The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (31 page)

In the Bay Area in August was the first time Jimi Hendrix and I really spoke to each other as musicians, but that wasn’t the first time we met. Back in ’67, the week after our band was fired by Bill for being late, Carabello had somehow got us into that Fillmore show to meet Hendrix. We were trying to duck Bill, and we didn’t have any money—we got in just as the sound check was starting. It didn’t matter about Bill anyway, because he had his hands full with amplifiers that wouldn’t cooperate. Everything was feeding back, screeching like electrified pigs. They finally got it together, and we were backstage just before the band was going on. Jimi and I hadn’t said anything between us except hello, and suddenly everybody went to the bathroom—
everybody
. Somebody said, “Hey, man, you wanna come and join us?” I was young, but I knew what they were doing. “No, man. I don’t want to do any coke.”

“You sure? It’s from Peru, really first class.”

“You go ahead, man. I’m there already.”

That’s when I started to use my mantra about partying too much. “I’m there already, man. I don’t want to get past it.”

Then Jimi played—and it was incredible, both shows that night. I couldn’t believe it—the way he could will his guitar to make those sounds. They didn’t sound like strings and amplifiers anymore—his sound was intergalactic, with spectral frequencies that were notes yet so much more. At times it sounded like the Grand Canyon screaming.

I was like, “Holy shit.” Gábor was on the bill, too, and that first night he sounded good, but I know for a fact that Gábor never wanted Hendrix to open for him again. He told me so when we were living in the same house for a while in 1971 and almost started a band together. That was the impact Hendrix had—he came and marched across the landscape like a conquistador wielding lightsabers and lasers, weapons that no one had ever seen or heard
before. I saw him around seven times total, and that night was great. But no Hendrix show topped the one I heard him do at the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds in San Jose in ’69. I never heard him do better.

The second time we met was sometime in April of 1970 in New York City. Devon called me from the lobby of our hotel and said, “Come on down. I want you to come with me to a party.”

“What party?” I thought we were going to go somewhere else, hear some music.

“Man, just come on down—we’re going to a Jimi Hendrix party. He’s recording.”

That sounded so strange. “He’s recording and having a party? When I record I don’t want anybody in the studio.” Devon just laughed. “Come on, don’t be such a square. We do it differently over here in New York.” Devon had taken me to see the Woodstock movie the day before, and now we were going to the Record Plant. Okay, why not?

We got into a cab and got to the studio just when Jimi was arriving with a blond lady who, the last time I saw her, was with Tito Puente. Small world. Jimi opened the door for us and looked at me. “Santana, right?”

“Yeah. How you doing?”

He paid for both cabs, then looked at me. “Man, I like your choice of notes,” he said with a smile.

I said the best thing I could think of at that point. “Well, thank you, man.”

We walked into the studio, and it was packed with people. “Hey, how you doing?… What’s happening?… How you doing, man?” As we walked from the front door down the hallway to the studio, there was a buffet of shit laid out on a table—I mean hashish, grass, cocaine. Really—it was a buffet. Jimi was ahead of me, running his hands through it, sampling stuff. He looked at me and said, “Help yourself, man.”

“Thanks—I’ll just smoke a joint. That’s great; thank you.”

Jimi and his engineer, Eddie Kramer, got started right away,
talking about picking up where they had left off the night before, doing a song called “Room Full of Mirrors.” I’m looking and listening, wondering how they do it in the studio—what can I learn? They played back the song, and I heard Jimi singing, “I used to live in a room full of mirrors / All I could see was me…” Then Eddie said, “Go ahead, Jimi, here comes your part.” They were overdubbing a slide guitar part. Jimi started playing, and for the first eight bars he was right with it. By the twelfth bar, it had nothing to do with the song anymore. It would have been okay if he were just blowing over a groove, but this was more a structured song. I was looking around to see how other people were hearing this. Eddie was looking worried, and he had actually stopped the recording, but Jimi kept playing—more and more out.

Jimi was facing away from the window to the control room. Eddie told one of his guys to check on him, and I swear the guy had to physically pull him away from the guitar and the amplifier. He got Jimi up, and when he turned around—I’m not kidding—Jimi looked like a possessed demon. It almost looked like he was having an epileptic attack—foaming at the mouth, his eyes red like rubies.

I remember that the whole experience drained me—and that a feeling of questioning came over me: “Is this how it’s got to be done? There’s got to be a better way.”

The last time I met Jimi was a few weeks later in California, when he played the Berkeley Community Theatre. He had made a change on the bass and was using Billy Cox, not Noel Redding. We caught the concert and went back to hang with Jimi at his hotel. Something told me that Jimi needed help, so I decided I should bring the gold medallion I wore around my neck, which my mother had given me when I was a baby—the kind that all Mexican mothers give their children for protection: Jesus is on one side, and the Virgin of Guadalupe is on the other. I was thinking I’d just grab Jimi’s hand, put the medallion in it, and say, “This is for you—wear it, because I think you can use it.” When we got there, Jimi opened the door and I could see that he was wearing six or seven of these medals already, so I kept mine in my pocket.

A few months after that, Santana was playing in Salt Lake City when we heard that Jimi had died. That night you could hear all the toilets on our floor of the hotel flushing—people dumping all their shit, so angry because we heard he had OD’d. Whether or not it was true, he was the first of our generation to go, and we were sure drugs had something to do with it. That’s how we put it. “Fucking drugs, man.”

I don’t think anybody came through the ’60s without taking some drugs. I also don’t think anyone came through the ’60s without changing—but some people changed a little too quickly. Who can tell someone who’s twenty-one, twenty-two, or twenty-three to slow down? I turned twenty-three that year, and it felt like all the planets were aligning and there was a divine explosion. The Woodstock movie came out, and a few weeks later, in September,
Abraxas
did, too, and it shot up the charts faster than our first album had. It was all these streams coming together, creating a river that just kept getting bigger and wilder. I started to see rock bands, and some jazz groups, too, getting hold of congas and timbales and making them part of their sound. Celebrities were showing up everywhere we played—stars, stars, stars. Mick Jagger saw us in London. Paul McCartney was at L’Olympia in Paris, so I quoted “The Fool on the Hill” in the middle of “Incident.” Raquel Welch was in the front row at the Hollywood Bowl. Miles and Tito Puente came to our shows in New York and hung out in the balcony.

Everybody wanted a piece of Santana—to be on TV, to be in various projects. At the end of 1970, we played on
The Tonight Show
for Johnny Carson and we did
The Bell Telephone Hour
with Ray Charles and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. That was the same time the Rolling Stones asked us to be in
Gimme Shelter,
the documentary about Altamont, and we had to say no.

Abraxas
was on its way to selling more than three million copies that year alone. “Black Magic Woman” was a top ten hit on pop radio, and all the underground FM rock stations were playing the album
a lot
. When I heard “Samba Pa Ti” on the radio for the first
time, everything just froze. I was at home, looking at distant lights twinkling away, not even focusing on them, just listening. It felt good to step outside of myself and just hear the notes, which sounded like somebody else playing beautifully and with heart. At the same time I knew it was me—it was more
me
than anything I had recorded before. That opening part of “Samba” made me think, “Whoa. I can hear my mom talking, or Dad telling one of his stories.” It’s a story without words that can be played and understood by people no matter where they are—Greece, Poland, Turkey, China, Africa. It was actually the first time I didn’t feel uncomfortable or strange hearing myself.

That year was jammed, and Bill’s prediction was absolutely right—when the money got more serious, everything got more serious, and there were some ego things happening in the band. People started to change. Stan Marcum started to get the idea that he should be in the band, playing flute. He also called a band meeting around this time with Bill to basically call Bill on the carpet for taking too much money and to work out clearly who the band manager was. It was like he was drawing a line in the sand. Bill took charge of the meeting from the start. He was prepared—he had written down a long list of all the shows and tours and TV gigs he had gotten us and all the other things he did to support us that were beyond the call of duty—such as free rehearsal space and the idea for “Evil Ways.” It was obvious that Stan was not in Bill’s league, yet we felt we had to choose between Bill and Stan. I didn’t say anything. Bill could have just said, “Woodstock.”

Bill had done stuff for us that we didn’t even know about, not until years later. When we were negotiating our very first contract with Columbia, Bill and his lawyer looked it over, and for some reason they inserted a line of small print on the back—something to the effect that if Columbia brought our music out again on different formats, the royalty rate would stay the same as it was on the original releases. When compact discs got big in the ’80s, Santana started getting checks with lots of zeros from sales of the old
albums in our catalog, and when
Supernatural
went worldwide in 1999, the same thing happened. It’s a gift that still keeps giving back—thank you, Bill.

By the end of 1970, Neal Schon had been hanging around for a while, jamming with us. Both Neal and I were playing Gibson Les Pauls, but we had different signatures—so that wasn’t a problem. I had a Les Paul to replace the red SG I had played at Woodstock and subsequently broken.

I liked Neal’s dexterity, and he brought a lot of fire for someone so young, yet in a humble way. We had some tunes he sounded good on, and we started thinking about where to put solos so we wouldn’t have two guitar solos in a row. When Gregg soloed I would comp something that would stimulate him, and Neal was able to do his own thing and find his way through it.

Neal’s playing next to mine made me think of bands I liked that had two guitarists and how they worked together—the Butterfield Blues Band had Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Fleetwood Mac had
three
guitar players back then—Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, and Danny Kirwan. Eric Clapton had a new band, Derek and the Dominos, with Duane Allman on some of the tunes.

In November, Clapton came to San Francisco with the Dominos, and because Bill was the promoter he arranged a special get-together for all of us at Wally Heider Studios. We were all there with Neal, and when Eric showed up the only problem was that I was tripping and too out of it to jam. I said to myself, “You better sit this one out and just learn.” Eric had heard about us and was really gracious to come over and hang. We all had a good time, and I liked Eric—I was comfortable with him because I could tell we were coming from the same place.

The next thing we knew we were hearing that Clapton had asked Neal to join the Dominos, which made me think that if we wanted to keep Neal with us we only had one choice. It felt good to have another strong melodic voice in the band, and I wasn’t threatened
by the idea—I wasn’t paranoid or too proud to have another guitarist with us. It was my decision to ask him to join us, after I spoke with the rest of the band. Neal said yes, and by December he was part of Santana.

I know a lot of people have their own perceptions about whether Santana needed another guitar player or not. I remember Miles had his own idea about it—expressed once again when we were at the CBS offices riding up the elevator one day. “Why did you do that? You don’t need him.” A few years after he said that, Miles had two guitars in his own band—Reggie Lucas and Pete Cosey, and then in the ’80s he had John Scofield and Mike Stern together. I’m just saying, you know?

Besides, Miles had no way to know that we had some new tunes we were doing, such as Gene Ammons’s “Jungle Strut,” that would be on the next album and that I wanted to play with two guitar players. I asked Neal to join not because I was thinking about who played which parts or that it would free me up—it was much more about adding more flames to the band, the sound and energy we had together. The fire that Neal brought was a white, white heat.

The year 1970 ended with Columbia getting ready to release “Oye Como Va”—and by January we were preparing to go back into the studio to work on songs for the next album. We kept going ahead, playing shows, not slowing down. It was crazy energy sometimes, and we could be cocky in Santana, even before we got big.

Sometimes it was just playing tricks and pranks: one time Carabello, who was always being a goofball, poured a strawberry milk shake on top of one poor waitress’s beehive hairdo. We also learned that Chepito could be crazy—he always wore long trench coats that had lots of pockets on the inside, and he’d always be filling them up with freebie stuff and other things he’d find on the road—soap and shampoo, towels, even silverware.

One time he bought a really big suitcase and filled it up with all sorts of stupid shit. We’d say, “What are you doing, man?”

“You don’t get it? I’m the Robin Hood of Nicaragua. I’m bringing the poor people back some stuff that I got from the white gringos.”

“Okay, but toilet paper and lightbulbs?”

Sometimes people did stupid things that really got us in trouble. Once, we arrived at LAX the same week that
Abraxas
came out, and Chepito was carrying a box of albums with him. His coat made the metal detector go off, and they asked, “Okay, what’s in the box?” He said, “Explosives.”
Bam!
Airport security handcuffed him and hauled him away and really put him through the wringer. We knew this was going to take a while, so we split for the hotel, and Ron stayed behind. Security finally let Chepito go when he told them he was talking about the music being explosive—“Man, it’s the brand-new Santana album.” He really went over the line, but he never wanted to back down from his logic. “It
is
explosive, man.”