The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (19 page)

My sisters still laugh when they remember the night I came home and was scratching my head and two joints dropped out of my long hair onto the floor! I don’t know if my mom didn’t see them or just didn’t want to see them. Maria scooped them up and gave them to a friend of hers who got high. Another time I left some weed in the hem of the white curtains at home. My mom, the clean freak, washed them, and they came out with a green stain along the bottom. She had no idea how that happened.

That was a sign I needed to eject myself from living at home. I couldn’t be listening to my music and smoking weed and coming home early in the morning with the family around. Another sign was that Tony had already left home by then to start his family, and so had Laura. I was nineteen at the end of that summer, but I stayed in my mom’s house for another year, still going to Mission High in the morning but then going off and doing my thing. And hanging out with Stan and Ron at their place until six in the morning. Meanwhile they were turning me on to more new music. We were listening to the Beatles and a whole lot of Bob Dylan.

Most of the time I was focused on playing with Danny and Gus, trying new things, and meeting other musicians and jamming. I didn’t know what I was looking for. It’s like when you go shopping for a present and you don’t know what you want to get, but you know it when you find it. But I did know what I didn’t like and what I did not want to play. I knew we weren’t going to be part of the San Francisco sound. We called that Hippieland, and we really tried to avoid it. We were listening to some really great music then—Hendrix, the Doors, the Beatles—but there wasn’t much in San Francisco that could stand up to that. Too much of it felt kind of phony almost as soon as it got popular. The whole country was
going, “Yeah, baby; groovy and peace!” Sammy Davis Jr. was in a Nehru jacket and beads. Too many people were jumping on that wagon just for the ride. We had our own direction in music.

Stan, Ron, and I went to as many shows at the Fillmore Auditorium as we could that year. I was still not 100 percent sure of my English and was speaking with a thick accent. But in Stan I had someone who could speak for me when I got to the door with no money. He had no experience as a manager, but he knew how to talk to people. Nothing stopped him—he was bold, and that was a side to him I really loved. One time Charles Lloyd was playing the Fillmore, and we were there just looking up in awe at him and his band—Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Ron McClure. Stan felt he had to say something, so just before they went on he went up to Charles and said something like, “Charles Lloyd, play it one damn time for the world, man!” He just smiled and did exactly that—played his ass off. Back then I could never have done that—those guys scared me!

One Sunday afternoon in October, Stan did his thing and spoke up for me, and after that everything started to change.

The Butterfield Blues Band was on a bill with Jefferson Airplane and Big Mama Thornton. She’s the blues singer who first sang “Hound Dog” before Elvis had the hit and “Ball and Chain” before Janis did it. We had to be there. That Sunday they were doing a matinee, and Stan and I got there early and saw that Paul Butterfield was not going to be playing that night. He was totally out of it—tripping on acid, wandering around in his bare feet, watching the wall like it was a TV. He hadn’t slept all night.

Onstage they were getting a jam together. Michael was directing things and playing organ because their keyboard player, Mark Naftalin, hadn’t showed up. Jerry Garcia and some of the guys from Jefferson Airplane, including Jorma Kaukonen, were going to play. Stan and I could see Michael’s guitar onstage and noticed that no one was playing it. Stan decided to take charge and see what he could make happen. He went up to Bill. “Hey, man, is it all right if
my Mexican friend over there plays a little guitar with those guys?” Bill shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not in charge of that. Go ask Bloomfield.”

Bloomfield looked at Stan and said, “Where is he?” Stan pointed to me. To this day I have no idea if Michael recognized me from that time I had challenged him. It didn’t matter. His answer had the same vibe I felt that first time. “Come on, man. Grab my guitar—plug it in.”

I got up onstage. They started into a blues—what else? “Good morning, little schoolgirl. / Can I come home with you?” Garcia played a solo, then they turned to me. I closed my eyes and hit it…
bam
.

We finished the tune, and I was smiling. It had felt good to be on that stage, to play with musicians who had it together and kept a good beat. Afterward people came up to me—“What’s your name? You have a band?” I told them who I was, that I was part of a group, and that we didn’t have a name. Then Bill came up to me. “Here’s my phone number—call me. I have a couple of dates open.”

That was it—we were going to play the Fillmore, and we’d be on those posters! Now we
really
needed a band name.

I did not know how important one blues solo could be—and it’s not just that Bill Graham invited me to play for him. Around a week later I was washing dishes at the Tic Tock when one of the waiters came into the kitchen and said, “Hey, Carlos, someone wants to talk to you.”

A young guy I’d never seen before put his head through the opening to the kitchen. “You’re Santana?” He was looking at me, up to my elbows in soap. “Man, I heard you the other day with Bloomfield. That was some great playing. Listen, I live in Palo Alto. I sing and play guitar with some guys, and we need a guitar player. We’re going to jam tonight. I got my car outside. I think you’ll really enjoy the band.”

Tom Fraser was a singer and guitarist who had been looking to put together a band and was at the Fillmore Auditorium that afternoon.
I was open to anything. “Okay. Let me finish up here—I’ll go.” Next thing I know we’re in Mountain View—the other side of Palo Alto—which is like the ghetto. Out in some old farmhouse in the fields near the shoreline. They had instruments set up, including a Hammond organ. That impressed me right away. I was already obsessed with the jazz guys playing Hammond organ—Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff. That’s when I first heard George Benson, playing in McGriff’s band. Later he became Miles’s first guitarist.

Danny, Gus, and I had found our first keyboard player earlier that year and had been working with him for around two months. He looked like that
Where’s Waldo?
guy—we called him Weirdo. He played a Farfisa, and I liked it because we could get that Question Mark and the Mysterians, “96 Tears” kind of sound—and also do songs by Sam the Sham and Sir Douglas Quintet.

Out at the farmhouse I started plugging in, and the organ player came over and we started talking. His name was Gregg Rolie. I remember thinking, “I know this guy.” I had seen Gregg before, before the Fillmore opened, at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bigger than a club but not as big as the Fillmore, which hadn’t opened yet. Gregg played there with a band called William Penn and His Pals. They would dress like Paul Revere and the Raiders and similar groups—in uniforms with floppy sleeves and tricorn hats, like the kind we’d see on
Shindig!
on TV. I remember Danny, Gus, and I were laughing at that—it never felt like anything more than a novelty, a first-kiss kind of thing. That all came and went really quickly.

I had a joint with me, and Gregg was drinking a beer, and we started talking. We clicked even before we started playing. It turned out he was a big jazz-organ fan, too, and we were both listening to the same kind of black music.

We jammed on “Comin’ Home Baby,” a tune Herbie Mann had a hit with that I knew from the radio. It was one of those groove kind of things, not complicated, that came out around the time
“The Sidewinder” and other jazz tunes were starting to infiltrate mainstream radio—what we now call crossover. Gregg was listening to that music, too, and he could hang with a groove. Then we played “As the Years Go Passing By” by Albert King—a blues guitar piece, really. But Gregg knew the words to that and liked to sing it. I could tell he was a good singer, and we needed one in the band.

The noise we were making must have woken up some neighbors. Then came the cops with their sirens going, like we were breaking into a bank. They found us with our instruments, the air smelling of dope. One of them was ready to just throw the cuffs on us and haul us away. The other one started asking questions, telling his partner to relax.

“Whose house is this?”

We pointed at Tom.

“What’s the name of your band?”

“We’re not really a band.”

“Well, you sound pretty good.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Listen, you guys are playing a little loud. I know it’s not that late. Can you bring it down anyway and put that other stuff away?”

“Okay.”

Meeting a polite cop like that was like a blessing at the start of the partnership that became Santana. Here was another angel interceding when we needed it. He gave us a thumbs-up and looked the other way when he could have taken us all in, which the other cop was itching to do.

And he was right: we did sound good.

Playing with a good keyboard player is like having a nice, soft bed to lie down on, with a big pillow. That was Gregg. Gregg and I started talking and hanging around, and we found we had more things in common than Jimmy Smith. Later I told Danny and Gus about the guys I’d just played with, but when we met, Danny and Gus immediately didn’t like them. They remembered William Penn and His Pals, too. “We don’t want to hang around with them; they’re squares.” I couldn’t argue—they did look like suburban
kids from Palo Alto. Carabello said, “We’re going to have to dress these guys better.”

I liked Gregg and Tom, but Danny and Gus were pissed because they felt I turned my back on them. I’ve been accused of many things many times, but this was the first time I was made to feel I was turning my back on Mexicans. It didn’t matter—all I could see was what the band needed, and these guys from Palo Alto had it.

Gregg liked us. I think that part of what endeared us to him is that we were really, really strange—Carabello and I were always kind of going at it and being crazy, but we had a camaraderie. He felt it was good for him to be immersed in the music that was playing around the Mission District. To us he was rich, but he was actually just middle-class Palo Alto. He cracked up when he found out we thought that he was rich, but where he grew up was very different from the Mission, that’s for sure.

For the next few months, we were a band. Gregg was our new lead singer, and we started adding songs he liked to sing. I give him credit for bringing the band back to other-side-of-the-tracks music, like Les McCann, Eddie Harris, and Ramsey Lewis stuff. Tom was a good rhythm guitarist, and he was into the blues, but even though he was the guy who’d brought me out, something did not work with us in the end. There was a side of him that wanted to do songs by Buffalo Springfield and the Grass Roots—rock with a hillbilly thing in it. We had to tell him, “No; we don’t care for that music,” and so we let him go after a few months. But Tom gets the credit for being the catalyst that brought Gregg and me together for the first time.

Rock groups were starting to show the same influences I had been hearing on those Gábor Szabó and Charles Lloyd albums—Eastern flavors and groove rhythms and strange scales that sounded Indian. It all became part of that psychedelic sound in rock. The year before, the Byrds had that song “Eight Miles High,” which had a middle part filled with those ideas on guitar, and the Beatles and the Stones had used sitar on songs—it was all in the air.

Then all of a sudden, that January, the Doors came out with their first album, and it had a heavier sound and lots of jazz feel, and guitarist Robby Krieger was mixing the blues with that same kind of drone that Gábor had. They were taking the basic blues—like Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” and other songs—and turning it into an entire movie, not just a story but a big, dark novel. You could tell they were dropping acid and listening to jazz—John Coltrane and Miles Davis—and Ravi Shankar. You could hear it in tunes like “Light My Fire” and “The End.” You could tell because the melodies and rhythms were not clunky anymore, like elephants or buffaloes trying to dance. Parts of the music were very delicate, like the group was working in satin and silk, and it moved smoothly, like a ballerina.

The Doors started what I call shaman music, or LSD music. Music that casts a spell and transports the listener to a place beyond time and gravity, beyond problems. The words are for real, not empty boxes. It invites the masses to move up to a multidimensional level. As Jimi Hendrix said, “I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time / I’ll give it right back one of these days.” He was saying, “I’ll borrow your mind for right now—you’ll get it back when I’m finished.”

A shaman knows how to get out of the way and let the spirits use him—to be a conduit. The best music of John Coltrane? He didn’t play it; it played him.

Around the same time, the new John Mayall record,
A Hard Road,
came out. Peter Green had taken over for Clapton, and his notes were like B. B.’s, but he already had his own phrasing—legato. He was just letting the notes hang. His sound grabbed me in a headlock and wouldn’t let me go. And his tone! On one track called “The Supernatural”—not to be confused with my album
Supernatural
—Green’s guitar sound was on the edge of feedback. That track left its mark on me. I think it was the first instrumental blues that showed me that the guitar could really be the lead voice, that sometimes a singer is not necessary. And I loved that tone.

Back then I was still learning about all this music—John Mayall,
Jimi Hendrix, the Doors. I didn’t know how really special all that music would become. I didn’t yet have the superlatives or the language to talk about these musical orgasms. What I knew then was physical orgasm. You can’t be in control when you’re having an orgasm. That’s what it is—letting go of control. When you have an orgasm musically, you surrender to the music. Normally, only a very few musicians on the planet can make that happen, but in the ’60s it seemed like there were many. We were busy searching for that surrender, scuffling gigs at other places—like the Rock Garden, on Mission near Geneva. It was one of the first real rock clubs in the Mission. There weren’t that many places we could choose to play in unless we could say we were a professional band. I never considered Santana professional until after our first album came out. Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaría, Wes Montgomery, and Miles Davis—they were professional.