The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (46 page)

You can see it in the covers and in the music: things were changing again inside Santana. We did
Amigos,
and a year later Gaylord Birch left and we got Graham Lear on drums—another Ndugu recommendation. He had heard Graham with Gino Vannelli, and said, “This cat is bad!” He was right—like Steve Gadd, Graham had precision and soulfulness. He stayed with us for almost seven years, into the ’80s, and I learned a lot from him. Chepito liked him, too, and used to call him Refugee because he was from Canada—that coming from a Nicaraguan. Onstage I would announce him as “Graham Lear the Great.” If you want to hear how good a feel Graham could bring to a track, check out “Aqua Marine” on
Marathon
from ’79 or any other instrumental from around that time. Soulful precision!

Around the time
Inner Secrets
was about to come out in ’78, Greg Walker was getting ready to leave Santana, and we brought in Alex Ligertwood, someone else who was in my Rolodex. I first heard him when he was singing in David Sancious’s band, Tone, and they opened for us at the Beacon Theatre in 1975. David is a bad dude. He plays guitar and keyboards and came from Bruce Springsteen’s band and wore Zorro hats like the ones Lenny White used to wear—a real rock fusion guy. I noticed that David’s singer had a great R & B voice, even though you could hardly understand him when he’d speak to you—he has such a thick Scottish accent. I called Alex, and he did a few gigs with us with Greg singing, too, and I found I liked the idea of two singers. They could cover for each other—one higher and clearer, the other lower and more bluesy, more across the tracks.

Over the years I’ve tried that again and again. That’s how we do it today, with two singers—Tony Lindsay, Andy Vargas, and sometimes Tommy Anthony, who plays guitar but can also go high and clear with his voice. It’s like basketball—some guys bring the
toughness, and other guys are like cheetahs. Still others are like anchors to a song. We need the versatility, but I need you to not drop the ball. I perceive the musicians in my band as players, and our goal is to reach the heart, any way we can.

By the end of ’78 Greg left us, and Alex fit right in. He became the voice of Santana on many of our albums and on most of our tours in the ’80s and into the ’90s. He can make you feel God in his singing—as he did when he sang “Somewhere in Heaven” on the
Milagro
album in ’92. You believe him.

One thing that hadn’t changed: I was still Devadip. When I did my own albums at the end of the ’70s I used that name because those were albums between albums: there was Santana the band, then there was Devadip Carlos Santana the person.
Oneness
and
The Swing of Delight
are two of my most personal albums. I did
Oneness
in 1979, and I was influenced by Weather Report and synthesizer sounds and their great album
Mysterious Traveller.

I did
The Swing of Delight
a year later, and Dave Rubinson helped me persuade Columbia to do that one, too, so I could get Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter,
and
Tony Williams to play. That was Miles’s band from the 1960s.

I looked around the studio and was scared to death, thinking, “What the hell am I doing?” That will make a guitar player turn down—turn it down and go deep, deep inside himself for the inner stuff. In the middle of the recording Wayne had a moment of doubt, which was very unusual for him. He stopped the song. Everybody stepped back from the mikes, and Tony put his sticks down. Wayne just shook his head and said, “That wasn’t me. I never play desperate or frantic. Let’s start again.”

I was feeling very blessed that we achieved everything I set out to do with that album at a high level.
DownBeat
magazine gave it a great review. I guess they could feel the intention. That album came from my wanting to honor Sri for what he had done for us—Deborah and me. He made the painting on the cover, with its pattern of gold and cherries.

I really started to get friendly with Wayne and Herbie during the making of that album. That was when I got to know them, to sit and talk with them. Wayne was much easier and more relaxed than he had been eight years earlier, when we first got together. He opened up and started to tell me stories about Miles and insights about the music that would take ten minutes to explain. Or he would show me something from a big, thick book of drawings he had. Once he showed me a picture of a woman from Venus. I asked Wayne why she had four feet. He said, “She doesn’t have four feet, she’s just moving really fast.” Okay, thanks for clearing that up. One thing I can say about my relationship with Wayne is that I often have to slow down to catch up with his velocity. He’s the one who’s always moving fast.

Wayne never takes anything too seriously—least of all himself. Here’s something else he told me once: “I’m going to go on the road as a comedy act, just me and a soprano saxophone. And I’m going to be the straight man.”

From the first time I got to hang with Wayne and Herbie, I could tell they were about spiritual principles and observations and cracking each other up. They were about being themselves, untainted by any particular way of behaving, like children with integrity and pristineness.

Herbie is a supreme genius and sweet as ice cream and pie, as Elvin Jones would say. I first met him when he opened for us at the Boarding House in ’72, and after that we would see each other around and he’d tell me about his chanting and that he liked to eat at Dipti Nivas, which by the end of the ’70s was the number one vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. In ’70, he was recording in San Francisco with Ndugu, and Chepito told me that Herbie wanted me to come over and sit in. I was honored but didn’t have time to play, because we were leaving the next day for Brazil.

Herbie is from Chicago, and that’s in his sound, by way of the blues. Once I was telling him to listen to some Otis Spann, and he said that he wasn’t familiar with him. I realized, “Oh, right. There
are always two sides of town—at least two. There’s the blues sentiment of Otis Spann and Sunnyland Slim and Jimmy Johnson, who backed up Chuck Berry—that’s one side, and there’s Wynton Kelly and Red Garland and John Lewis on the other. Still, Herbie can give you all of them at the same time.

Nobody’s more modern or fearless than Herbie is with electric pianos and synthesizers—real artists are not afraid of technology. Starting when he was with Miles, he found a way to utilize those instruments so they didn’t sound offensive or weird. Years later, when he and I were welcomed together at the Kennedy Center Honors, Snoop Dogg thanked Herbie for giving birth to hip-hop. I’m not sure how many people understand how huge that is and how true. Just listen to his album
Sunlight,
which came out even before “Rockit”—everybody uses those ideas now.

Today if I put on
Oneness
and listen to those tracks I remember that by then Deborah and I had gotten back on track and I was hanging with SK a lot more. Some of the music came from that, including “Silver Dreams Golden Smiles.” SK played guitar and sang on that one, and Clare Fischer did the string arrangements.

In 1981 Deborah agreed that we should both leave Sri—it was time to dust off our feet and get moving. We left our place in Queens late one night, leaving behind all our things, just like that. Later I heard that Sri was going to take my name back and told some disciples not to associate with us anymore because Deborah and I were going to drown in a sea of ignorance, which I didn’t like hearing because I didn’t want to back down from what made me go to him in the first place. I didn’t stop believing in the principles and the divinity and light within—but that was a dark thing to say.

The Sri I knew would say things like, “When the power of love replaces the love of power, man will have a new name: God.” I’m not sure how it happened, but many people think Jimi Hendrix said that. He didn’t; that was Sri.

Sri helped me be more than just Santana the guitar player. He
helped me get to a deeper awareness of my own light, a deeper awareness of my own connection with divinity and humanity and the invisible realm. It’s God, no matter what you call it, and he is beyond all praise. He doesn’t need a billboard—he doesn’t need us to worship and adore him. We need to honor and worship and work on ourselves, to crystallize our existence by discipline. That’s the most important thing I got from Sri, and I’m still guided by that principle.

Miles Davis and me at the Savoy, New York City, May 5, 1981.

In the ’80s Santana could tour just as much as we wanted. We navigated across the country, playing the same venues in the same cities, from Detroit to Chicago to Cleveland to the usual places in the New York area—Nassau Coliseum, Jones Beach. You could hear us on classic rock and oldies radio stations. I’m proud that those songs kept good guitar playing out there for many years, even when there were few guitar solos on popular songs. You could hear oldies on the elevator or at Starbucks with a solo by Eric Clapton or Jimmy Page, and sometimes the solo itself was more memorable than the song.

One of the best compliments I got after
Supernatural
was from Prince. He said, “Carlos, because of you I can play a guitar solo on one
of my songs and it’ll be on the radio.” I had never thought of that. I replied, “Yeah, it wasn’t cool to have guitar solos on songs for a while.”

In the ’80s, radio wasn’t making or breaking Santana. I think our reputation was always more about our shows, because people need to be given chills. When you get chills you immediately become present in the now. And because of that our audiences can feel that the intention and purpose of the band is a whole lot more than entertainment. It’s to remind everyone on a molecular level of their own significance, to convey the idea that each of us has the power to bring forward abundance from the universe right now. Santana is a live experience, bringing the moment more than the memory. That will never change.

I
n 1981 it was time for a new start and a new home—a family home. Deborah and I left the East Coast and moved from Marin County to Santa Cruz. It was the first house we bought together since we had met, and right after that her parents and my parents came to visit. We started to spend more time with our friends, and Carabello and I reunited because he had married Mimi Sanchez, who was still one of Deborah’s best friends. They started coming to the house a lot. We were both older and smarter by then.

Watching Carabello grow to become a proud man who is positive and honorable has been gratifying to see, because I want people to understand that we need to believe in each other. It makes us stronger than we are by ourselves, and it can make us change. There’s always someone in every neighborhood who in the end redeems himself. In my neighborhood it was Carabello—we have so much history between us, which goes back to my Mission High days, and I’m very pleased about that.

Just as I did, Carabello remained friends with Miles—he stayed at Miles’s town house when he visited New York City. In ’81 Miles was coming back after he had stopped playing in ’76. Nobody had heard from him for around five years. All the stories said that he was in a dark place with the curtains closed. I sent him cards and flowers once in a while, and I heard through Herbie and Dave
Rubinson about him because they used to visit him. I know he thought of me, and I thought of him.

Santana played Buffalo that year, and as we were getting ready to come to New York City to play the Savoy we were listening to some Miles. I remember Rashiki asking if I thought Miles would ever put the trumpet to his lips and play again. We still didn’t know. I said, “Nothing is really impossible—maybe when he gets bored.”

Sure enough, a few days later, when we got to New York, I heard Carabello was coming to our show at the Savoy and bringing Miles. I couldn’t believe it. We finished doing the sound check, and there they were backstage. Miles had on a suit that made him look a little raggedy, like he was living a funky life.

It didn’t matter. Man, it was beautiful to see him. Bill Graham was producing that tour and got as excited as a kid. “Miles, it’s so great to see you! Thanks for coming out. How are you doing? How do you feel?”

Miles seemed to think Bill was checking up on him. “What?” he said.

“How do you feel, man?”

Miles said, “Put your hand up like this.” Bill put his hand up, and Miles punched it real hard—a Sugar Ray Robinson jab, up close and hard. “I feels fine, Jewboy.” Same old Miles.

I went to my room to meditate, as I do before I go onstage, and Miles followed me. I told him what I had to do, and I closed my eyes and started getting quiet and going inside. I wanted to do that for at least ten or fifteen minutes. Miles was very respectful—he didn’t talk, but I could feel his eyes, like two lasers, focusing on the medallion I was wearing. I could hear him breathe, and I opened my eyes. He was looking at the medallion like he was going to pierce it with his gaze, so I said, “Miles, do you want it?” He said, “Only if you put it on me.” I took it off, put it on him, and he said, “I pray, too, you know.”

“You pray, Miles?”

“Of course. When I want to score some cocaine I’ll say, ‘God, please make that motherfucker be home.’ ”

I was like, “Oh, dang!”

There’s a thing I used to do whenever we played and Miles was near—I still do it when we’re in New York City. I’ll play a little bit of “Will o’ the Wisp” from
Sketches of Spain
. We played it in the concert at the Savoy, and after the show Miles mentioned it for the first time. “Yeah, I like the way you play that. A lot of people don’t know how to do it right.” I said, “Miles, we got a limousine. Would you like us to take you home?” So five of us got into the limo—Miles, Carabello, saxophone player Bill Evans, Rashiki, and I. When Carabello got in the front he slid the seat back, which hit Miles on his foot, which was already hurting for some reason. Miles got real brutal, and he immediately went off on Carabello.

We started driving around, then suddenly Miles turned to me and said, “Carlos, this Puerto Rican bitch tried to get some cortisone in me to help me with this thing I have with my foot. She was saying, ‘Cortisone this, cortisone that.’ ” I thought about it and laughed. “Miles, she’s saying
corazón
—that means ‘sweetheart.’ She loves you.”

God loves characters, and God loves Miles. That whole night was incredible, crazy. It felt like we had fallen into someone else’s weird version of Wonderland—like we had slipped down a rabbit hole into some other dark, scary world. Miles was telling us where to go. He was in charge, and everywhere we went you could see that people knew him well. Whether they were happy to see him was another thing. He’d try to get away with a lot of stuff—testing people, doing his street act.

Miles took us to one of those nightclubs that looked like it had come out of
Escape from New York.
It had steel shutters everywhere. We got out of the limo, and I was wondering why we were there, because it looked like an abandoned factory. Then a big security guard carrying a baseball bat came up to us. He said to me, “You guys are all right. I know who you are.” Then he pointed to Miles
and said, “Why do you have to bring him here?” Miles walked right past him into the dingy building, and I just followed.

Miles went straight to the piano, which was beat up and out of tune. He said to me, “Come here—I want to show you something.”

I said, “Okay,” and went over to him. Miles looked at the keyboard and stretched those long fingers of his. Man, you could do a whole movie just on Miles’s hands. He was doing the same thing Wayne does at the piano—look, wait, then pounce. It’s funny—my wife eats that way: Cindy with food, Wayne and Miles with chords. That night, when Miles hit the chord, the whole club just disappeared—suddenly I was in Spain, in a castle in an old adventure movie. Miles said, “Do you hear it?”

I said, “Of course—that’s incredible. Thank you.” He got ready to show me something else, but some guy got up and put a quarter in the jukebox, and the song “Muscles” by Diana Ross came on, totally changing the mood. Miles looked over at the guy, who knew what he had done, because he was looking back. Miles stared at him some more and then said, “Man, you know who I am?” He said, “You’re Miles Davis. Big deal.” Just like that. That was all Miles needed to hear. He smiled and went up to the bar. “Give me a fucking rum and Coke. And whatever he wants.”

Miles started to get bored with the place, so we all got back in the limo, and Miles said, “Carlos, are you hungry?”

“Yeah, I could eat something.”

“I know a great place where they have black bean soup.” So he told the driver where to go, and we got to talking. Suddenly Miles looked up and saw that we’d driven too far. This was through his sunglasses and the tinted windows and all that. He opened the partition behind the driver and shouted, “Hey! You passed it—it’s two blocks back. Back up the car!” The driver said, “I can’t go back: it’s a one-way street.”
Slap!
Miles reached through the little window and whacked him on the back of his head! “I’m telling you—go back!”

So we backed up the narrow New York street and went into the restaurant, another funky place. We found a table, and Miles said, “I’ll be right back; I got to go pee.” On the way to the men’s room he saw a
woman and stopped and started talking to her and then whispered in her ear. When he was gone, she turned to me and said, “You’re a nice man. Why are you hanging around this filthy-mouthed guy?”

While Miles was in the bathroom, the soup arrived, and a big, burly waiter with huge arms came over and said, “Hey, Santana, want some bread with that soup?”

“No thanks—I’m cool. Just the soup.” But when Miles came back he didn’t see a bread basket, so he told the guy to come over. “Hey, motherfucker, where’s the bread?” The waiter looked at Miles and put his big arm on the table right next to Miles’s face and said, “Man, what did you just call me?”

This is the part that was like
Alien vs. Predator
. Miles had some really long fingernails, so he put his beautiful black hand around the guy’s arm really slowly, looked up at him, and in a really creepy way said, “I’ll scratch you.” The guy shook his head and kind of slithered away. Rashiki and I were looking at each other like, “Man, this is some scary shit.”

A whole night with Miles in New York—it was really challenging sometimes to be with that dude. That night ended when the sun was starting to come up and Miles took us with him to score some coke. We drove to a neighborhood where I didn’t want to get out of the limo, so I told him that I had to get back to the hotel because we had an early flight later that morning. Rashiki and I stayed in the limo—I took some money out of my wallet and gave it to Carabello and said, “Here’s some cab money for you and Bill Evans.” I waved good-bye to Miles, but he was already walking away into the dawn, getting smaller and smaller.

I remember thinking he seemed like a kid walking through Toys“R”Us who knows he can pick out anything he wants. Everybody in New York knew him. He had carte blanche—he was Miles Davis.

I saw Miles again later that year in New York City when he played Avery Fisher Hall. He came right up to me and gave me a hug, which was the first of only two times he did that. I really cherished those moments—I didn’t see him hug many people. At Avery Fisher it was the strangest hug—he locked his hands behind
my head and put his nose to mine, so we’re looking straight into each other’s eyes, then he picked himself up from the ground while holding on to my neck. So he was hanging from me, and he looked at me and said, “Carlos, it means so much that you’re here.”

The second time Miles hugged me was at his sixtieth birthday party in 1986, on a yacht that was docked at a marina in Malibu. I felt so moved afterward that when he went to greet somebody else I went off the boat just to take a moment. I was looking at the ripples in the water when his nephew, Vince Wilburn, came over, and I said, “Man, it really affects me when he greets me like that.” He said, “I saw that. Right after you left he said, ‘That’s a bad motherfucker right there.’ ”

It’s something to be validated by a giant like that—a giant who was a divine rascal, too. I remember he was an hour and a half late to his own party that day, and while we were waiting I was talking with Tony Williams, who was smoking a cigar next to the boat, and he told me, “This isn’t the first time he’s done that.”

Zebop
was the album I made when I started playing a Paul Reed Smith guitar—which would become my main guitar. Paul is still my main guitar maker to this day. He and Randy the Boogie Man have given birth to creations that have done so much for guitarists and pushed the boundaries of excellence, each in his own way—Paul with his guitars and Randy with those Boogie amplifiers.

Paul Reed Smith—I like his heart and the people he hires. His workshop is like the set of a science fiction movie. More science than fiction. From the carving to the measuring to the fine-tuning to the varnishing, he knows the science of it and how to get the balance right so the guitar has—here’s the word: consistency. No matter the weather or the place or the circumstances, a PRS guitar will not fail you, because it behaves itself. One other thing: whenever Paul ships them, the guitars always come out of the case in tune. It’s a personal touch.

The funny thing is that when I first fell in love with two of those
PRS guitars, they were the prototypes. I had models 1 and 3, but meanwhile Paul had moved on and redesigned his guitars and was manufacturing them. It wasn’t just the shape—the new model of what I had been playing sounded different to me, a little more nasal. I asked Paul to go back to the old style, but he said it was cost-prohibitive at that point to redo the guitar. My argument was that I know what happens when somebody sees Tony Williams playing a Gretsch or Jimi Hendrix with a Stratocaster or Wes Montgomery with a wide-body guitar. I just knew if kids could see me with that guitar they’d want the same thing—and I knew there would be enough of those kids to make it work on the business side. I had a feeling about product endorsements—my name could sell things besides albums and concert tickets.