The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (11 page)

I can’t tell you exactly when my perception changed from rock and roll to the blues, but it was like a laser when it happened. Over time you start to learn about it—you learn to understand that the blues is a very sacred language. It really has to be played by musicians
who know and feel its history and respect its power. When you have people who do honor and respect the music like that—man, they are able to captivate. If they don’t, they have to play at it, they cuss and swear, and it’s like listening to a comedian who’s not funny. Nothing sounds worse than mediocre blues. If you don’t know how to play it, you have no business doing it. When you go to an altar at the Vatican you don’t start putting up graffiti and shit.

The blues is a very, very no-nonsense thing. It’s easy to learn the structure of the songs, the words and the riffs, but it’s not like some other styles of music—you can’t hide behind it. Even if you are a great musician, if you want to really play the blues you have to be willing to go to a deeper place in your heart and do some digging. You have to reveal yourself. If you can’t make it personal and show an individual fingerprint, it’s not going to work. That’s really where you find the magnificence in the simple three-chord blues, in the fingerprints of blues guitarists like T-Bone Walker, B. B. King, Albert King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, and all the cats from Chicago—Otis Rush, Hubert Sumlin.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about the blues. Maybe it’s because the word means so many things. The blues is a musical form—twelve bars, three chords—but it’s also a musical feeling expressed in what notes you play and how you play each note. The blues can also be an emotion or a color. Sometimes the difference is not so clear. You can be talking about the music, then the feeling, then what’s in the words of a song. John Lee Hooker singing, “Mmm, mmm, mmm—Big legs, tight skirt / ’Bout to drive me out of my mind…” It’s all the blues.

To me, jazz is like the ocean—wider than the eye can see, with many places to go to and explore. I see the blues as a lake—you can look across it, travel around it, get to know it quickly. But you have to really dive into it, because it can be very, very deep.

A lot of musicians put down the blues—it’s too simple; it’s too limited. They criticize it because they can’t do it, and they have no interest in figuring out how to imprint so much feeling and emotion onto just three chords. Or a good blues shuffle? Just because
someone plays jazz doesn’t mean he should dismiss a rhythm like that. I’m not going to name names, because I don’t want to get in trouble, but I am here to tell you that I’ve heard a few jazz drummers who do not know how to play a shuffle. Great jazz drummers. Again, some things are made of gold and should be respected that way. A good blues shuffle is pure gold.

The blues is nothing if not deep and emotional. The blues can be about joy and celebration, and of course imploring and lamenting—but the real blues is not whiny. Whiny is like a baby who’s not really hungry, but he’s still crying and maybe just wants to be picked up. That’s the trouble with a lot of guitar players trying to play the blues: they whine a lot.

Imploring means, “I need a hug from the celestial arms, from the supreme. I need an absolute hug.” That can happen to anybody. You can be rich or poor or healthy or sick. When a woman that you love more than your next breath leaves you, or when your own mom turns her back on you, that’s the blues. The things of the earth are things of the earth, and things of the spirit are things of the spirit—and the spirit has to have what it needs. When they talk about the healing power of the blues, that’s what they mean.

In Tijuana I would hear all sorts of music, Mexican and American, but for some reason it was the blues that felt most natural to me. I listened to the blues 24-7 and studied it as I had never studied anything before. In San Francisco we were the Santana Blues Band and played blues exclusively at the start. Then our music changed. We became Santana, but the blues was always part of the feel in the music. If you look at all the Santana albums now, you’ll see that there are a few tunes you could call blues—“Blues for Salvador,” obviously, and the beginning of “Practice What You Preach.” The jam with Eric Clapton on
Supernatural
. They aren’t strictly blues numbers, but that feeling will always come through my music.

I’ve been hanging around the lake for a long time now. Like jazz, the blues knows its own history. It has rituals and rules that must be respected. Everyone knows them, and everyone knows
everyone—the guitar heroes and what they sound like. Who did you listen to, and where did you get your style? Who influenced whom, and who’s your daddy? It’s easy to hear that. I’ll put it this way—B. B. King has a lot of children.

There’s a story that Stevie Ray Vaughan told me. He had been playing in Texas for years before he got big in 1983, playing with David Bowie on “Let’s Dance” and sounding that nasty, stinging tone like Albert King. Then he was playing blues and rock festivals—the big leagues. The first time he ran into Albert after that, Stevie was so happy to see him. Albert was backstage, sitting down and working on his pipe. He didn’t get up, didn’t shake Stevie’s hand. He just looked at Stevie. “You owe me fifty thousand dollars.”

That was the price for copping his style. You know what Stevie told me? He paid it.

When I started out in Tijuana, I played funky three-chord blues changes. After a while, I started to get into songs like “Georgia on My Mind” and “Misty” a little bit. As time went by, I got more and more into the blues—
black
blues. And more and more, the guys I hung out with were into nothing but the hard-core blues—black American music. Other groups in Tijuana would want to play Elvis Presley or Fabian or Bobby Rydell, that Dick Clark kind of stuff. Yuck. Even when songs by Pat Boone and Paul Anka, songs like “Volare,” were popular and played on the radio, we didn’t want to touch that. We had a badge of honor.

Once I started going down that road, there was no turning back. The blacker the sound, the rootsier the guitar, the more I wanted it. That meant I wanted to hear black singers whenever I could. Tijuana had its resident R & B star, Gene Ross—he sort of looked like Joe Frazier. Don Lauro Saaveda, who ran El Convoy, had brought him down from New Orleans. Gene had a falsetto voice like Aaron Neville’s, with power, and he could play the hell out of the piano. He had a big repertoire of songs—many I didn’t know
till he sang them: “Summertime,” “Georgia on My Mind,” “Let the Good Times Roll,” “Something’s Got a Hold on Me.” He’d sing “I Loves You, Porgy,” and man, it just gave you chills.

Playing in the house band at El Convoy meant I eventually played as support for Gene and also behind these other weekend musicians, black Americans who came down from San Diego to play, like this one guy who called himself Mr. T and looked like he was Albert King’s brother. He would hit Tijuana, score some grass and some uppers, get up some courage, and sing “Stormy Monday Blues.” That was his one song, and he would kill it every time. Other musicians would come down from as far away as San Jose for a long weekend, spend all their money in their first night, then sing at El Convoy to make enough money to get back home on Sunday.

Gene and these black weekenders became my teachers—they took my blues training to another level. After a while I couldn’t learn anything else from the radio or records—I had to really, really get in it live. The only way was if these blues guys were right next to me like that, close enough for me to feel the way the singer would stomp his foot, and the way he’d be getting on that piano. I would learn by the dirty looks they gave me if I messed up the changes or the time. It was all extremely educational because I learned the ingredients—the rhythms and the flow, the sound symmetry—of that music.

I remember Gene would be at the piano, and the bartender would line up between five and seven shots of tequila, and that’s how many songs would be in the set. He’d finish one song and knock back a shot. The cat was blacker than black; his lips were purple, his eyes were yellower than yellow, and he had the prettiest voice I had ever heard. He also had the prettiest white girlfriend I had ever seen, like Elizabeth Taylor beautiful.

Gene was a rough dude—I remember one time his brother was visiting, and they started roughhousing with each other, just brothers messing around, and they almost tore the whole place down! Gene had served in Korea and could get real angry sometimes. Just
a year after I left Tijuana for the last time I heard he got into a fight with some Mexican guy. He brought a knife to a machete fight, and that was the end of Gene Ross. It’s too bad he never recorded, because that cat had the most gorgeous voice.

Later on I got to know that Tijuana was a kind of Casablanca for black Americans—neutral territory away from the race war of America. Let’s face it: racism was very active then and still is, especially in San Diego, where you had a lot of white kids in the military who were raised thinking that way—angry, hating blacks and browns, looking for a fight. In Mexico everyone was on more even ground, and the Mexican police were just waiting for those racist kind of guys to get out of hand and give them some back-alley justice.

I want to say that it’s a cliché about the drunk American tourists acting ignorant and getting derogatory, but I witnessed that many times—drinking and getting a little too loud with their feelings about Mexicans. “You’re not in America now,” the cops would say and whale away at them with nightsticks. Then they would throw the tourists in jail and “lose” their passports for a few days. There were so many stories about Tijuana jails—they could be brutal. You did not want to mess with the police there. You were not going to win that fight.

The first time I experienced racism directed at me I had just started to get into the guitar. I was still a little light-haired, and the border was a lot more open then. A friend had taught me how to pronounce “American citizen” like an American would, and he told me that all I had to do was walk across the border and say “American citizen” at the checkpoint and just keep walking. And it worked! Then I would take a bus to San Diego and go to a place Javier told me about—Apex Music. They had the best guitars—Gibsons, Gretsches, Epiphones. I wasn’t so much a Fender guy, not even then. I found that you had to crank Fenders up really, really loud to get something out of them, or you would sound like the guys playing with Lawrence Welk.

I had just enough money with me to take the bus to Apex and
back, so I never went inside. I was too intimidated. One time I was standing there just salivating, looking in the store window at these most gorgeous freaking guitars and amplifiers with tweed covers. I wanted to smell and know what they felt like in my hands! Suddenly I heard a voice behind me. “Hey, you fucking chili-bean eater, fucking Mexican, Pancho Villa!” I froze. “Hey, I’m talking to you!” I slowly turned around and realized that there were two sailors screaming at me. “You fucking little Pancho Villa chili-bean eater!” What? Who? My mind filled with questions, but I just started walking away—quickly.

I was thinking that this was just like a bullfight—don’t get in the bullring, and you’ll be all right. Just keep walking and ignore them. I don’t know if they were drunk, but it was around four in the afternoon. They followed me for a little bit, screaming like idiots. Then they got bored and went to drink some more, I guess. That was the first time I actually heard the sound of pure hate directed toward me simply because of the way I looked. That wasn’t my first time across the border, but it made me think twice about going back.

By the beginning of 1962, I was playing all the time and learning fast. I had the steady gig at the Convoy, and it was a real high watching the music taking shape, doing songs by Etta James, Freddie King, Ray Charles—really getting to know that style of music. I loved it. When I started I only played weekdays—I would get there after school at 5:00 p.m. and play until 11:00 p.m., three sets a night. Then I got to play weekends on top of that, starting at eight and playing until five or six in the morning!

I was also back to playing my first instrument. Part of my deal with my mom when I first got the guitar was that I would get out my violin again and play as part of the church service every Sunday. I played “Ave Maria” and some classical pieces like Bach’s Minuet in G Major with this one accordion player. I don’t think they had enough money for an organ or a bigger band. I did that for almost half a year to appease my mom while I was getting stuck on the guitar.

I would get so high—on the music, on not getting enough sleep, and on playing all through the night. When I say high, I also mean dizzy—from forgetting to eat. It was funny, but I used to love getting out of the club in the morning, seeing the sunrise, and feeling light-headed from having played all night with no meal. If it was Sunday, I’d go straight from El Convoy to church and play “Ave Maria” on the violin and all that. I didn’t have really good eating habits, but my friends turned me on to going to the street corner and getting juices. I mean, carrot juice, celery, and raw eggs, and then they blend it and you drink it. Man, that would get me so high it would take me to the next level. I never smoked any pot then, though everybody around me did, but I got stoned just being in that environment, and then I started drinking and soon realized that was going the wrong way when I woke up one day passed out on the street.

The freedom I had during that year and a half was heaven. I was like a sponge. I was learning how to take care of myself in the music business, learning lessons such as the more steady the gig, the more likely I was to get paid. I had been naive, playing my first gigs and not getting paid at all; getting burned because of all the bullshit they’d tell kids—“We can’t pay you because you’re not in the union”; “Come back next week and we’ll pay you after the next show.” Yeah, sure. Some things my father could tell me about being a musician, but I had to learn most things on my own and to build myself up.

By the time I was the featured guitarist at El Convoy, I was making nine dollars a week. I had no idea about the other musicians, but once a week the manager called me upstairs to the office. I’d get my money in cash, put it in my pocket, and take it home to Mom—she got all of it. I didn’t question any part of this or try to negotiate. I was happy to be playing and to be part of the scene.