Incident at Neshabur” was the first tune we worked on. We also knew we wanted the right producer from Columbia to work with us. I’ll put it this way: Santana didn’t actually like the sound of Santana until
Abraxas
.

I’m going to get into trouble, but this is the truth—Fred Catero helped many of the producers he worked with look good; their sessions would never have sounded the way they did without his help. At first he was Columbia’s engineer in San Francisco and had great credentials. He worked with Sly and Janis, and on that live album by Bloomfield and Al Kooper—he engineered Mongo Santamaría at the same time we were making
Santana
. We heard that he knew how to record congas. Even more important, he knew how to record congas and electric guitars, which is why he became our producer.

I think the guitar sound was becoming clearer—it’s obvious on
Abraxas
. One thing that helped my signature was my tone, and the thing that most helped my tone was a new Boogie amplifier—which, when I met the guy who invented the idea, Randy Smith, didn’t have a name yet. My friend Randy gives me the credit for saying his amp really boogied the first time I heard it. I got that word from the original boogie man—John Lee Hooker.

Randy the Boogie Man, as I call him, gets the credit for making a small amplifier with enough beef to it so you could play with drive and sustain, whatever the volume was. He put turbo in it, and what a tone—damn. Some of the best things I ever played—including much of
Abraxas
—came through that first Boogie amplifier I got from Randy.

At the time, everybody was taking sounds and ideas from Jimi Hendrix and the British guys or from R & B guitar players like the ones who played for Motown. I was thinking more from the back of my brain—way in the back—like, “What’s the sound of a soul praying or a ghost crying?” I think my sound was closer to what Pete Cosey would do later with Miles. Fred helped make it easy for us to paint and play without worrying whether we were getting recorded in the right way.

Fred did that when Carabello came up with “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts” in the studio. Carabello didn’t play keyboards, but he could sing the melody he wanted to Gregg, who’d figure it out on organ. When I hear that tune now I still remember that I loved getting to the studio on time and finding that Gregg and Carabello were already there and they had a track ready to go—which was funny in a way, because they could fight a lot. I think they might have been there from the night before. But if that was what it took to get to the point where there was a tune that needed my guitar, that was okay with me.

Michael’s a dramatic cat—you can hear it in “Singing Winds,” which was a very evocative way to start an album—a little mysterious. You don’t know what’s going to happen after that, and then we go into “Black Magic Woman.”

Gregg brought that one in, and it was an instant okay—I was already into Peter Green, and, as I said, the song was like a brother to Otis Rush’s “All Your Love (I Miss Loving).” I think we took that tune and really made it our own. It’s still our most requested song—and I still get women coming up to me saying, “You know, I’m the black magic woman.” Of course over the years, a few more Santana songs have had the same impact. I’ll get “I’m Maria, Maria” or “I’m the Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa,” and if they all claim to be, who’s to say they’re not?

The segue into “Gypsy Queen” we thought was a perfect bridge between those two songs—we did that many times in concert and it worked so well. When I hear “Gypsy Queen” now it makes me think of how persistent Michael Shrieve was during that summer,
getting me to listen and understand Miles and Coltrane. I could tell the two of them were using different scales from the ones we were using, but to me it wasn’t about figuring out sharps and flats, it was about the emotion they were going for and how they went about it. In the studio we would ask ourselves, “How would Miles approach this mood?” In a way, I didn’t want anyone to explain too much about their notes and scales—once I know exactly where a chord is, it’s like hearing the punch line before the joke. “Damn, I wish you hadn’t told me.”

Abraxas
was very good to a few people who had songs we covered. They all got nice royalties for a long time, and I’m happy about that—Peter Green, Gábor Szabó, Tito Puente. Tito was always funny about it in the years after the album went big. He complained that people expected to hear our version of “Oye Como Va” rather than his, and he had to deal with that. “People are always saying, ‘Why don’t you play it like Santana?’ First I want to get mad, and then I think, I just got a new house because of that. ‘Okay,
no hay problema
.’ ”

The first time I got into the song I didn’t know Tito Puente at all—Ray Barretto, sure, but not Tito yet. I was at the house with Linda and I had just dropped some acid and was full-on into the trip, and all of a sudden I wanted to turn on the radio, which I never did normally. It was tuned to an obscure local station that was playing Latin music all night—a late-night party kind of mix. A tune came on that had a great groove, and I started breaking it down, thinking how close the feel was to “Louie Louie” and some Latin jazz tunes. The next morning I went down to the Mission to find this song, went through all the records till I found the right one, and listened to it nonstop—my own heavy rotation. It had some great solos—trumpet and flute, plus crowd noises and a kind of false ending, like one that Ray Charles would do. Just a great party atmosphere. I kept saying to myself, “We can play this song. We
got
to play this song. This will drive the hippies wild—especially the women.”

There are certain songs that really get women to be women—no apologies needed, no excuses. “Oye” is one of them, and that was what I wanted, even back then—to make women crazy. I think
it comes from the Tijuana thing. I think some people were more interested in playing music that could impress in the way that Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin did. I couldn’t care less about that.

We were getting ready to record, so we were already thinking about the number of songs we would have. I brought that song in and I started hearing, “Hey, man, that’s not rock. It doesn’t sound like rock.” It was the first time that happened—that people in the band were uncomfortable with a song because it didn’t sound like Cream or Hendrix or the Doors. Santana was about building bridges between different music styles—and apparently this was a bridge too far. To me, rock and roll was anything that felt good. So this was also the first time I really put my foot down. “No. We’re recording this song because we’re recording it.” I think Gregg did a great job singing “Oye Como Va.”

I had my own prejudices, too. Gregg was growing as a songwriter, and he had some great tunes, such as “Hope You’re Feeling Better.” He pushed us to record that song—we had been doing it live, but not often. To be honest, it was one of those tunes that Carabello and I thought was
too
rock and roll, too white. When we played it in concert, sometimes Carabello and I would pretend to hide behind our amps just to tease Gregg. We could be cruel like that—I had a lot to learn about appreciating and validating what was right in front of us. It’s a great song. What I should have been doing was going up to him and saying, “Hey, Gregg—you got any more like that?”

We liked to tease each other—we used to tease Gregg about the fact that he walked like John Wayne. We’d imitate the way he talked, too, and Gregg would play along. He’d say, “Okay, pilgrim,” as Duke would. “Are we going to rehearse today, or are we just going to sit here? A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” Man, we’d all be laughing so hard!

I had to fight for “Samba Pa Ti.” The song came to me in New York City, after our first tour in Europe that spring, when I was jet-lagged to death. I couldn’t sleep; the walls were moving like I had just fallen off a merry-go-round. Then just about when I was falling
asleep I heard some guy trying to get a sound out of a saxophone in an alley outside. I opened my window, and I saw the guy staggering around, not balancing so well. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind what to put in his mouth, the saxophone or a bottle of booze. He took a deep breath and was just about to blow, then he stopped and hit the bottle again. I heard a voice inside me saying, “Man, that could be you, lost like that.”

I grabbed a pen and paper, and a poem came to me, and as soon as I wrote it down I could hear the melody right with it. The words and music came symbiotically. The music reminded me of how my dad would sound when he’d be playing by himself, plus I could hear a King Curtis, “Soul Serenade” groove. “Samba Pa Ti” was definitely about developing romance and beauty in my playing—I wanted a naked, undressed feeling, a feeling of vulnerability.

It was fun playing it for the band for the first time. I don’t think they expected something that was a little delicate. They were looking at me like, “Damn, that don’t sound like rock and roll, but it’s honest and real.” To our credit we never dismissed any music that was honest and heartfelt.

A melody can be memorable or fleeting. “Samba Pa Ti” is not music that just passes by. If you want to see what’s happening when you’re on a moving train you have to look at what’s off in the distance, not at what’s up close. For me, it’s like that with music. The best songs get the big picture and take the high road—they are long, beautiful, memorable melodies.

We went into the studio not knowing who would sing the lyric. I didn’t have the confidence to sing it. I felt that I couldn’t sing it as well as I could play it on the guitar. I think it’s a lot more transparent without a vocal. Of course it depends on who sings it, but it could have been too thick, too much like… mayonnaise. I know José Feliciano recorded it with his own lyrics, but they aren’t mine. When I play it now in my head, I’m still playing along to that poem—maybe I should record it again and sing the words.

That shift in the middle of the song just happened in the studio. It happened because I was listening to the grooves in King Curtis’s “Soul Serenade,” “Groovin’ ” by the Young Rascals, and Aretha’s “Angel.” All that music just gave birth to an idea, and we all knew to follow if one of us wanted to go someplace.

When we finished playing it the first time in the studio, we knew it was going to be big. I was going to call it “For Every Step, Freedom from Within,” but Chepito was the one who came up with the name on the spot: “Eh, Carlos—
llámalo
‘Samba Pa Ti.’ ” I thought, “You know, I like that,” and trusted my instinct.

Abraxas
was a group production that was done song by song—so really Gregg, Carabello, and Chepito coproduced their own songs with Fred, and I coproduced “Samba Pa Ti” and “Oye Como Va” with Fred and “Incident” with Gianquinto. We loved that album—it was the first album we made that was as good as it could be. I love the way it looks, and I even love the name.

The title
Abraxas
came from a book by Hermann Hesse that Gregg, Stan, and Carabello were reading. A quote from the book is on the album. For the cover, we got a painting from the artist Mati Klarwein—he did the painting on
Bitches Brew
. He had done it in 1961, and we saw it in a book that Carabello had. It was perfect for us—the painting matched our music and incorporated our themes of Africa and spirituality and sexuality and Latin music. It had a beautiful naked black woman in the center, and on the left there was an angel riding a conga, which for us is now like what the Stones have with the tongue and lips—a trademark. Carabello
showed it to me, and we were sure it had to be on the new album—Columbia Records helped make that happen.

Abraxas
came together so easily that the album almost seemed to form itself. Of all the albums I ever did,
Abraxas
was the easiest to make. The sessions were nice and laid back and took place between some touring in June and July, and we were able to relax and not rush anything. We spent more time on sounds than we had before—getting the congas and guitars and organ right instead of settling for a compromise—and getting the room sound right, too. Some friends came by the studio and sat in, including Steven Saphore, who played tabla, and percussion player Rico Reyes. Reyes and Carabello had a group called San Pacu, which they started around ’68; it was a cross between Santana and Tower of Power. Rico was a great singer and reaffirmed the Mission District vibration around us—he was also a beautiful-looking cat, but he became another heroin and cocaine casualty.

Another friend who hung with us was a guitarist named Neal Schon, later of Journey and Bad English, whom Gregg and Shrieve knew from San Mateo. They all lived in that part of the Bay Area. Neal was already tearing it up—he was just seventeen, but he had a reputation and was really smart. We didn’t jam, but he did play one solo on “Hope You’re Feeling Better” that was not on the original album. He had a great tone and great ideas when he played.

Clive Davis was one of the reasons
Abraxas
was so easy to make. He was out there in CBS’s office in New York and wasn’t checking on us
or
disappearing. He trusted us, and he was there if we needed him. He understood that we made music from the heart to go straight
to
the heart of people, and even though he was someone who started as a lawyer, his love for music transformed him into something beyond a tie dude. To this day, his main talent never changed—he hears music that can hit the mainstream, and he puts it there. That’s what
he
does.