The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (20 page)

The bad news happened at the end of February. I went to school one morning, and everybody was getting tested for TB. What’s that? Tuberculosis. Uh, okay—what’s that? Everyone got a little shot in the arm, and if your body reacted a certain way, then you had TB, and that was serious. I thought, “No problem”—I wasn’t feeling bad, and I wasn’t coughing, unless I was smoking weed. Suddenly the test came back positive. Next thing I know they were treating me like a pincushion, shooting me full of penicillin and streptomycin. Then they took me off to San Francisco General, putting me in quarantine for who knows how long, in a bed surrounded by sick people, and I wasn’t even feeling tired. To this day I think it happened because of the water in Tijuana and my year there on my own.

My parents didn’t protest or anything. When they heard what happened, they trusted the authorities to do what was best, which meant that within days I was just so bored. I was there for more than three months! They would run test after test, shoot me with medicine, take X-rays of my lungs, then show me the spots. Then they’d tell me I was doing well, but still I had to stay. What kept me there was not the idea that I needed to get better: I stayed because
the doctors convinced me that if I were outside I might infect other people, and I didn’t want to do that.

I knew I had to go through with it—take the medication and let my lungs rest. I watched a lot of TV—I remember after being there a month, I was watching when the 1967 Grammy Awards show came on, with Liberace and Sammy Davis Jr.—all this corny stuff. Suddenly Wes Montgomery was playing. That was the first time I saw him play, and it made an impression. I started listening to his music—“Goin’ Out of My Head,” “Windy,” “Sunny”—another jazz guy doing the pop songs of the ’60s. He had such a different guitar sound, that deep kind of voice that made me feel like someone was touching my head, saying, “Aw, everything’s going to be all right,” and I believed it.

Some people came by to see me, including Stan and Ron, my dad, and my sister Irma. Carabello brought me some books to read, including a Time-Life science book called
The Mind
that I remember liking. He also brought me a reel-to-reel tape deck with headphones so I could listen to my favorite albums on tape, like Gábor Szabó’s. A few weeks later I had gone through all that. I complained that I was going crazy, so Carabello said, “Well, I got a couple of joints and some LSD.” Like an idiot, I took the acid later that night, right there in the hospital.

I could look around me and see older people who were lifelong smokers and had lung problems, and their skin was all yellow and their fingers were orange from all the cigarettes they smoked. It felt like everybody was dying to the left and right, and there I was, tripping in the middle of all that. A movie came on TV—
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
with Glenn Ford, about the Nazis in World War II. I got so deeply into that movie I was thinking, “Whoa: I’ve got to get back under the covers and close the curtains.”

The next day Ron came over, and I was still hiding. “Hey, man, how you doing?” I said, “Man, I need to get the hell out of here, and you guys are going to help me out. Come back this afternoon, bring me some clothes, and I’ll get rid of this freaking hospital robe they got me in. We’ll get in the elevator, stop between floors, I’ll change,
and we’ll leave.” So that’s what we did—I did my Clark Kent thing and got out. I heard they were looking for me for a couple of weeks, because by law I wasn’t supposed to leave. They didn’t find me, because I didn’t go back home. I left the hospital and moved in with Stan and Ron, and that was the beginning of another long break from my family, which put even more distance between my mom and me.

Two good things came out of that stay in the hospital… well, three things. First I got healthy, and I never had a trace of TB again.

The second thing was that while I was in the hospital the people at Mission High knew where to find me—I wasn’t going anywhere. They told me I could work with a tutor while I was in the hospital. If I did the work and got passing grades they’d let me graduate. So they sent this guy over in the mornings, we would talk, and he’d leave me some books to read for the next day, mostly on American history. He would come back, and I’d take some tests. A lot of the testing took the form of his asking me questions and my explaining what I got from the reading.

I liked the tutor. He knew my situation—that I had been held back because of my English and that I was nineteen and still in high school. One day he looked at me in my hospital robe and said, “Out of something bad came good, because you’re not in a uniform carrying a gun. Those people would have really made it hard for you—you probably would be in Vietnam now.” I hadn’t even thought about that, but he was right. By all rights I was old enough to be inducted. But because I was still enrolled at Mission High, the draft couldn’t get me—yet.

Staying out of the war was the third good thing that came out of getting sick. Around a year later I got the notice to report to the induction center in Oakland. I remember that place—all these young guys lining up and sitting down, filling in forms, and taking tests and sweating. You could smell the fear in there. One brother I saw had his arms crossed. His eyes were yellow from meningitis or something. He was refusing to even pick up the pen. He looked at the man and said, “Hey, man, I ain’t doin’ nothing. I don’t have a
beef with the Vietcong. You, honky, you’re the one that’s fucking with me in the streets. You give me a gun, I’m going to shoot your ass.” I was thinking, “Whoa, he’s not going into the army—maybe some other place, but not the army.”

Then a guy in uniform came up to me and said, “What’s your story? Why aren’t you doing the test?” I gave him a letter from the doctor. By then I had been back to the hospital and submitted to a few more tests. After that the doctors decided I could just take some medicine at home. This is how ignorant the guy was: he opened the letter, read it, and went, “Tuberculosis, huh? Where did you catch it—Thirteenth and Market?” He made it out to be some kind of sexual disease and was insulting my neighborhood. I was thinking, “I’m supposed to follow you?” Shit. That’s when I knew I had to keep as far away from military service as I could if the army was putting people like this in charge. I had friends at Mission High who did go over to Vietnam and never came back. I was lucky—I walked out of there, and that was that.

To this day I appreciate that the guys at Mission gave me that one last chance to graduate. I read the books and answered the tutor’s questions just well enough to graduate that June. I was allowed to go to the ceremony at the Civic Center as a courtesy, but for me it really wasn’t a big deal. I saw all the other families there with their kids and girls carrying flowers and stuff. I didn’t have the cap or gown, and my family didn’t come. No one made a fuss about it, and that was okay with me. What I remember most from that last day of school was a bunch of us students sitting in the park near Mission, smoking a joint and talking about our plans. One kid was saying, “I’m going to help my dad at the warehouse.” Another guy said, “I’m going to join the marines. What are you going to do, Santana?”

I said, “I’m going to be on stage, playing with B. B. King and Buddy Guy and people like that.” People just started laughing like squirrels. “Hey, man, you’ve been smoking too much of this.”

What? I didn’t say I wanted to
be
B. B. or even be a star like him. I just wanted to be next to him and be able to play with him. I didn’t
know how far I could get, but that was my goal. I had the feeling that the hand of destiny was touching me again, as it had the first time I heard an electric guitar playing the blues. My expectations of what I was destined to do transcended everything I experienced in my time at Mission High.

I just looked at them. “Well, you asked me.”

It wasn’t such a big dream. We already had a gig at the Fillmore Auditorium—the same place where all the blues legends were starting to play in the Bay Area. My band had to wait for two months to play a show for Bill Graham while I got over the TB, and then Bill booked us to open for the Who and the Loading Zone—a Friday and Saturday night in the middle of June. We had no idea how big the Who were going to get, and the Loading Zone was a local group. What mattered most to us was that we were finally going to get to play the most important venue in San Francisco. Our name wasn’t even on the poster, but at least we had a name.

It was Carabello who came up with the idea. Playing the blues was the thing we were most proud of, and the word
blues
was in the names of some our favorite groups—the Butterfield Blues Band, the Bluesbreakers. He went through our last names—Haro Blues Band, Rodriguez Blues Band, Carabello Blues Band. He thought my last name had the most ring to it. Santana Blues Band became our name for the next year and a half. It wasn’t that I was suddenly the leader. We were a leaderless band—not because we sat down one day and decided that, but because that’s how it was.

We were already mixing other music in with the blues. We rehearsed and got our set together—“Chim Chim Cheree,” “Jingo,” “As the Years Go Passing By,” “Work Song.” Our set was short compared to what we would be doing in a few years—just thirty or forty minutes.

The first night was great. It went by very fast—and not only because I had started taking uppers at the time. I was so nervous and wired that I broke three strings that night. I didn’t have any more strings with me, and we were in the middle of the set, so I looked around and grabbed the only guitar I could see—a beat-up
Strat that was Pete Townshend’s! I saw Keith Moon looking at me, and he smiled when he saw my situation. “Pete won’t mind—go ahead.” He was very encouraging. Bill Graham was, too. He liked what he heard, and he said we should open for some more shows that were coming up.

Saturday night was terrible. We got to the Fillmore late,
really
late. Both Danny’s and Gus’s parents kept them late at work, and they were my ride. Man, I was so angry. But not nearly as pissed as Bill Graham was when we got to the Fillmore. He was standing at the top of the steps—the old Fillmore had a staircase that you had to haul your equipment up to get to the auditorium. His arms were folded, and he looked as big and mean as Mr. Clean, the Jolly Green Giant, and Yul Brynner in
The King and I
. He saw us trying to get our equipment up the stairs as fast as possible, and he started yelling. “Don’t even bother. You will never fuckin’ work for me again.” He started cursing us, our ancestors, and the children we didn’t have yet. He started using words I’d never heard before but would get to know because of him.

I was thinking, “Oh, shit, man. We really fucked up.” We had—and just like that, we were banned from any Bill Graham concerts for a long time. He didn’t even want us coming in to check out other bands, but that couldn’t keep me away. I remember going home after seeing Jimi Hendrix perform at the Fillmore that summer, shaking my head and telling myself that what I just heard and saw was real. I still have never felt like I did the first time I heard him.

When Eric Clapton and Cream came to town in August and played the Fillmore, I had to sneak in to see them, too. I had to—I had no choice. I still knew how to do that through the fire escape. I wanted to see if their live show would match the sound on their records, which was so different from the Chicago blues bands that they were coming from. Bigger and more bombastic.

It did. Cream looked big in their platform shoes, and they sounded bigger. Clapton had that double stack of Marshalls behind him, Jack Bruce sounded like a freight train, and Ginger Baker
looked like some kind of weird creature with his red hair, playing those double bass drums. On tunes like “Spoonful” and “Hey Lawdy Mama,” it wasn’t just electric blues or blues-rock anymore. They were hitting with the energy of Buddy Rich—which made sense when I found out that Ginger and Jack had experience playing jazz. Catching those first Cream shows was like someone who had only experienced black-and-white TV seeing a CinemaScope movie for the first time.

Anyway—the Santana Blues Band was on Bill’s blacklist. I couldn’t believe this happened. I never missed gigs. Being late was not in my DNA. My mom and dad taught me that if you make an appointment, being punctual means being there a half hour early. I’m that way now, and my band knows it. If you want to get my stomach upset, show up late to a rehearsal or a sound check or a show. I still can’t stand it.

I knew how parents can be, but at a certain point when you know where you’re supposed to be going, you don’t let them stand in your way. You tell them, “I made a commitment. I need to be over there.” For me that was the end. I was thinking, “Your priorities are not my priorities—your priority is to please your mom and your dad, and you’ll end up putting that first for the rest of your life.” How could making tortillas or cutting meat be more important? A gig at the Fillmore in 1967 was a major thing for any musician, and it was the biggest thing in the world to me.

Santana in late 1968. (L to R) Gregg Rolie, David Brown, me, Doc Livingston, and Marcus Malone.

Before I was twenty, I could hear the difference between a weekend musician and a full-time musician. I could tell from a person’s playing if there was enough conviction to elevate the music, to make it come together. When I started playing with people I knew in high school, I could tell how the music changed depending on whom I was playing with. In our group we’d try out various tunes or keep old ones, but the songs we played were not as important as the new players who came into the band. I think I was lucky to have started so early in Tijuana—even the little group that had the two fighting brothers on guitar and me on violin helped me to hear what works and what doesn’t in a group situation.

I think if you look at rock groups in their first few years you find two
ways they got their sound. Groups like the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Grateful Dead mostly came up together. Their lineups changed very little; sometimes not at all. They got better together. I think Santana developed more like a jazz band does, with different musicians coming and going until the right parts are together and the music grows into itself. We also came from R & B and Latin music: our instruments were guitar, organ, and percussion—no horns. When we started we didn’t have a plan for what our sound would be like, but we knew it when we got it. I think Santana is still developing a sound that depends on the people who come into the band.

One thing we had in common with groups like the Dead and the Stones is that everyone in the band started as equals. Early on, these groups all were collectives. Then each band got tested and got successful until a leader had to step up.

I think it was a good thing Santana began that way. I think if it started out with my being the leader I might have wanted to do only whatever songs were already in my head, and maybe I wouldn’t have been open to hearing the music that we were developing. I would have tried too much to control what was happening. Even with the Santana Blues Band, the idea of letting the music lead the way was there at the beginning.

T
he summer of 1967 was the Summer of Love in most people’s minds. Flower power and psychedelic rock and hippie chicks. The Monterey Pop festival. Everybody was talking about how Jimi Hendrix burned his Strat and broke it onstage and
How could he?
Then
Are You Experienced
came out, and suddenly the sound of the electric guitar was dive-bombing, supersonic jets, roaring motorcycles, and rumbling earthquakes. Jimi made sonic sculptures out of feedback. Jimi’s first album took music from the days of gunpowder to the time of laser-guided missiles. I remember someone turning me on to “Red House,” and I knew immediately this was where electric blues were going—everybody was going to be following Jimi.

For me and many musicians, this was also when we started to feel that the resonance of our convictions could change the world. People like John Coltrane and John Lennon felt their music could be used to promote compassion and wisdom. It could make people better human beings. Later, Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and Bob Marley did the same thing—“Amazing Grace,” “What’s Going On,” “One Love.” Their music infused people with a different kind of message that went beyond entertainment: “We are one!” It wasn’t just a cliché. It had real power to unite, just as Woodstock and
Supernatural
did. There can be unity, and music can be the glue. That’s the big message, the one I’ve been hearing and believing since I was a teenager.

For me, the summer of 1967 was also the summer of decisions.

One day I saw the Grateful Dead stop by the Tic Tock in a limousine. Everyone in the city knew they had signed a big record deal the year before and had their first album out. I saw them from the sink where I was washing dishes and said to myself, “I shouldn’t be doing this anymore.” It wasn’t because of the limousine. It was the idea of making a full commitment to music. I had to take the whole plunge—music had to be my 100 percent, my full-time thing. My office and my home. My eight days a week, as the Beatles said. Who you are going to be decides what you’re going to do, and what you’re going to do decides what you’re going to be. I was telling myself, “Dude, make the eight lie down like infinity.”

The decision to leave had been building up for a while. It was really motivated by seeing those Chicago blues guys playing the Fillmore in that first year. Man, I would be in such a daze for weeks after that, I don’t know how many dishes I broke at work. It seemed like they were calling me—calling me to abandon, as my good friend the saxophonist Wayne Shorter would say. Abandon the need to ask permission to do this or that, to live my life. I could hear the level of the commitment they had in their music; I could hear their commitment to the way they lived their lives. I could even smell it. The other decision I had to make was to finally leave home. I could not be like those bluesmen and still be living under my mother’s rules.

Then everything seemed to happen at once. We had showed up late to play the Fillmore and lost any chance at playing there again. A few days later Danny Haro’s brother-in-law was driving Danny’s green Corvette and crashed. He was the first person close to my age to suddenly die like that. Then I dropped LSD and had a bad trip. It wasn’t my first time tripping, but it was my first bad trip. A
really
bad trip.

The problem was that I was in the wrong environment when I dropped. First I dropped with a guy who started freaking out, which made me freak out a bit. Then I left him and was hanging with Danny and Gus in the house they were living in in Daly City. They were eating pizza and laughing in the kitchen—“Ho-ho-ho, hee-hee-hee, ha-ha-ha.” In my ears they sounded just like the Beatles’ “I Am the Walrus.” I turned on the TV, and the movie
The Pride and the Passion
was on—Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, and Sophia Loren hauling a cannon across Europe and killing thousands of people. Not a good movie to watch on LSD. I was beginning to lose myself in a sea of darkness and doubt. It was almost like a box of firecrackers was going off in my brain, a lot of negative explosions—fear of what’s going to happen to me, fear of a world that is so sick and so negative and dark. I had all these thoughts and couldn’t come up with the words to describe what I was seeing. I don’t remember how I did it, but somehow at five in the morning I got the mechanics together to call Stan Marcum and ask him to come and get me.

Stan was the kind of friend who would say, “I’ll be right there” and mean it. He picked me up, and the first place he took me was to the woods in Fairfax, in North Bay. I was watching a beautiful golden sunrise, but what I was seeing was the world burning itself down. Suddenly I felt like I was Nero, fiddling away while a huge fire was happening all around me. I felt that the world was destroying itself and needed to be helped.

My mind was still higher than an astronaut’s butt, so Stan took me to his house, and he and Ron put me in a room to try to sleep it off. But I was wide-awake. Then they put on
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band
. The album was only a few weeks old then, and I heard “Within You Without You”—George Harrison playing sitar and singing about spiritual principles.

I needed that. Everything came together, and I finally started to come down. Stan asked me, “What happened this morning? What did you see?” I told him that I had seen the world on fire, crying for help. He asked, “What are you going to do about it?” I told him I had been thinking about that for a long time. This is what I said: “I want to help it heal.”

I felt like I actually gave birth to myself that day. I went from believing the world was coming to an end to figuring out what I had to do to stop that from happening. It had been a long, long night and day—I felt that the whole experience had given me power and brought me to my purpose in life.

Stan and Ron listened to me talk. They heard the conviction. “We’ll be your managers,” they said. “We’ll quit our jobs—no more bail bondsman, no more barber. We’re going to join you, man. We’re going to help you. We’ll dedicate all our energy and money to you and the band.” I was blown away—these two hippie dudes were ready to invest in my career. They became two more angels stepping up—coming in at just the right time. I think about it now, and it felt like they’d been waiting to hear me say what I said as much as I’d been wanting to say it.

Stan said one more thing. “You have to get rid of Danny and Gus—that’s the way it is, man. They’re not bad people, but they’re not committed. They’re weekend musicians; you’re not. We can tell that. We’ll drop everything for you, but you got to drop them.”

I was like, “Oh, damn.” I could tell that Stan and Ron had been thinking about this for a while. I knew they were right, but Danny and Gus were my oldest friends in San Francisco. Making us late at the Fillmore kind of sealed it, but if anybody was going to tell them, I would have to be the one.

Danny and Gus were upset—really upset—and they got pissed off at Stan. I told them it wasn’t about their playing. It was because they just weren’t ready to take the plunge. That LSD trip made me
realize that our thing was done—they were my friends, I grew up with them, but it was not something that I needed to hang with. It would have been like wearing shoes that didn’t fit anymore.

We stayed in touch over the years, but they never stuck with music, at least not as a profession. They’re both in heaven now—they both left in the early ’90s, way too early. Cancer got Gus, and diabetes got Danny—he lost a leg, and the last time I saw him I got the feeling his soul was broken because he had lost his parents and his two sisters, and he was the last one left.

I said good-bye to Danny and Gus, and I finally said good-bye to living with my mom and dad and moved in with Stan and Ron on Precita Avenue. That was the nest that nurtured the birth of the band. Their place was just ten blocks from my family’s house, but my parents wouldn’t know where I was for almost two years. They would look for me all over the city even though I was right next to them. But I didn’t want them to do the same thing they did in Tijuana. I left without even taking my clothes.

That really was the beginning of Santana right there.

Bands living together in San Francisco was normal back then—it helped focus the energy, and it saved money. The Grateful Dead and Big Brother had their houses. So did Sly. Some were in poor, funky neighborhoods, but that was okay if it helped you to afford it. This kind of thing still goes on in Paris now among African musicians—they’ll rent one apartment and cook and play music together. Same thing. You learn to trust each other.

When I moved in with Stan and Ron, I took over a small room. I borrowed clothes when I needed to and bought some stuff at Goodwill. We cooked together and closed the curtains and brought chicks in and out. People would come around, because Stan was a very social guy in a nice way, not a bullshitter. We’d smoke weed, take acid, and drink wine and discuss Miles and Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. Whoever we were listening to. We listened to a whole lot of Bob Dylan. Stan and Ron had a lot of jazz in the house,
too—that’s when I really got to hear more of Grant Green and Kenny Burrell as well as Wes Montgomery.

The three of us—Gregg, Carabello, and I—still went to the Fillmore, sneaking in under Bill Graham’s eyes. We’d stand in front of the stage, look at the bands, and say, “You better bring it, man. Let’s see what you got.” We heard the Young Rascals and Vanilla Fudge from New York, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Procol Harum from England. Certain bands didn’t disappoint us. Steppenwolf was mean—they had charisma. We opened for them a lot in Fresno and Bakersfield and Lake Tahoe.

Other bands were like copies of copies. A few of them had some corny one-song hits. We’d say, “Nah—this sounds like a bad rehearsal. Let’s go.”

Not B. B. King. I had been so excited to see him for the first time in February of 1967. Finally, the teacher I had started with and kept coming back to was coming to the Fillmore! The first time I had heard his music was in Tijuana at Javier’s house—all those LPs on the Kent and Crown labels.

B. B. was the headliner after Otis Rush and Steve Miller. Another great triple bill. I was there for the opening night. Steve was great, Otis was incredible, and then it was B. B.’s band onstage, vamping. (Later on, I learned what his close friends call him—just B.—but in my mind he will always be Mr. King.) Then B. walked onstage, and Bill Graham went up to the mike to introduce him: “Ladies and gentlemen, the chairman of the board—Mr. B. B. King!”

It was like it had all been planned to build up to this. Everything just stopped, and everyone stood up and applauded. For a long time. B. hadn’t even hit a note yet, and he was getting a standing ovation. Then he started crying.

He couldn’t hold it in. The light was hitting him in such a way that all I could see were big tears coming out of his eyes, shining on his black skin. He raised his hand to wipe his eyes, and I saw he was wearing a big ring on his finger that spelled out his name in diamonds. That’s what I remember most—diamonds and tears,
sparkling together. I said to myself, “Man, that’s what I want. This is what it is to be adored if you do it right.”