The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (33 page)

I couldn’t believe it—I got myself over to the other side of the lobby as fast as I could, away from the intensity. I think we were all getting itchy to get out more, and at the same time I remember wishing some of us had been more understanding and respectful of the people and their culture. I remember Pickett would say that Africans needed to use more deodorant, and Willie was ragging on the holy man we met at the airport—he was really a charlatan, a guy who had people convinced he had some kind of power. I also remember hoping that the witch doctor didn’t pick up on any of this—just in case.

The next night in the lobby bar I heard an African guy in a suit and tie talking about how we were there just to steal their shit and exploit their music. He said it just loudly enough for me to hear him. I walked up to him and said, “Excuse me.” Then I handed him my guitar and said, “Here, man, play me something.”

He said, “What? I don’t play the guitar; I’m a lawyer.”

“Then it’s not your fuckin’ music—it’s only yours when you play it.” I could be cocky, too, and I liked to make my point. He grabbed his drink and gave me my guitar back.

I went back down the next day—it was the same place, the same people, like they hadn’t moved from the night before. Later that afternoon, someone came up to me in the lobby—“Mr. Santana? Mr. Pickett wants to see you in his room.”

“Uh, Okay.”

I went upstairs, knocked on the door. A young lady opened it. I heard a voice from inside go, “Who is it?”

“I think it’s Carlos Santana.”

“Yeah? Let him in.”

I went inside, and Pickett and Ike Turner were doing coke. “Come on in, man.”

“How you guys doing? What’s going on?”

Pickett looked me up and down. “So you’re the magnificent one, huh? You’re the Santana? You’re that guy?” I knew from back in my Tijuana days where this was going—I didn’t want any of that. “I heard that you wanted to talk to me, so I’m here, but before we do that I just want to let you know that I have all your albums. I play all your songs and love them. ‘In the Midnight Hour,’ ‘Land of 1000 Dances,’ ‘Mustang Sally,’ ‘Funky Broadway,’ ‘Ninety-Nine and a Half (Won’t Do)’…” I kept going down the list, and it was true—I learned all of them. “I love you, man.”

Wilson looked at Ike. Ike, to his credit, just shook his head, like, “It’s cool. Carlos is okay.” I politely got out of the room.

It wasn’t the first or last time that happened—meeting a musician I love who was mistrusting or not happy with praise. But I have to say it very rarely happens—I think over the years I can count on one hand the number of those kinds of meetings.

I met Eddie Harris in Ghana on that same trip and asked if we could play together on one of his songs. “Hey, Eddie—you want to jam? Let’s do ‘Listen Here’ or ‘Cold Duck Time.’ ” He shook his head. “No, Santana, you’re not going to beat me with my own shit. That ain’t going to happen.” I wasn’t looking at it like that and tried to explain. “Man, I just love your music.”

It happened another time just a few weeks after we got back from Africa, when we shared the bill at the Fillmore East with Rahsaan Roland Kirk. The night Miles was there and flicked my ear, I knocked on the door to Rahsaan’s dressing room, something I rarely did. It opened, and I remember it was almost pitch-black in there. Rahsaan and some of the guys in his band were in the room. “Mr. Kirk, my name is Carlos Santana, and I’m just here to thank you from the center of my heart for bringing so much joy in your music, man. I’ve listened to
Volunteered Slavery
and
The Inflated Tear
…” As I had with Wilson Pickett, I started naming the songs I
loved, then I waited. All of a sudden they all started laughing like hyenas, just laughing and laughing. I quietly found the doorknob, opened it, and walked out. I told myself, “Okay. I’ll never do that again.”

Another thing I won’t do is mess with any black magic. We ran into that holy man again walking near our hotel in Ghana, and a chicken crossed his path. He stopped and looked at it in a weird way, and
pow!
The chicken suddenly fell over dead, even though it had just been looking fine and healthy. Everyone backed up and gave the guy room. We got back to the hotel, and at the restaurant all the guys in Pickett’s band wanted to tell him the story. “Pickett, man, you’re not going to believe what this voodoo guy did. Man, it was freaky!” Pickett kept saying, “No, no. I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me, don’t tell me.” But they wouldn’t stop—they were like kids coming back home and needing to tell their parents about something that happened at school. They told Pickett about the chicken, and he just shook his head. “I told you not to tell me this shit, man. Now I’m going to have nightmares.” Meanwhile Willie Bobo was cracking up.

The last day before the concert in Ghana, the organizers found something for us to do. They invited us to the Cape Coast Castle, which was a place where Africans were held before they were put on the slave ships that would take them to various parts of America. It was basically an old brick fort painted white, right next to the ocean, with cannons in front. We had a tour guide explain what had happened there. He showed us the “gate of no return,” which the slaves went through as they walked on African ground for the last time. He took us down into a horrible, hellish basement where the slaves were stuck waiting for the ships. All of us got really quiet—you could still feel the intensity from all the souls that had been crammed in there.

The wind picked up on cue and started making a whistling, lonely sound as it blew through the cracks and crevices in that old fort. All of us got chicken skin—it was like the sound of souls howling in pain and horror.
Woooohaaauuuiiiiiii!
Tina Turner
heard it, and her knees got weak and she started crying and people had to carry her back to the bus. The wind kept blowing harder, and the whole thing got more and more creepy. Thinking about it now still gives me chills.

Willie didn’t come with us to the castle because he wasn’t feeling right. When we got back to the hotel he was really sick—sweating with a fever and vomiting. It was the same thing that Carabello had during most of the trip, but worse. He had a serious fever, and it wouldn’t go down. We all took turns staying with him and putting cold towels on him throughout the night. Around midnight, a local doctor in a suit and tie came by while I was watching him and started looking at him.

The doctor said it was dysentery, and I couldn’t help thinking about that holy man and all the things Willie had been saying and wondering—well, we all felt that way, suspicious and not sure what to believe. Just then somebody knocked on the door, the doctor got up to answer it, and sure enough, there he was—the holy man, stopping by to look at Willie. The doctor let him in, but I got up and blocked his way. Our eyes were locked on each other, and we had an inner conversation—I spoke to him inwardly.

“Man, I know you got the power, and I know you did this to him.” Then I pointed to my T-shirt, which had a picture of Jesus on it. I kept talking to the holy man in my mind. “I respect and honor the beliefs that people have all over the world, as I do yours—but can you get through Jesus? You may be able to go through me, but you also got to go through him, because I am not only with him but I also belong to him.”

You have to understand that I respect and honor Jesus Christ—he was a remarkable historic figure who stood up to authority and believed in common people and the power of his message—and he was killed for it, pure and simple. The thing about Jesus that gets lost, I believe, is that he was a man—that he was born and that he had to grow up to become who he was. He was a man, and he must have been a very attractive one at that, because he had charisma and people loved him. Women loved him. It’s strange that the Bible
says nothing about when he left home as a teenager and came back later. Where was he between the ages of thirteen and thirty? I believe the man went around the world—to Greece and to India. He got around, and he did things. He had to so he could learn to feel what it’s like to live, how it is to eat well and be loved but also to be hungry and scorned. To feel the sensation of what it is to be a man and also hold divine mysticism.

There’s a scene in Franco Zeffirelli’s TV miniseries
Jesus of Nazareth
that’s one of my favorites: Jesus walks into a temple just when the rabbi is about to open the holy scriptures and read from them, but Jesus politely asks the rabbi to move over. He does, then Jesus grasps the open scrolls and closes them, saying, “Today before your eyes the prophecy is fulfilled” and “The kingdom of heaven is upon you.”

The people in the temple all get twisted and think it’s blasphemy, but they don’t understand his message: we can stop suffering—the divinity is already here, in each one of us, which ultimately is not what the church wants us to hear because they want the control and the message to come through them. From his aerial view of the situation, whether he speaks through Jesus or Muhammad or Buddha or Krishna—or whether he communicates directly to each of us—God can reach any part of anyone and say what we need to hear. No one should have a monopoly on that connection; no one can say with certainty, “You have to go through me to get to him.” That sounds like a pimp to me.

I have a problem when that message gets twisted so that certain people are in a position to control and manipulate others, which is what religion has done for centuries, without coming to the aid of people who need help—when religion lets people suffer because of its dogma and traditions.

There’s something else I like about that scene: Jesus was one of those guys whose duty it was to stand in the middle of a crowd and say, “Hey! The world is
not
flat,” and that takes a lot of courage. It’s how I feel about someone like Ornette Coleman, who came to New York from out of town with a different kind of music when
everybody else was doing a more established kind of jazz, whatever that was. I have a lot of respect for people who not only have the clarity to see but are also not afraid to step up and speak out.

If Jesus were around today in the flesh there wouldn’t be a Christmas. That’s about business, and religion is an organized institution like the Bank of America, and it has a lot more money than the Bank of America. There’s a saying that I love: “You got to give up the cross, man. Get down from there—we need the wood!”

Jesus was never about rules and requirements. He had a Christ consciousness, and he was not interested in dividing the world into believers and nonbelievers and saints and sinners and making everyone feel guilty about being born into sin and telling them they need to suffer because of that.

It wasn’t a “my God versus your god” thing when I stood up to that shaman in Ghana. I was just facing my fear and calling on the power of love, which is the most supreme force of all—love and forgiveness, allowance and willingness. With just those few things, miracles can happen and human consciousness can be advanced and fear can be eradicated.

The holy man glared at me. I could see he understood what I was thinking. He looked at my eyes, then at my T-shirt, then he turned to the doctor, and they nodded at each other. It almost seemed to me like they had a thing going—one of them would get people sick and the other collected when he brought the medicine. Then that holy man walked out. Nothing happened to me—I didn’t catch dysentery.

Check out
Soul to Soul,
the movie of the concert—Willie was able to play the next day, but you can see he was very listless. You can also see the crew getting fascinated with that holy man, turning the cameras on him whenever they could. Who knows? Maybe he worked some voodoo on them, too.

I remember Ike and Tina went on first—they had the theme song for the concert, “Soul to Soul.” Wilson Pickett was the top headliner, and I think we played pretty well. What was peculiar was that the crowd didn’t know when to clap. We would finish playing a
tune, then… nothing. You could still feel that they were thinking it was really cool, that they really liked us, but I think the long songs and the various sections confused them, as they did with my father. They were learning through all the music, though, because they applauded when we finished the set and were clapping and dancing by the time Pickett played.

The Voices of East Harlem, with Dougie Rauch still on bass, played that night, too, and they impressed me more than the first time I heard them, in Tanglewood. They had a great song called “Right On Be Free” that sometimes I will play with Santana even now, more than forty years later. I like music with a message like that, music that I call brutally positive—such as Curtis Mayfield’s songs or Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” or the Four Tops’ “A Simple Game”—because people need a constant jolt of “Kumbaya” that’s not goody-goody. There’s a lot of African music like that, too—I love Fela Kuti and his son Seun, who does a song that goes: “Don’t bring that shit to me… don’t bring bullshit to Africa.” I love songs that say, “I’m going to take all those words and tell you straight about what’s goin’ on and whoop your fears with it.”

After I got back from Africa, that trip stayed with me for a long, long time. I brought albums home with me and started to collect more wherever I could find them. I said, “Thank God for Tower Records” when they made a separate section for African music. I wanted to have one room in my home just for African music because I wanted to learn how to play it. It was rough trying to find the records at first, then starting in the ’80s, when I would be in Paris you could see me making a beeline for the African section in those big music stores on the Champs-Élysées. I’d get a basket and just start grabbing.

Chepito recovered from his aneurysm, and he and Coke Escovedo joined us after we got back from Africa. We toured from the Bay Area to New York and then went to Europe, where we played the Montreux Jazz Festival again in April. We returned to the United
States and toured, sometimes with Rico Reyes or Victor Pantoja, who played congas on the first Chico Hamilton record I ever heard. And in July, we finally finished recording for our third album—
Santana III
.

We were doing a lot
as
a band, but things were not getting better
inside
the band. I think the first real cracks in Santana, the cracks that started forming the winter before, had started to show in terms of our musical tastes. At first the differences in what we were listening to helped us develop as a band: we shared it all, and it held us together. But by the time we were in the middle of recording our third album, our differences had us wanting to grow in our own separate directions. Gregg and Neal wanted to do the Journey thing—more of their kind of rock sound. David Brown was getting deep into Latin dance music, and Chepito was already there, listening to Tito Puente and Ray Barretto. I was pregnant with John Coltrane and Miles—Shrieve was, too. I was also getting into Weather Report, which had musicians who played with Miles on
Bitches Brew
—Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter were the nucleus of that new group.