The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (35 page)

Mimi and my first wife, Deborah, were friends. In the ’80s Carabello and I were also friends again, and when Mimi came down with terminal cancer, Deborah threw a party for her and her family. I remember I didn’t recognize her because of her illness. Mimi had one request—that I play “Samba Pa Ti” for her. Such an outpouring of love came to her that day from her family and from Deborah’s divine giving—she washed Mimi’s feet. There was a reason Deborah and I had thirty-four years together.

Gábor and I stayed close, even after I got back with Santana. I remember so many things about him—he never talked about his time with Chico Hamilton or listened to Chico’s music. I’m not sure why. But I could tell he was thinking about a different sound when we got together—something he was working on with Bobby
Womack that he later called “Breezin,’ ” which George Benson made famous.

One time Gábor invited me to come and sit in with him in the studio—he’d brought in another amplifier for me. “Oh, man, thank you,” I said. We ended up just hanging out, then Gábor wanted to go for a walk. We stepped outside on Broadway in San Francisco, a funky area of town. At one point he stopped, turned, and said, “Carlos, I heard that Santana is starting to have some problems. If you ever want to start a band together, you and I, let me know.”

I was like, “Really? That would be a great honor, Gábor, but what the hell do you need me for?”

One thing I think people have to know about Gábor is that even before Wes Montgomery was putting a jazz thing on rock and pop tunes, Gábor was really the first jazz guitarist to say it was okay to blatantly borrow songs by the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas and other radio stars and record them in a jazz style, with his own thing. Later other jazz people did that, and no one could help noticing: “Hey, this idea is selling a lot!”

I was honored that Gábor wanted to build a group with me, and I did think about it, but I think he saw me as a freelance musician when really I was still part of a band. I was part of Santana, and I felt connected to Gregg and Shrieve and Carabello, even with the drugs. Later on I developed the kind of perspective that made it easier for me to do collaborations and play with other bands and still be completely in Santana.

Three weeks after Santana left for the road (minus this Santana), the phone rang. It was Neal. The band was going through the East Coast and was at the Felt Forum in New York. “Hey, man, I don’t want to say this, because it’s probably bad for your ego, but the audiences are screaming and booing—they want to hear you. They know you’re Santana. Come on—why don’t you get on the next plane?” I wasn’t changing my mind. “No. Not unless you put Carabello and Stan on the next plane home. Then I’ll be there.”

I heard later that when the band made up its mind to get me back and send Carabello and Stan home, the two of them went around to everyone’s room, letting people know how upset and hurt they were. I got on a plane and flew to New York to meet the band at their hotel. It was really awkward, because when I got there, Stan and Carabello were right there in the lobby, looking daggers at me. Carabello said, “Okay, man, you got your fuckin’ way. This is what you wanted, right?” I didn’t take the bait—I just looked at him and said, “What I wanted is the band to be thriving.”

The feeling right away was that this was going to be a new chapter for Santana. It wasn’t just that we had to find a new
conguero;
we also needed to do that while we were thousands of miles from the musicians we knew best. So one night in New York City we decided to put it out into the world, and we asked if there was a conga player in the audience. That’s how we found Mingo Lewis. He was a street musician with a lot of energy. We put out the request from the stage—I was probably the one who did it—and the next thing we knew this cat showed up and sounded good with us. He knew almost all the parts for our songs, so we asked him to join the band right there and then.

During those first few shows there was definitely a division, or the feeling of a divide, in the band. Half the members wanted to beat me up, as did some of the crew; they were pissed off because they felt I was killing a good thing. My thing was, “It’s already dead and will be more dead if we don’t cut off the diseased leg.” I also think I might have done some people a favor by helping to prolong their lives.

The energy in the new lineup was immediately different onstage, too, where it felt like Gregg, Neal, and I were fencing each other and Michael was the guy in the middle, which actually was a good thing. When Dougie came in on bass, and with Mingo on the congas, it was a whole new kind of rhythm—more flexible and looser. That really was when I started to feel that maybe Santana could go in a different direction, one that would be evident on our fourth album,
Caravanserai
.

After we finished the US tour we flew for the first time to Peru to do our last concert of 1971—but something happened that stopped us from playing. And thank God we didn’t play, because we probably would have sounded horrible. Just think about it and repeat these words:
rock band; Peru; 1971
.

The twin brothers who booked us there were heavily involved with cocaine, so they met us at the plane in New York and brought a flour jar that was filled to the top. The party started in the air, and when we landed the whole Lima airport was filled with people—you would have thought the Beatles were coming on the plane after ours. We looked like… well, you know the story about Ulysses and the sailors who are turned into swine and grunt and act like pigs? That was Santana coming off that plane. By the time we landed the jar was almost half empty. I was ready to have another cold-sweat nightmare about going onstage and finding everybody in the band frozen like popsicles.

There was another part of the picture we didn’t know before we got there. Some people were not happy we were there—communist students who thought we represented American imperialism. Not everyone who hears the word
America
thinks of
Howdy Doody
and Fred Astaire. There was a protest, and someone started a fire in the place where we were going to play.

Later I heard that Fidel Castro wouldn’t let people listen to our music for the same reason. I also already heard that Buddy Rich used to throw people off his bus for listening to Santana. I’m okay knowing that we are not going to be everybody’s golden cup of tea.

When we got to Lima, we hung out with the mayor while our luggage went to the hotel. We got the key to the city, took some photos, and then we went to visit a few churches at my request—I was in Latin America again, and I wanted to see the churches. We were at the first one for just fifteen minutes when suddenly the place was surrounded by cops. They escorted us to a municipal building, where we waited and tried to figure out what was happening. The cops kept saying that everything was being done for our protection, but they revealed nothing else.

We were supposed to play the next night, and some guys were getting angry. Gregg was like, “Hey, man, fuck this.” I told him not to pull the John Wayne act. “I’m telling you, lawyers are not going to help you here, man. Be cool.” I could see that our situation was no different from being in a Tijuana jail. Then the cops told us there’d been some more problems with students; we were in danger, and we had to leave. They asked a plane that was flying from Brazil to Los Angeles to land and pick us up so that we could get back safely. We went straight to the airport. Our tour manager was Steve Kahn, who worked for Bill Graham—we called him Killer Kahn. He went back later to get all our equipment and luggage, which we had left at the hotel. He had to put on a wig to hide his hippie hair and shave his mustache so that he wouldn’t be recognized as an American.

So we get inside the plane that will get us out of Peru, and there’s only one place for me to sit—next to a weird-looking chick with raggedy blond hair who’s wearing a big muumuu. We took off, and she asked, “What happened?” I told her the whole story, then she looked around and said, “I wouldn’t worry about that. Look what I have.” She lifted up her dress, and it was like that guy in
Midnight Express
was sitting right next to me. She was a mule, and she had so much cocaine strapped to her that she looked pregnant. “Why don’t we go to the bathroom and do some coke?” Just what I needed. “No thanks,” I said. “I need to sit somewhere else, man.” As soon as we landed at the LA airport, the FBI and other people in uniform wanted to interrogate us about what happened. “Sure thing, man; let’s go.” I wanted to put as much distance as I could between me and that pregnant chick—and fast.

The story we got was that the government actually was trying to help us. I hear that people in Lima still talk about the time Santana came there but never played.

I was talking with Miles one time about changing the players in his bands and always going forward with his music. “It’s a blessing
and a curse, man. I
have
to change,” he said. I liked the idea of a band being like that—loose and natural, open to the gift of new ideas.

I wanted Santana to be that way. But at the end of 1971, Santana was falling apart. Two of my oldest friends were gone from the band, and the mood in the band wasn’t pleasant—things were getting intense.

We could have used some time off the road to turn down the heat. When you’re busy playing and creating new music and recording—repeat, repeat, repeat—you don’t know how long to keep it going. You don’t know how long the phone will keep ringing with offers to do shows and make records. We never asked, “How much time can we afford to take off? A few weeks? A year or two?” But maybe we should have.

Santana III
came out in October and was another number one album for us. I say “us” because on the first three albums everybody played his part and nobody told anyone else what to do. But when we started recording
Caravanserai
in 1972, I began to tell people what to do and what
not
to do.
Santana III
was the last album featuring most of the original Santana members, including Gregg. I could tell that there was a hurtful rub when I was in the room with certain people, and I’m sure it was the same for them, but what happened had to happen. When something is over, it’s over.

It would be around eight months before Santana got a new lineup and really got its groove together and went back on the road. It was the only time Santana did that—leave the scene for so long and come back with new personnel and a new sound.

We had gone from rooting for each other to tolerating each other to being two bands in one, in conflict musically and philosophically. On one side you had Gregg and Neal, wanting to do more rock tunes, and on the other side you had Shrieve and me. Chepito was always on his own path—dealing with his distractions and never really involving himself with what the band was doing or where it was going. He had songs that he wrote, and his sound will always be an important part of the band, but through all
the changes that would happen in Santana, he always seemed to be in the dugout—never really in the game.

Shrieve and I were like gardeners, trying to let the music relax a little bit and grow on its own. We were listening to and thinking about jazz and rhythms and how many musicians we could meet and jam with. I think our way was more true to the idea of the original band, which gave everyone the freedom to say, “That was beautiful. Let’s try that again a couple more times, maybe in a different direction.” The big change was that by the time we were recording
Caravanserai,
I was the one saying that.

It took me around a year to go from being part of the band to being at the point where I was feeling that the name of the band wasn’t just a cool-sounding name: it was
my
name, and I had a responsibility to it. I think it’s good that I got to that point in my perception, because I wasn’t wired or equipped to deal with maintaining a Who or Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin kind of band—all for one, but no clear leader. I am
Santana—if I’m not in the band and it has the name Santana, then it’s a Santana tribute.

I’m very lucky to have worked with all the musicians who played in Santana. They all brought different rhythms and beats, different ways to articulate chord changes, and different energies. I have learned from each one, and my mind is very clear about what and who—I can name you all the keyboard and conga players, all the drummers, all the bass players. They’ve all been important.

If you see a musician up there playing in Santana, he’s not there just because he knows the songs. It’s because of trust. I trust each one of them to be genuine and to have a deep respect for three things that they will never drop: the tempo, the feel, and the groove. We talk about that all the time. The tempo and feel have to be right for each song, and the groove—man, the groove is king.

One reason Santana survived all those lineup changes over the years is because every new keyboardist or bassist or singer wasn’t there just to sound like the records from thirty-five years before. Each Santana band has had its own identity. Every new musician has to show his own heart and bring new commitment into the mix and make it work with everyone else. Some guys ask me what they should do or rehearse. I tell them if you want to do research before playing in Santana, don’t research Santana. I wouldn’t even be talking to them if they didn’t know our music already.

I tell them to go and check out Marvin Gaye—get a video of him from 1974, and see that you have no choice but to believe every word he sings. Or Michael Jackson in ’83. Or Miles in ’69. Jimi in ’67. Howlin’ Wolf in the ’50s. You believe every note they play. I tell them, don’t justify the music and talk about chord changes without talking about how to make it come alive every time—like Frankenstein, up from the dead. I can see why Wayne Shorter likes those old movies—“It’s
alive!
” That’s what we need to hear in Santana.

One time we had a discussion on the bus. One band member said, “You know, we really don’t like it when you tell us what to do and what not to do.”

I said, “Okay, then surprise me. Don’t bring the same thing to every song. Don’t play me something you learned. They don’t teach audacity or sass or motherfuckingness at Berklee or any other school of music.” It’s not that they have to get to that every time. But I can tell if someone’s just slipping by, and it’s my role to say something, just as it’s my job to let a musician know, “Hey, that was some great shit you played tonight. Thank you.”

A
lot of projects came out of guys hanging out, playing, and talking about ideas to work on together. The concert in Hawaii with Buddy Miles came out of Buddy and Greg Errico getting together with people like Neal and Coke Escovedo. Buddy and Greg had a mutual affection, so it was natural they’d do something together. And when I visited Buddy at his house in Nevada, he told me about a New Year’s gig at the crater on Diamond Head that he was going to do with Greg and other musicians.

Buddy Miles had been Jimi Hendrix’s last drummer and had been with Wilson Pickett and the Electric Flag before that. Then in 1970 he had a big hit with “Them Changes,” and at the time of the concert he had just signed with Columbia. From my point of view, things weren’t happening with Santana anymore, and who knew what the future held? Doing this concert was like imagining what Santana on steroids could be. It felt like it was the last part of the parade, and it was fun—an all-star band that was mostly Bay Area people, like Neal, Gregg, Coke, Luis Gasca, saxophonist Hadley Caliman, and Victor Pantoja. Carabello was there, too, and he played—but I had started to hang out with Coke more after we split, and Coke and I really bonded there.

Buddy and the others brought some tunes, but mainly we jammed on some loose ideas. We played them first and named the tracks later. The whole concert was recorded by Columbia, then Buddy and I went into a studio to mix the music. I got my first lesson in collaborating musically and finding the right way to say something that has to be said—away from Santana, in a studio
filled with musicians, friends, girlfriends, and Buddy, who had a lot more experience than I did.

After a while Buddy got into the mixing room with the engineer and put the rest of us out. Hours and hours later, he played it for us. I listened to what were going to be the first two sides of a double album, and when it was fading out, I just said, “Buddy, you ain’t enough.” He said, “What?” with a hard look on his face. I said, “Man, I have to hear voices and horns and guitars. It can’t be just you. You’re too far up in the mix, and where’s everyone else? You ain’t enough. We need to mix it again.”

Everybody was looking at me, then back at Buddy, like, “Damn, he just sounded you, man.” Buddy started looking at me like, “How could you say that in front of everybody?” It had to be mixed again, there was no question about it. “Come on, Buddy, let’s do it once more, and this time make sure we can hear everyone enough.”

I liked the music—I was honored that he trusted me to bring something different out of him, and he definitely brought something different out of me. That’s the way I still hear that music. Buddy just sang his ass off on “Evil Ways” and “Faith Interlude”—he’s a phenomenon.

Buddy and I got tighter after that album, which was good, because we had to get behind it and tour that music when it came out. We found a way to speak with each other and to respect the music first. Buddy would say, “You talk to me in a way that most people don’t.” Most people were afraid of making him angry and saying the wrong thing. I told him, “Buddy, I’m never trying to put you down. I love your drumming and your singing. Sometimes I’m just saying you’re getting in the way of a lot of things with the mask you put on. I just want to get to Buddy Miles—the soul, the heart, the gift that God gave you.”

Buddy had a voice that could sing in any key, and he also played great guitar. The problems occurred when he wasn’t playing. He’d need to be the focus and have things serving him. It was Buddy, Buddy, Buddy, or he would get into trouble really, really quick. I still love Buddy in spite of Buddy Miles. We got together again in 1987,
after I saw him with my friend Gary Rashid at the Boom Boom Room—it felt so good I invited him into the band. I have a good habit of using a bad memory, so I forget stupid shit that happened and I will give a person a second chance. We had fun for a few shows, until the same things started happening again.

Buddy was a pocket drummer—meaning he played in the pocket, which is great if you’re going to play “In the Midnight Hour” or “Knock on Wood” or other R & B grooves like that. If you’re going to play “Manic Depression,” that style doesn’t necessarily work. Buddy, and even the famous Stax drummer Al Jackson Jr., as great as he was playing with Otis Redding—they’re sometimes too tight. With cosmic drummers like Roy Haynes and Jack DeJohnette and Tony Williams and Elvin Jones and Mitch Mitchell, there’s a chemistry of bubbles and sparkles that is an entirely different kind of pocket. The extreme is Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s last drummer—that was a pocketless pocket.

John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and Antônio Carlos Jobim and Alice Coltrane, with their looser rhythms and spiritual, praising melodies, were inspiring a change in the kind of music Shrieve and I wanted to do. If you listen to the music from the sessions we started doing in early 1972, you can hear that we sound like we were working with divining rods, looking for water—you can hear things changing in our music from February to March to April and May.

We were looking for our new identity beyond Santana. You could say we were looking for Weather Report and for Miles Davis—I mean, Don Alias and Lenny White, who played on
Bitches Brew,
are also on some Santana recordings. I think what we were all doing was looking for our identity in the same places—rock and jazz—with a spirit of exploration and the courage to try something new, even if it didn’t make sense or we weren’t supposed to do it.
Caravanserai
was the album we weren’t supposed to do.

For the next five months we were Santana mostly when we were in the studio—the band only did a few live shows under that name, and it wasn’t clear what the future of Santana was going to be. We
went ahead with sessions from March to June of ’72 in CBS’s new recording studio in San Francisco—where we had done
Santana III
with Glen Kolotkin. The studio had originally been Coast Recorders, the place where John and Alice Coltrane had done one of their last sessions on the road in 1966, and it made sense that we’d be making the same kind of cosmic music in the studio they had used.

What was strange was that instead of the usual tensions we went through while making the other albums, these sessions were really smooth. We weren’t fighting—that part was over. Instead there was a kind of sadness. David Brown, Stan, and Carabello were gone, and Gregg and Neal agreed to do the music that became
Caravanserai
but were thinking about the music that would become Journey. For me, it was the sadness of feeling the original Santana coming to an end. I think about those months, and I remember I found myself crying a lot—asking myself what was wrong. My body was shedding tears at the dismantling of my relationship with everyone, mourning the fact that we didn’t have each other’s backs, like we used to. To this day I listen to “Song of the Wind” and break down inside hearing Gregg’s playing on that one—no solo, just a simple, supportive organ part that is not flashy or anything but supremely important to the song.

Transitions can be painful, but this period was made more organically smooth by Michael Shrieve. Musically he and I felt that we needed to walk a tightrope with
Caravanserai
—we knew it would mean trying new kinds of music, really stretching. It was Shrieve who said, “Let’s check out Jobim,” and we decided to record “Stone Flower” and write lyrics for it. Players on the album included Gregg, Neal, and Chepito as well as a few new members, such as Mingo and Tom Rutley on bass, who left after these recordings to go back to the jazz world, where he came from. We had Dougie Rauch on some tunes. You can really hear what he brought to “All the Love of the Universe” and “Look Up (to See What’s Coming Down)”—when we heard those tracks, we realized how much we needed Dougie.

Gregg was getting ready to say good-bye, too, but I had heard Tom Coster in Gábor’s band at the same time Dougie was playing with them. Tom—or TC, we called him—was a jazz guy, no two ways about it. He could play everything. I knew if he took over for Gregg he would bring something different to the organ feel in the band and would bring other keyboard sounds, too. He plays that high-energy electric piano solo on “La Fuente del Ritmo.” TC would help create some great songs for Santana when we needed them, such as “Europa” and “Dance Sister Dance.”

With Coster and the others I started to find my own way of talking about what I was hearing in the music. I was learning that especially with new people in the band I needed to be as respectful as possible but also as clear as possible about what I wanted, like: “The chord I’m thinking feels like this—you have to picture a sunset, when the clouds are painted red… no, that chord is the middle of the day. Try this other chord. Okay, that’s like four in the afternoon. Can we get to six o’clock, right before the sun goes down?”

To me, music has always been visual. I can see when there is color or mood, or water or fire or a tear rolling down from an eye, or a smile. That’s the business of a musician: to make the chord or the rhythm or whatever “sound-match” a certain memory or emotion and connect to something real.

I told Glen Kolotkin at the beginning of the sessions that I wanted the album to start with the sound of nature, and he said, “I got just the thing—in my backyard I have a cricket chorus, and you won’t believe how loud they get.” So that’s how the album starts, and then you hear Hadley Caliman playing the saxophone part—the fog whooshing in after the crickets. That’s also Hadley with that wild flute solo on “Every Step of the Way.” There were other local people we brought in—Rico Reyes sang on one tune, and a local guitarist, Doug Rodrigues, played with me on “Waves Within.” Wendy Haas played keyboards on this album, as she would on some other Santana albums. I decided my solo on that tune should cut through the music like a hot knife through butter—some of what I played came from listening to Freddie
Hubbard’s “First Light” and Miles’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Neal and I were quoting a lot and using ideas and feelings that we got from other music. “Astral Traveling,” from Pharoah Sanders’s album
Thembi,
helped give birth to the opening song on
Caravanserai
.