The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (23 page)

Even if Santana didn’t have anyone from the Caribbean in the group at the beginning, we came to Latin music naturally. It was the congas—hearing those jams in Aquatic Park and liking them, deciding that we would have some in the band and that they were going to be part of the soup. Then it was, “What music makes sense with congas”? Well, “Jingo.” Then we started to hear music that could work with what we had, blues and congas, like “Afro Blue.” Then it was: “We’re going to write songs around the congas.”

The next thing I knew I was hearing more music with congas, and I started buying Latin records with the same passion I had for the blues. By this time Gregg and Carabello and I were living together in a house on Mullen Avenue in Bernal Heights, near the Mission, and it was like we were all in a study group: “Check out the congas on this Jack McDuff record! Have you heard Ray Barretto on Wes Montgomery’s ‘Tequila’ or on Kenny Burrell’s ‘Midnight Blue’? We gotta go hear him when he comes to town.” Then Carabello heard Chepito playing timbales, and Chepito knew more about clave than any of us and helped us cement the full Santana sound.

We were from the streets of the Mission District, and in the beginning we were sensitive about what the “clave police” were saying. We didn’t want to be intimidated by anyone thinking that we were trying something we didn’t know how to do. When they first came after us, I wish I knew then what I know now—that the feel of the clave was already in blues and in rock. The electric blues guys—Otis Rush, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter, Magic Sam—they
all had songs with that Cuban feel. B. B. King had it—check out “Woke Up This Morning.” Bo Diddley put tremolo on his guitar and maracas in his music and created his own electric primitive clave, and guess what? That shit went viral.

Here’s another thing most people don’t know about rock and clave: Chano Pozo, the Cuban conga player with Dizzy Gillespie’s band, cowrote “Manteca.” You can hear the influence from that song in Bobby Parker’s “Watch Your Step” from ’61. Parker was a blues guy from Washington, DC, who passed away in 2013, and who knows how he got to “Manteca,” but it’s the same pattern. When I was starting, every guitar player had to know “Watch Your Step”—including George Harrison, who played around with it for the introduction to the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.” Later Duane Allman used that feel on “One Way Out.” People need to know that. It all started with one Cuban song.

In 1968, Marcus really helped us show off this side of Santana—from “Jingo” to Willie Bobo’s “Fried Neckbones and Some Home Fries.” The chords from that one were a big part of our sound. Marcus had riffs that were his alone, and one time he came up with an idea—“Man, I wrote this song; I want you guys to help me out”—and started humming and slapping his knees. Then we each did a thing on it—I did a guitar solo that borrowed a lick that Gábor Szabó played on a Chico Hamilton track. Later we called it “Soul Sacrifice.”

We were young—I didn’t appreciate at the time how good Gregg was for us. He’s a great soloist. I can remember watching his posture, and how he’d get into it so deeply, watching the veins appear in his throat, all that tension and conviction. He’s a great arranger, too, which connects to his solo style.

Speaking of arrangers, in 1971 Santana did a
Bell Telephone Hour
show on TV. I’ll never forget it: Ray Charles was on the same show, so we got to see him do “Georgia.” I remember they were running through it, and suddenly Ray shouts, “Stop! Stop the band! Hey, you—viola in the third row. Tune up!” I wasn’t sure if we should stay quiet or applaud.

Anyway, they wanted us to do “Soul Sacrifice” with the string
section, and the whole arrangement was based on Gregg’s solo. That’s how lyrical a player he is. He also has a really, really powerful sense of knowing how to start a story—check out the opening of “Hope You’re Feeling Better” or “Black Magic Woman.” Santana likes dramatic openings, whether big or mysterious.

We started playing “Black Magic Woman” at this time, just after it came out. It was a song by Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac that was a blues-rumba of the kind that Chicago blues guys would sometimes play. It was really Otis Rush’s “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” with different words. We brought up the Latin feel in Peter Green’s version, and when we played it live it made a great segue to Gábor Szabó’s “Gypsy Queen.”

One of the ways we stuck out from the rest of the bands in San Francisco was that we weren’t really psychedelic or purely blues. We also didn’t have horns, as Sly & the Family Stone did—we didn’t have that funk rhythm, either. That summer Sly became a local hero. His “Dance to the Music” was everywhere, and those different voices really gave it a family vibe. Soon you could hear that Sly “sound fingerprint” all over the radio. Sly changed Motown—the producer Norman Whitfield started doing the Sly thing with the Temptations. Sly even changed Miles Davis. Miles would tell me later about watching Sly & the Family Stone just tear it up at the Newport Jazz Festival. That had to have hit Miles hard, to get him to change his music.

Let’s face it—Sly Stone at his peak changed everything. The only person he did not have to change was James Brown, because James was already there. Sly had to get his funk from somebody, and he got his soul straight from the church. Sly’s father was a minister and a preacher, and Sly was, too—just a more multidimensional one. He was the first guy who had female and male musicians, black and white. We were so proud that a cat from Daly City could go and change the world like that. We still are—in San Francisco, he’s still our Sly, man.

It was around this time that I first met Sly. Carabello used to hang out with the Family Stone in Daly City. He brought me over.
“Hey, man, we got invited to go to Sly Stone’s house. He wants us to open up for him on a couple of gigs, and he wants to produce us.”

“Really? Okay. Let’s go.” When we got there, Sly said the wrong thing from the start—with attitude: “So you guys play that blues Willie Bobo stuff, huh?” I’m thinking, “What ‘blues Willie Bobo stuff’? I’m not going to let this guy encapsulate me and define our music that way.” He’s a genius, man, no doubt about it, and he was already on the radio and everywhere else and he had the baddest bass player in the world—Larry Graham. But I didn’t like somebody looking down at me like that.

“I’m fuckin’ out of here, man.”

Sly wasn’t wrong; it was just how he expressed himself. Santana
was
starting to get it together with a Latin rock reputation. It was a way people could label our sound. Just don’t call us blues Willie Bobo stuff.

That wasn’t the end of that, though. The worst name I think I heard used to describe Santana was in
Rolling Stone
’s review of our first album—“psychedelic mariachi.” Why? Just because I’m Mexican? What an ignorant, touristy thing to write.

I remember even my Caucasian friends telling me how stupid that was. I don’t like to be reduced to anything other than a person who has a big heart and big eyes for a big slice of life. I’m not necessarily against music writers, but sometimes they don’t think before they write. And when they
do
get it right? I remember that, too—like the jazz writer who described Albert Ayler’s music as a Salvation Army band on acid. I read that and heard what he meant—and I love Albert Ayler. I thought, “Damn, that’s a real badge of honor.”

Here’s what I think—if you’re describing music that’s original and not clichéd, don’t use clichés to describe it. Be original and be accurate. We were open to Latin influences, and I think when we did it we did it well. Well enough to get back to playing the Fillmore.

I hadn’t known that Bill Graham used to go hear Latin big bands in New York City. It was only later that he told me that he used to hang
out at dance clubs in Manhattan and that he could mambo and cha-cha. It was in his blood. He knew about congas and Latin rhythms, and he liked them.

In the spring of ’68 Bill was holding open auditions at the Fillmore Auditorium on Tuesday nights. Despite being unofficially blacklisted, we were welcome to play those, and we did. He didn’t attend every time, but he heard us on a few occasions, and he heard how our music was changing. His ears were working. Speaking of Willie Bobo, Bill was the one who said we should do “Evil Ways” for our first album.

We didn’t know it then, but around this time the Fillmore Auditorium became too small for the crowds. Bill took a plane to Sweden to meet face-to-face with the owner of the Carousel Ballroom, which was on Van Ness Avenue not far from the Mission. But the guy lived in Gothenburg! Bill flew out and met with him. They ate and drank and talked about a contract, then Bill flew back. That’s how he started the Fillmore West. I don’t think anyone else back then was serious enough to do something like that. If Bill believed in something or someone, he’d go after it. I admire that.

Bill would need bands to play this new, larger venue, and he knew we were getting a really good reputation with our shows. In June we played a benefit for the Matrix at the Fillmore Auditorium—the first time we had played there in a year. Stan and Bill talked, and Stan told him we had a new lineup with new songs. We wanted to play the Fillmore West, and we’d never be late.

He also told him the band had a new name—just one word, and it wasn’t
blues
.

The classic Santana lineup, 1969. (L to R) Michael Shrieve, me, Gregg Rolie, José “Chepito” Areas, David Brown, and Michael Carabello.

Santana was in New York City in 1970, and that was when we really, truly understood what clave was—when we got that word into our vocabulary. A bunch of us went to hear Ray Barretto at the Corso, a dance club on East 86th Street where all the Latin stars played, including Larry Harlow and Tito Puente. There were moments when Ray would suddenly stop the band, but the audience would already be clapping and keeping the rhythm going, hitting that clave time: ba-ba-bah—ba-bah, ba-ba-bah—ba-bah.

It was like seeing something on the wall you had never seen before but had always been there and being told, “Well, that’s what keeps the wall together.”

“Oh, now I see—that’s the foundation for all Latin music.”

Then at one point Ray grabbed the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have in the audience—”

I was thinking, “Uh-oh. Here it comes,” because here we were, right on their turf. The clave can be like a sacrament in church to some people; to them, “Latin” can only be the music of people like Machito, Mario Bauzá, and Tito Puente. But what Ray said was:

“—some people who have taken our music to another level, to all four corners of the world, and their music represents us very well—Santana!”

You can take all the awards and accolades in places like
Rolling Stone
and
The New York Times
that we started getting—you can keep all that stuff. When Ray Barretto said something complimentary like that, there was nothing better. We had gotten props from one of the masters.

This is my thing: clave should be honored and understood and respected for what it is, but the traditional definition of clave is not all there is. When I hear Buddy Rich or Tony Williams play Afro-Cuban or Latin music, I don’t think they’re honoring it less than Tito Puente or Mongo Santamaría does, even though Buddy and Tony don’t play strict clave—and that’s their choice. But if you look at the clave as something that doesn’t change, then it becomes like a ball and chain. It might be a golden one, it might be studded with diamonds, but with that attitude you’re locked into one way of doing it.

Santana was never a purebred when it came to music—we were always a mutt. We were using some of the clave but not the complete conception, and we were using other ideas from Latin music. It took almost ten years for that stuff to go away about Santana not doing the clave right. When it did, it wasn’t because things changed with our music. It was how people heard it that changed. We still have congas and timbales, and Santana still does not play clave in a strict sense. We play Santana.

I
n 1967, the world heard about San Francisco. We already knew it, but Monterey Pop had been huge—it helped Hendrix go worldwide, it got Janis Joplin and Big Brother signed to a record contract, and it put the spotlight on San Francisco. A year later it was like the whole world was visiting the city or even moving there. Bill Graham moved his concerts to the Fillmore West so more people could come. New clubs were opening up around town. Record companies were sending people to hang around and check out bands and sign them up. We didn’t see them, but we knew they were there.

The summer of ’68 was when everything started to roll for us. That was when we started calling ourselves just one word: Santana. You can see it on the posters from that summer. Bill was the guy who got down and lit the fuse for us. Everything that came after that happened in some way because of him: our record deal, our first time in a studio, our first trip to the East Coast. Playing Woodstock. And it all happened very, very fast, beginning with Bill bringing us back to play for him—playing the Fillmore West the first month it opened.

Bill put us on the bill with the Butterfield Blues Band—Michael Bloomfield wasn’t in the band anymore. The week went great—the music felt good, but most of all it was a relief to be back in Bill Graham’s embrace. He was such an important person in San Francisco to have on your side. I was gun-shy from our last experience with him, but I know he noticed that I was with a new band and that our music was more conscious, that we had our own sound going on. His ears could hear where we were coming from. Later he’d say we were the perfect child of two parents—B. B. King and Tito Puente.

Bill forgot to mention some of our other musical ancestors, but that was okay. Overnight Santana went from being the band that showed up late to the band that was on call. He was constantly calling us—“Hey, I need you guys to play tomorrow night, man. Procol Harum got busted!” Or “This freaking group canceled.” We weren’t headliners yet, but our name was on the poster next to
national names like Steppenwolf, the Staple Singers, and Chicago—on the bottom, anyway. We got a reputation opening for every band that came through, and we put it to many of them. I think they could feel how good we were, that they should look out for us. We were capturing the headliners’ fans—they were getting on our train. I think it was somebody in the Grateful Dead who said, “It’s suicide if Santana opens for you. They’ll steal the show.”

It was great for Bill, too, because we weren’t getting paid nearly as much as other bands, and we were local. No hotel rooms or transportation costs. The trade-off was that we were getting a lot of exposure. Bill actually said that out loud a few times to remind us.

At first Bill was rooting for us, not really managing us. It was more like he was a coach. He was like that with many bands—he’d do things no other promoters would even think of doing. He had that habit of carrying his clipboard and taking notes. You know that guy in the movie
The Red Shoes
—the impresario who pushed the ballerina to dance beyond limits she didn’t think she could get past? Bill was like that. During a concert he would walk around backstage, onstage, all over the venue, writing things down on that clipboard. You could be working in the box office or you could be the star of the show. Bill took notes on everything and everybody. If a song went on too long, if something was set up in the wrong place—if he felt something was wrong, even if it was just okay but it could be better—out came the clipboard, and down went another note.

Then he would pull you aside at the end of the night and let you know what he wrote: “Listen, Carlos—that one song is no good: nobody’s going to understand it.” Or: “You could have started with this, and that one’s great, but it went on too long,” or, “It should have been longer.” Stuff like that. That was Bill—he did that with Jimi Hendrix, and I know he took notes on Barbra Streisand and tried to do it with Bob Dylan as well. I don’t think he did it to Miles.

I remember in 1985 I flew with Bill to a show he was producing with Sting in Los Angeles. Sting had a really special band—Omar Hakim from Weather Report, David Sancious on keyboards, Darryl
Jones from Miles’s group on bass, and Branford Marsalis on saxophones. I had to hear the show for myself.

I was hanging with Sting in his dressing room after the concert when Bill came in. He was shuffling his notes. “What, Bill?” Sting saw the number of pages in his hand and rolled his eyes. “Can we do this some other time?” There was a plane waiting for us, too—Bill and I had to get back to San Francisco that night, and time was running out. But Bill stood there like a statue. “We should go over this now.”

I remember Sting looked over to his manager, Miles Copeland, for help. But Miles kept smoking his cigarette and walked away like he hadn’t heard anything. He didn’t want to come between them. I saw that I should leave, too, so Sting and Bill could talk.

“Okay, Bill,” Sting said. “But only one thing. Let’s have it.”

“Just one thing?” Bill looked at the clipboard. “Great—one thing. But there’s parts A, B, C, D, and E…” I closed the door behind me.

Bill adopted us. He gave us space to rehearse in a warehouse where he kept all his old posters, near the original Fillmore. He gave us advice on getting an accountant and a lawyer and how to think about the band like it was a business. This was before we even saw a record contract. Bill made sure he put us in the spotlight when he could.

We were still playing all over the Bay Area and in halls like the Avalon and the Sound Factory in Sacramento. We played colleges and a few high schools. We did lots of benefits for a radio station and an arts company and a protest against the war. There was some serious political stuff going on. In one year the feeling in San Francisco went from flower-power vibes to serious consciousness and revolution and “Who are they to judge us because our hair is long?” and we were right in the middle of it, and across San Francisco Bay the Black Panthers were raising their fists in power salutes and marching in their black berets.

We were living in the middle of the hippie revolution, but we
were different. Our attitude was that even though we loved the principles of the hippies, we didn’t wear flowers in our hair or put psychedelic flowers on our bathtubs. We were more hardass, more street. It wasn’t a put-on or marketing gimmick. This was when we had those first photos made of the band—Marcus wore a jacket and a turtleneck and sometimes a sombrero, like a mariachi. That was not my idea. I wore a leather jacket, and all of us had really long hair or Afros. We looked very scruffy—except for Marcus—and very different from each other. That’s who we were, and those were the people we hung around with.

It was the band 24-7, man. I had really been away from my family for a while—again. Almost another whole year and hardly any contact. My sister Maria remembers our mom asking Tony to look for me. Tony would find me and tell her, “He’s fine; he’s perfectly fine.” Maria told me that one time my mom made her call the police to report me missing. When she told them I was eighteen, they hung up. “What do you mean they can’t do anything? He’s my son!” My mom was upset. She didn’t really know what the rules were—but that wouldn’t stop her.

I had seen my mom just once after leaving our place on Market. When I went to say good-bye she gave me a hug, and I could feel her hand going inside my pocket. She gave me a twenty-dollar bill. “Mom, I can’t take this money from you.”

“
Por qué no?
Why not? You need it to eat—who knows if you’re eating in that place you’re living?”

I said, “Because when you give me something somehow it has strings attached. I’m okay. I like the life that I’m living now. I love living where I live.”

In fact, I was moving. I had met Linda Smith. She was one of the ladies who used to come hear us at the Matrix—she and her friends were listening to our music and looking for companions. We started hanging out, and the next thing I knew I was living with her and her two kids. She was white and from Oceanview. I was almost twenty-one at the time, and she was almost thirty, and she had a beautiful body and beautiful legs. She taught me many
things. She also graciously took care of me. She offered me not only her body and her heart but also her support. She fed me and sometimes the whole band because we were so poor. There were some weeks when we were living off her food stamps.

Linda and I were together off and on for almost four years. I got to know her, her kids, and her family well. I wrote “Europa” for her sister when she was having a bad LSD trip—I started singing: “The Mushroom Lady is coming to town / And she’s wondering will you be around.” That was how it happened—the melody of “Europa” came from a lyric I made up on the spot to help calm Linda’s sister.

Around this time my sister Irma was on a bus going to work and she saw
SANTANA
on the marquee at the Fillmore West. She told my mom, and next thing Irma knew my mom was telling the family to get ready to go out. “We’re going to see Carlos play.”

The rest of this story is now a family legend: my mom and dad got dressed up like it was the 1950s—Mom in her dress and nylons and heels and a nice coat, Dad in his tie and sport coat and hat. They all came to the Fillmore, and of course there were no seats—there was no place to sit but on the floor, so they all sat down. My mom saw hippies passing around what she thought was a cigarette, and she said to my dad, “
Viejo,
my God, they’re so poor, they don’t have any money. Let’s give them a cigarette.” So he opened his box of Marlboros and handed them out—they were all laughing.

I had no idea they were there until after the concert. I went out to meet them, and they were all excited. Maria says now that she liked the music, but she was thinking I was really shy because I never looked at the audience—I played to the amplifiers. Her friends who saw the band used to ask her why that was. I think it was because I was focused on the music, looking at Gregg and Doc and David—not David’s foot, of course. But it was also true that I was shy—I wasn’t all the way comfortable in front of an audience yet.

When I came out after the show to say hi, the first thing my mom said was, “Oh,
mijo,
the songs are too long. You have to cut
them down.” I said, “Well, these are our songs—that’s how long they are.” I told her I thought we could write our own songs and get paid playing our stuff, not somebody else’s songs all the time. My mom thought I had been smoking too much weed, and she said so. My dad didn’t say much. He was happy to see me, but I’m sure he agreed with my mom about the music. A few years later he was interviewed by a local paper, and he told them that he was confused because he didn’t know when a song began or finished. His songs were in the old forms—thirty-two bars or whatever.