The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (30 page)

Miles was right. We didn’t understand harmonically or structurally what he and his band were doing. That took years and years. They had another kind of vocabulary, which came from a higher form of musical expression. It came from a special place—from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane—and at the same time it was deep in blues roots and expanded into funk and rock sounds. The sound of Miles back then was a microscope that showed everything that had happened before in jazz and a telescope that showed where the music was going. I was blessed to be around and to hear this music when it was happening. I think if you start by listening to the music he made when he played for Bill Graham at the Fillmores, you can hear how Miles helped people expand the boundaries of their consciousness—his music put stretch marks on their brains.

There’s a story I love to tell about Bill and Miles because it says so much about each of them and about their relationship. I call them both supreme angels because of what they did for me and their impact on my life—and because the way they lived their lives was an example to everyone. They were both angels, but they also had feet of clay. They were divine rascals.

I first heard this story from Bill. The way Bill told it, after he got that letter from Clive Davis asking Bill to start booking Miles at the Fillmore—the one that calls Santana unstoppable—Clive left the job of persuading Miles to Bill. Bill already loved Miles, but who tells Miles what to do?

Miles couldn’t get into the idea at first. A lot of it was about the money. Bill offered him a different kind of deal from what he was used to in the jazz clubs, where he would play for a whole week. So Bill made it more attractive financially for Miles. Bill also made the argument that Clive was making—that it’s an investment in the future. If Miles played the Fillmore, his name would be on the marquee next to rock bands and he’d be getting through to new listeners—the hippie crowd. It might not mean so much right away, but the following year he’d double or triple his audience and then double or triple his record sales.

Bill finally persuaded Miles, got him into the schedule, and told him, “I have these dates open, and you’ll open up for so-and-so and so-and-so.” Bill’s thinking was that even though he respected Miles he could not let him be the headliner. All those hippies coming to hear Neil Young or Steve Miller or the Grateful Dead would not stick around for Miles, and he wanted to be sure they heard Miles. He wanted Miles to go on first so he’d be sure to have a full audience, even if it looked like Miles was opening for them.

Miles did not know these bands—their music did not resonate with him, and for whatever reason he didn’t see himself opening up for them. So Miles showed up late for his first show at the Fillmore East.
Really
late. Neil Young was the headliner, and Steve Miller was on the bill, too. Miles was so late that Steve Miller had to play first, and they were getting ready to ask Neil to go on. Somebody got through to Miles and got him to hustle down to the club.

I remembered how Bill would be if a band dared to show up late—he would stand with his arms folded across his chest. When Miles got there, Bill was looking at his watch and looking at Miles.

Miles played it cool—“What’s up, Bill?” Miles knew he had him. Bill had made the mistake of telling him that
Sketches of Spain
was his number one album of all time, the one album he would take to a desert island. The redder Bill got, the calmer Miles was. Bill wanted to let loose some of that New York language that he had educated me with, special words like
schmuck
. But he couldn’t. This wasn’t some teenage rock group. This was Miles Davis.

Finally Bill let it out. “Miles—
you’re late!
” Miles looked at him innocently and said, “Bill, look at me. I’m a black man. You know cab drivers don’t pick up black people in New York City.” What could Bill say, right? Meanwhile, Miles had his Lamborghini parked around the corner. Bill probably knew it even then.

After we met in Tanglewood I would see Miles almost every time we played New York City, sitting right in the front row, wearing something flashy, with a fine woman in the seat next to him. He
would call me to hang out—he’d find out where I was, track me down, and the phone would ring. “Didn’t I tell you never to come to New York without calling me first?”

“Hey, Miles—what’s up?”

“Whatcha doin’?”

What was I doing? It was three in the morning. “Oh, just having fun and learning.”

Miles also liked to hang out with Carabello—they would get some cocaine and get into it together. I remember a bunch of us from both groups were together at a 5th Avenue hotel—it was Keith Jarrett, Shrieve, and I in the elevator, holding it and waiting on Miles and Carabello, who were getting something from a dealer in the lobby. We were waiting and waiting, and Shrieve turned to Keith and said, “How do you do it?” He meant, how did Keith put up with all the cocaine and stuff? Keith said, “Like this.” He snapped his fingers. “I just turn it off, like a button.” I remember thinking, “Whoa—what button is that?” I wondered what it would take for me to turn off the cocaine conversations in Santana.

Miles and Carabello finally got on the elevator, and when we were going up Miles looked at me and out of nowhere said, “You gotta get you a fuckin’ wah-wah—I got one.” He wasn’t taking any argument. The thing is I already used a wah-wah on some Santana songs, such as “Hope You’re Feeling Better,” but it wasn’t something that was onstage with me. But the way Miles said it, it was like, “Come on—keep up, man.”

Miles was right—Hendrix had used it, then Clapton with Cream, and Herbie Hancock had it in his group. After a while it felt like any band in the ’70s had to have a wah-wah and a Clavinet or some kind of electric piano. I obeyed Miles and started using a wah-wah in all my live shows. I remember looking at Keith as Miles was giving me that advice, and he just rolled his eyes.

I got a lot of advice from Miles over the years. A few years later, after we hadn’t been in New York for a bit, he called me. “What are you doing now?”

I said, “We’ve been on the road for a while, so we decided to take a break, record an album, and replenish.”

“Well, don’t stay out there too long, man. You don’t want to lose the momentum. You’ve got it going, so don’t stay off the stage too long.” I said, “Okay.”

Another time, Miles told me, “You can do more than just ‘Black Magic Woman.’ ”

“Thank you, Miles. I’ll give it my best shot.” It wasn’t a spanking, it was an invitation.

I know Miles went out of his way a lot of times to find me and teach me the ropes, tell me when to duck, stay away from this, and have you checked out that? I don’t know how many other musicians Miles showed that side of himself to, but I got the feeling not many. The more I’ve read about Miles, and the more I’ve talked with other people about him, the more surprised I became that he would sometimes drop his guard and mentor me. Because Miles usually would get very intense, and he could read people, and if he saw that he could ride someone, he would mount that person psychologically. I saw him do that to a lot of people.

Miles could push it too far. There’s a story that Armando Peraza told me after he joined Santana. Armando was one tough dude—he came up from Cuba in the ’40s and played percussion with Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich almost immediately after he made it to New York City, and he had no problem going into the roughest part of town to collect money that somebody owed him. One time Armando was playing with George Shearing at the Apollo, and Miles was on the bill, too. Both Miles and Armando were kind of pint-size—when they met, Miles started messing with him in his usual way, and Armando got him in a corner and told him in his accent, “You doan wanna mess wid me. I break you jaw—you never fuckin’ play trompet again.” I can see the words Miles was thinking in a balloon over his head—“Uh-oh. That motherfucker is crazier than me.” Miles was smart—he knew when to back down.

I liked to use the term “divine rascal” to describe Miles. I later heard that around this time, Gary Bartz knocked on Miles’s hotel room door and said, “Miles, I got to talk to you. I can’t fucking play anymore—that Keith Jarrett is fucking up my solos, playing all the wrong shit, never backing me up. I’m going to quit, man.” Miles said, “Okay, I got it. Tell Keith to come over.” So guess what he tells Keith? “Hey, Bartz just told me he loves what you’re doing: do it some more.”

Sometimes we’d run into each other. One night I was hanging backstage at the Fillmore East checking out Rahsaan Roland Kirk playing flute on Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour.”
Fwap!
Someone flicked my ear from behind me—really hard. I’m thinking, “Oh, man—that fucking Carabello…” I turn around and
fwap,
in my other ear. I turn again and there’s Miles running away, almost to the elevator. He saw that I saw him and came back slowly, grinning. He said, “What you doin’, man?” I rubbed my ear. “I was listening to Roland Kirk.”

He said, “I can’t stand that n.…” He used the
n
word.

“Oh?”

“He plays some corny-ass shit.”

I was thinking, “Okay, that’s between you two, because I like
Volunteered Slavery
.”

Miles was
way
ghetto. I don’t think he cared so much about what other people thought about him or about what he said, but a lot of times he used words just to fuck with people’s heads. Once I asked Miles if he liked Marvin Gaye. “Yeah—if he had one tit, I’d marry him.” He called Bill Graham Jewboy, and Bill would just go, “Oh, Miles.” Bill wouldn’t take that from anyone else—not Hendrix, not Sly, not Mick Jagger. Later he’d come up to me and say, “Can you believe the way Miles talks to me?” I knew underneath it there was mutual respect, but I still couldn’t believe how Bill’s macho thing could melt away that easily with Miles.

People could be envious of him—even scared. He made some people angry and feel hurt. Some people saw Miles as abusive
toward white people. I never saw that. I thought he just abused everybody.

Backstage at the Fillmore I changed the subject.
Jack Johnson
had just come out, so I said, “Miles, man—your new album is incredible.” He looked at me and smiled. “Ain’t it, though?”

I met two more heroes in New York that summer of 1970, both of whom connected with Miles—Tony Williams and John McLaughlin. Tony played drums with Miles through most of the changes of the 1960s and on an album I loved,
In a Silent Way
. He was leading his own group, Tony Williams Lifetime, with John McLaughlin on guitar and Larry Young on organ. It was like all roads led to Miles—Larry and John had also played with Miles on
Bitches Brew
.

Lifetime was playing Slug’s, a small, run-down club on the Lower East Side. This place was like something in a war zone; it was the club where the trumpet player Lee Morgan would get shot the following year, and they’d close it down for good. I was walking across Avenue A or B, and some guys were sizing me up, like, “What’s this hippie freak up to down here?” John told me he went through the same thing—“Where are you goin’, white boy?”

“I’m going to go play with Tony Williams.”

“Tony Williams? Man, we’ll walk you there. You can’t walk alone here. They’re going to take your guitar.” John’s story gave me the same feeling I had when the bus driver in San Francisco had me sit with him that time I was carrying my guitar. We all have our angels.

Man, the Lifetime show was loud and mind-boggling. It fried my brain. I had never heard rock and jazz ideas put together with so much intensity and with the volume turned up all the way like that. Slug’s was a small, narrow place, and Lifetime filled it with a vortex of sound. Cream sort of had that energy, but not with the same ideas or sounds—it didn’t surprise me so much that Cream’s Jack Bruce joined Lifetime a little while later.

The three of them had an attitude that made them look like enforcers. You almost didn’t want to look at them they were so… menacing. John was killin’ brilliant in his playing, and I know that just as he scared me, I’m sure he scared even Jimi Hendrix. It was like, “Holy shit, he’s got the Buddy Guy thing down
and
he can take care of the Charlie Parker thing.” There are just not that many musicians who can play fast and deep the way he does. Even today I love to jam with him, then step back and just listen to him
soar
.

I met John when they took a break, and he recognized me right away. “Santana? Nice to meet you.” Around a month before, I had gotten into Wayne Shorter’s album
Super Nova,
which had Sonny Sharrock and John on some tracks, so that was the first thing I told him. “I also love what you do on Joe Farrell’s ‘Follow Your Heart’ with Jack DeJohnette.” I think I surprised him a little with what I was listening to, and then he told me what
he
was into: Coltrane, Wayne, Miles, and Bill Evans—in that order. That’s all we needed to talk about. John wasn’t into Sri Chinmoy at that point, but Mahavishnu was right around the corner.

I didn’t get to talk to Tony or Larry that night, but I would get to know them later, along with many other musicians who played with Miles, including Jack DeJohnette. It was Jack who told me that he suggested John leave London and move to New York City—John, like Jimmy Page, was a session guitarist at the time, and Jack had heard him playing here and there. I always wondered, though, about Tony leaving Miles, which seemed like the perfect gig for him, and then Miles using his new band—John and Larry Young without Tony—on
Bitches Brew
.

I never asked Tony about that, but I think I can hear the reasons on a live gig at the Jazz Workshop in Boston in 1968, not long after he played with Miles on
In a Silent Way
. It sounds almost like he’s having a tantrum on the drum kit—like he’s a little kid throwing stuff from his high chair onto the floor. Meanwhile Miles was cool, and so were Wayne and Chick. I would have fired him. I really don’t know what happened that would make someone do that, but he was certainly sending a strong signal.

Tony needed his own band—that’s something I would see time and time again in other groups, and in Santana, too.