The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (34 page)

You could really sense those differences after our shows, when we’d be hanging in the hotel. Shrieve and I would get together to listen to our favorite music in his room or mine, turning each other on to different records that had just come out. It could be jazz or soul or whatever. Girls would come by, looking to get high and party, and they’d get bored when the two of us would be going, “Check out this groove!” or “You gotta hear this solo.” They’d move on to Chepito’s room or David’s.

I’m not judging one thing against another—there’s time for everything. But it wasn’t just music—by 1971 differences were also showing up in the priorities of some people in the band. The rock-and-roll lifestyle was taking over; it wasn’t just the women or the cars or the cocaine and other excesses, it was also the attitude. We used to say that we were from the streets and we were real—we’d look at other bands that were making it and judge how they acted. “We’re never going to be assholes like that,” we’d say. But I saw how
some people in the band were acting, and I was thinking to myself, “It’s easy to see why a lot of bands fail—they OD on themselves.”

I thought Santana was becoming a walking contradiction. The soul wanted one thing, but the body was too busy doing something else, and we were trying to be something we weren’t anymore. Everything that Bill Graham said would happen was coming true—our heads were getting so big it was starting to feel like there wasn’t enough room for everyone. I think we were all equally guilty of this.

For me the worst thing still was that we weren’t practicing or working on new music, and I was hungry for that. I’d have to work at getting us together to play. I’d say, “There’s dust on those platinum albums, man. Our music is starting to get rusty. We need to get together, and it shouldn’t be like I’m saying we have to go to the dentist and deal with an abscess. We should get together—I’ll rejoice with your songs, and you’ll rejoice with mine, as we did on the first two albums.”

Being a collective made us possible in many ways—it’s what we
were
. But there was basically no discipline, and nobody but Shrieve wanted to hear that we might be making incorrect choices. We were very, very young—even our manager was young. He was supposed to be looking out for us, but he was participating in many of those excesses. He was using and helping to supply the band, and he still wanted to be in the band.

Some people in the band were angry at me because I was not happy most of the time. It’s true: I probably wasn’t a pleasant guy to be around, because I was complaining about this and that. I was feeling myself in conflict with so much money and so much excess, and the spiritual side of me was being crushed.

I was starting to lean more deeply in a spiritual direction at this time. It started with a few books. The only thing I had read when I was a kid was comic books—
Amazing Stories;
Stan Lee’s Iron Man and Spider-Man. At the start of Santana I was already moving over to books about Eastern philosophy. In the Bay Area it was in the air—everybody was reading
The Urantia Book
and Paramahansa
Yogananda’s
Autobiography of a Yogi
and Swami Muktananda’s memoir. I read all of them, too.

There were yogis who came through San Francisco, and they would speak to whoever came to hear them—followers and friends who were curious. Sometimes I heard that John Handy or Charles Lloyd might show up, which was one more reason to go. I got to know the names of various gurus, including Krishnamurti and a young, pudgy guy called Maharaj Ji. There was also Swami Satchidananda, whom Alice Coltrane was into. They’d sell books after they spoke, and I would pick them up.

Everyone had heard about the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru they followed for a while, and some people saw him as a trickster. I began to understand that these gurus were not charlatans but very wise men who could help people see their own luminosity—the divine light each person has inside, which enables us to lessen fear and guilt and ego. I learned new words for these ideas—words like
awakening
. That was really the job these teachers were doing: awakening people to a higher consciousness.

The next thing I knew my molecular chemistry began to change just by being curious and considering the metaphysical questions these gurus would talk about. It was a new language I was learning. I started asking questions like, “How can I evolve and not make the mistakes that everybody around me is making? How can I develop a bona fide, tangible spiritual discipline—with or without a guru? How can I connect this to my rock-and-roll lifestyle and the music I’m making?”

I was starting to get an inner urge to read more books and listen to music that resonated on the same frequency. I started to put aside Jimi’s music and even Miles’s for a while. I looked for the resonance I was getting from these gurus and found it when I was listening to Mahalia Jackson or to Martin Luther King’s speeches—just his words and his tone and intention. John McLaughlin came out then with his new group, the Mahavishnu Orchestra—I played that first album over and over and felt their intention.

I also played lots and lots of Coltrane. He stayed on my turntable for a long time. I was learning, trying to comprehend the language of ascension. “The Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost” was
the
door for me. That was not easy, because the first ten times you listen to it you can’t even find 1—the downbeat. It’s all 1, and the only close resemblance to a melody in there is “Frère Jacques.”

I could play guitar and hang with the modal music Coltrane was doing later, around the time of
A Love Supreme,
but Shrieve helped me get a feel for Coltrane’s earlier stuff—and that of Miles and other jazz guys—because the idea of thirty-two-bar songs and AABA parts was all new to me. He would say, “Here’s the bridge” and “This is a tag.” “See how they modulated to another key?” or “Hear how the first sixteen bars are played two-beat and then the bridge is in 4/4 to get a swing feel?” Shrieve started in a high school jazz band, so he had some training and could be a guide.

As intense as Coltrane’s music is, that was becoming my peace of mind. I’d play Coltrane or Mahavishnu, and I could be by myself. Cocaine and partying and all that fast living do not go well with
A Love Supreme
and
The Inner Mounting Flame
—that music was like daylight to vampires. Sometimes I’d play Coltrane for my inner peace, but to be honest sometimes I’d do it to get people who were hanging out too long at my place to leave. It would work every time—
whoosh!

I know Coltrane was about peace and nonviolence, as Martin Luther King was—you could hear that in his music. But the intensity that I saw turning some people off was coming from the supreme intention there—the kind of intention I connected with in the Black Panthers across the bay in Oakland. We had gotten to know about them through David and Gianquinto, who was the first white Black Panther I knew. We had learned about the programs they established to help their community, like providing lunch for schoolkids. The government didn’t see it that way—they were coming down
hard on the Panthers. By the time we played for them they were on the run—Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale were in jail, awaiting trial, and Eldridge Cleaver was in exile in Africa.

Some San Francisco groups, such as the Grateful Dead, did benefits to raise money for the Black Panthers so they could fight their legal battles. I remember we did two concerts for them, and I got to see how scary things were up close. We showed up in a limousine at the Berkeley Community Theatre, got out, and the first thing that happened was that security guys in black berets and black jackets asked us to stop and assume the position—“We need to frisk you.”

I said, “Uh, okay, but you know we’re playing for you.”

“We know that, and we thank you, man, but up against the wall. We still have to do this.”

Later on I understood that they had many infiltrators and people in their own organization spying on them. They didn’t trust anyone. They had to protect themselves. They were living as if every second could be their last. I could feel that, and that impressed me. I remember talking with one of the Panthers. He pushed his face close to mine, saying, “I got one question for you, man. Are you fucking ready to die right now?” He was talking about what it meant to be in the Panthers back then. “Are you ready to die right now for what you believe in? Because otherwise get the fuck out of here; if you join the Panthers you got to be ready to die right now.” I kept my mouth shut. It was scary. I was like, “Damn. This is not the Boy Scouts.” It was brutal then, and that was their level of commitment.

I know seeing that kind of supreme intention had an effect on me—it felt like it was time to make decisions. Not long after that it was clear to everyone that David was not doing well—his heroin use was showing, and his playing and the music were starting to suffer. Sometimes he’d take too much and would be nodding out and not capable of presenting the music the way it was meant to be. He couldn’t hang on the bandstand, as jazz musicians say. He was too buzzed to be open to any discussion or accept any offer of help.

Drugs had taken Jimi the year before, then Jim Morrison died that summer in Paris. In 1971 many people were getting scared—some of us were feeling that everything we had been building was falling apart. At the end of that summer, it felt like some of Santana was on the same route. Just a few months later, they’d find Janis with a needle in her, and she’d be gone, too.

I felt I had to put a stop to anything that had to do with cocaine or heroin in the band. I didn’t have any problem with marijuana and LSD, but the harder stuff had to go. It was also a matter of who was hanging around with us: dope dealers, pimps—some real San Quentin material. I had the radar for that from Tijuana, and it had gone on long enough—these people were just bad news. It was getting dangerous, and it was making us look bad.

This was when I really started to feel that it meant something that my name was also the band’s name—that started to be my explanation of why I cared so much about so many things. Why I couldn’t chill about people showing up late, or showing up in no condition to play.

“I told you why,” I would say. “This is about the music, not me. But this thing happens to have my name, and since it does I have a responsibility.”

“We just called it that because we didn’t know what else to call it. But it’s not your band,” some people said.

I would think, “Well, not yet.”

I made the decision to fire David. It wasn’t like I fired him directly, but really I did it by saying I wouldn’t play with him anymore. This was the biggest step I had made toward taking charge. I think everyone understood that it had to be that way. But we weren’t getting rid of him—it was more like we were giving David a chance to get straight, because he came back to Santana just a few years later.

We had dates to play, so we replaced David with Tom Rutley, an acoustic bass player Shrieve had worked with in a big band in college. I liked Tom—he was a big, huggy-bear kind of guy, and he had a low, low voice that I could barely understand and a great
upright bass tone. He recorded some tracks with us on
Caravanserai
. He was only with us for a short time before Dougie Rauch took over, but Tom helped us at just the right time—when Shrieve and I were trying to navigate jazz music and imagine we could actually play with people like Joe Farrell and Wayne Shorter.

David might have been gone, and we had a bass player, but many things were still wrong—the drugs and lowlifes and hangarounders were still getting in the way of the music. It had gotten to the point where people would wake up in the morning still drunk and fucked up from the night before, still totally buzzed on cocaine. Then they’d do more cocaine to wake up, so then they’d be tired and wired, and I was the one who kept putting my foot down. “They” were mainly Stan and Carabello.

Sometime in September, before another tour across the country, I opened my mouth, and there was an argument, and by the end of it I said, “I’m not going unless we get rid of Stan Marcum and Carabello, because they’re supplying the band with the heavy stuff and we sound like shit. We’re not practicing, and it’s embarrassing. Either those guys are out or I’m out.” I had to do what I had to do.

Stan and Carabello were in the room and I said this in front of them. They laughed and said I couldn’t do that. “We leave on Monday, man. If you don’t show up, then you’re not in the band.” And that’s exactly what happened. It felt horrible. It felt really, really horrible to be part of a band that had just left on tour without me. But that was it—there was no official separation announcement, no press release, and no legal agreement. Everyone left, and I stayed behind, licking my wounds.

My consolation for the next few weeks was going to various jazz clubs around San Francisco and hanging out, playing with guys like George Cables at Basin Street West. I had gotten tight with George when we both played on Luis Gasca’s album
For Those Who Chant
that summer. He was playing in Joe Henderson’s group, with Eddie Marshall on drums, and they told me to come down and sit in with them.

I was also hanging with Dougie Rauch, who had moved to San Francisco and was playing at the Matador with Gábor Szabó and Tom Coster on piano and the drummer Spider Webb. This was when Gábor and I got tight—we’d get together and play, then we’d talk and listen to music. I was just breaking up with Linda after almost four years together. He would come over to the house, and he’d feel uncomfortable because of the arguments and the vibe. After I got back with Santana a few weeks later, Linda left, Gábor moved in, and we started hanging out with a group of chicks that included Mimi Sanchez, who was a hostess at the Matador and was an incredibly beautiful, very strong woman.

Mimi is the lady on the cover of
Caramba!,
the album by the great jazz trumpeter Lee Morgan, and she’s the same Mimi who later married Carabello. I want to mention her—and Linda and Deborah and other women who have been in my life. There are people who are strong, independent forces in the lives of many musicians—there have to be. They help unfold us in a way that makes sense with all the craziness that can go on. They help us to not be afraid of ourselves and to learn to deal with brutal confrontations that seem so important but that really didn’t mean anything. For many of us, these people are our teachers. They nurture us and keep things together when we’re out on the road.