The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (27 page)

So I persuaded a cab driver to take me there, and I went by myself. As soon as I got out of the cab, I was like, “Oh, damn. This
is
a danger zone.” It was deep, deep ghetto—I felt people looking at me like I was a pork chop and they were a bunch of sharks. I quickly stepped into the small club, and there he was—Otis Rush, looking so cool, wearing shades and a cowboy hat, a toothpick in his mouth. I stood by the bar and couldn’t move. I was just listening to his voice and looking at his fingers on that upside-down guitar. I had the feeling that this was just another night for him, that he did this every night he played, but seeing him there—playing with a real Chicago rhythm section, showing me how it’s done and why it’s done—was so different from seeing him anywhere else. For me, there was still nothing else that came close to the feeling that comes from the heartfelt blues—that music was just zipped into my pores. To hear Otis Rush like that, I was ready to go to Vietnam or Tehran or Pakistan. To hear that music, I’d go to hell and make a deal to stay there.

I stood out like a sore thumb in that bar with my long hair and mustache and hippie clothes. I noticed everybody looking at me. Then I saw a policeman talking to the bartender, so I walked over to him. “Excuse me,” I said quietly. He looked at me up and down. “Yeah?”

“I have a hundred dollars for you—can you keep an eye on me? Let me hear Otis, and when he’s finished, can you ask the bartender to call a cab and help get me to it?”

“A hundred dollars? Show it to me.”

I showed him. “Okay, be cool, man. Relax and enjoy it.”

I did, until the end of the very last set. Otis unplugged his guitar,
said, “Thank you, ladies and gentlemen—good night!” and split. The cop looked at me. “You ready?” The bartender called me a cab, he walked me over to it, and I paid him for hanging with me. It was worth every cent. I didn’t see the streets or feel the bumps driving back to the hotel. I was still hearing the music—the profound sound of Otis’s voice and the way he bent the notes. Catching Otis and other blues guys like Magic Sam and Freddie King, who still played in small bars around Chicago, became part of every visit.

I think Brother Otis will always bring out the seven-year-old child in me. I’m not the only one who feels that way—Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page do, too. Even Buddy Guy will give it up for Otis. I remember one time in 1988 I got into Chicago around five o’clock and was checking in to an airport hotel. The phone was already ringing in my room when I put the key in the door—it was Buddy. “Hey, Santana! Listen, Otis and I, we’re waiting on your ass here. You got a pen? Write down this address and come on over.”

The address was that of the Wise Fools Pub, and I didn’t waste any time. I got there early enough, when the place was only half full—Otis hadn’t actually showed up yet, so Buddy and I took some solos, and we were just killing it. Then suddenly I saw that cowboy hat and toothpick come out of the shadows. It was like a scene in a movie. Otis looked around and walked through the crowd like he was in no hurry at all. This was his turf. He grabbed his guitar and stepped into the single spotlight, which hit his face in a very dramatic way. He leaned into the microphone and said: “Give them a hand, ladies and gentlemen!” Then quietly, almost to himself, he said, “Stars, stars, stars…”

It was like Otis was saying, “Oh, yeah? You think these guys were good?” He plugged in and didn’t even sing—he just went straight into round after round of an instrumental blues that showed us who the star really was. He was in the middle of a solo and hit a lick that had Buddy and me screaming like shrimp on a Benihana grill. We couldn’t believe what he was able to get out of each note. It was like getting a real long piece of fresh sugarcane and peeling it with your teeth to get into the middle, where the
sugar is, and the sound it makes when you suck the sap out of it and the juice starts running down your chin and onto your hands. That’s what it was like when Otis was hitting those notes—nothing sounds or tastes better than that!

Over the years I’ve gotten to know Otis and let him know how important his music is to me. He’s not one for compliments, though—the first time we met at the Fillmore, I told him how incredible he sounded. His reply was, “Man, I got a long way to go.” What—you? The guy who made “All Your Love (I Miss Loving)” and “I Can’t Quit You Baby”? I think he’s just one of those brothers who has a hard time validating his own gift, who’s distant in his mind from his soul—except when he’s playing. Not long ago Otis had a stroke, and he can’t play anymore, and I make it a point to stay in touch, send his family a check twice a year, and let him know how much he’s loved. He was never really one for words, but he’ll still get on the phone and say, “Carlos, I love you, man.” What can I say? He changed my life.

Back in the Bay Area in December we got asked to play another festival. It was at the Altamont Speedway—and I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to be the first band to go on, then or now. Now that I look back on it, I think that while Woodstock was as close to spiritual as you could get, Altamont was about overindulgence and cocaine and strutting your stuff to see how badass you were. It wasn’t about the Rolling Stones hiring the Hells Angels, though that was part of it. It was just a strange, rowdy kind of vibe—people pushing instead of relaxing, getting upset with each other, just the wrong kind of energy, and the people who were supposed to stop that from happening were getting the most pissed off. It smelled bad, and there was fear and anger. You could see it in people’s eyes. We played and left before it all got weird—later we heard that someone in Jefferson Airplane got knocked out and that the Dead didn’t want to play and that the Rolling Stones went on and a man got killed.

You can see it in the movie
Gimme Shelter
—it was all so tangible. The Stones wanted us to be in their movie, and I think we were all pretty much in agreement that we didn’t want any part of that. It put everything in a bad light—the atmosphere was dark and brutal and cruel, and we didn’t want to participate. We said no—more than just bad vibes, that experience had a tangibly dark, scary, cruel kind of energy that we didn’t want to be connected to. We’re still saying no today, because every once in a while they want to bring it out again with more footage.

If ’69 was about volume and overindulgence, another part of that year was about speed—things kept happening faster than ever for Santana. How fast? By November, when we came back to New York to play the Fillmore East, we were headlining—the Butterfield Blues Band and Humble Pie were opening for us. There’s a letter from that same month that I got to see years later, sent by Clive Davis at Columbia to Bill Graham, asking him to start booking Miles Davis into the Fillmores and introduce him to the rock audience. In the middle of it, he wrote about the strong sales of
Santana
and called us “unstoppable.” In December, “Evil Ways” was released, and by early ’70, it was a top ten radio hit. Then we got ready to go into the studio again, and after that, as Clive said, Santana really was unstoppable.

In the week before we played Woodstock, I started hanging around a dude who was older than I was. He had some cocaine, and I said, “Nah, I don’t want to do that.” Then he started playing me bootleg recordings of Charlie Christian performing live at Minton’s Playhouse, and man, that shit was even scarier for me! I was hearing the roots of bebop coming out of swing jazz from a guitar player who had had TB, as I had, and who had died at twenty-five. His music went straight into me. He was
one of those guys—like Django and Tal Farlow and Wes Montgomery—who could play intricate melodies with all these chords on every single part of the neck and never look at it once. If you look at videos of Jimi or me, you can see us counting frets.

I think Charlie Christian should be required listening if you’re a serious guitar player and not just a weekend musician. As I got to know his melodies—and the octaves and warmth of Wes and the atomic, bombastic sounds of Sonny Sharrock—I grew to believe that all that music and all those musicians came to me for a reason. I think everyone I was turned on to made me think in a new way about the instrument and how to get at something new.

It took me a while, but I learned to respect Christian’s way of playing. It’s a language that’s very, very evolved. Modern jazz has another kind of vocabulary, which came from a higher form of musical expression. It came from a special place—from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, and it was deep in blues roots. But not the same kind of blues I started with—string benders like B. B. and Muddy. Django, Charlie Christian, and my former father-in-law, Saunders King—they were not string benders.

I used to ask SK, “Why weren’t you guys bending notes?” He’d say almost with disdain, “Man, we never had time.” I was like, “Oh!” You can hear that when you listen to Charlie Christian hitting those notes in those tempos. No time to bend any strings. Thank God Miles and Coltrane moved on to modal playing; it made it easier for me—it’s closer to the blues. I know what I can and can’t do and what I’m best at, and I still don’t know how to play solos around chord changes. Well, maybe subconsciously I do. But when someone like Charlie Christian or Charlie Parker starts doing chord changes, I can play along and hang for the first twenty seconds, maybe thirty. I think I did okay with that kind of feel on the end of “Hannibal.”

I
n 1970 we kicked off the year already riding on a rocket ship. Santana was busy touring—back to the Fillmore East and New York City; back home to San Francisco, where we played on a TV
special produced by Ralph J. Gleason and a company called the Family Dog; and then a fund-raiser to help the Grateful Dead after they got busted in New Orleans. More festivals and colleges. Then the first royalty check for
Santana
came from Columbia Records—which was the first real money we had seen as a group. I remember some of the other guys started buying motorcycles and expensive cars right away.

The first thing I did was keep my promise to my mom—I bought her a two-story, big-garage house on Hoffman Avenue in a safe place in the upper Mission District, near Twin Peaks. Everybody was pretty much gone from the old house by then—it was my dad, my mom, and Maria. My sister Irma lived downstairs. Mom got her washing machine and dryer. They stayed there until 1991, when they moved to San Rafael and then Danville. My parents were twenty-one years in that house—longer than any other place they had lived.

I remember when I told my mom that her Safeway bag just got bigger and that I was buying her a house, she gave me a hug and kept looking at me like she didn’t know what to say. We had some distance between us then—it took time for us to act like mother and son again. I’d been out of the house for a while.

While I was away on the road, my girlfriend, Linda, found a house for us in the North Bay area of Marin County, up on Mount Tamalpais, with an incredible view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge—hawks would be circling around there all the time, riding the winds. We moved in there together, and compared to the center of San Francisco, with all its street noise, it was so peaceful that I had trouble because the quiet was so loud. It took some time to get used to that. I wasn’t meditating yet and had just started reading the works of Paramahansa Yogananda and some other books on Eastern philosophy. You could say that moving one step outside the city and learning to listen to the quiet and really hear new sounds helped open me to the spiritual path I was about to follow.

What else to do with the money that was coming in? I started collecting a lot of music—tapes, record albums—and bought a set
of drums. I told myself I was going to dedicate one room to all my music. Later that summer in New York I would meet a man who just started to work for Columbia Records in France named Michel Delorme. He was friendly with Miles Davis and had been tight with John Coltrane, too. In fact there’s a great color photo of him interviewing Coltrane in 1965 that a friend of mine turned into a T-shirt. He was instantly a hero and a friend. The second time we met was in France a few weeks later. Michel gave me a stack of reel-to-reel tapes, mostly unreleased music by Miles and Coltrane. I treated those things like they were precious metals—I took them home and carefully copied them, then returned them to Michel. He still likes to tell me how surprised he was that I kept the tapes safe and got them all back to him. He must be thinking about the three-hour interview he did with Coltrane: he lent the tape to a friend and never got it back.

Michel is one of a few special people I met over the years whom I like to call Keepers of the Flame because of what they do to keep the music thriving. They are collectors of the music and information and spirit like Michel, or Hal Miller, who has almost every jazz video ever made, or Jan Lohmann in Denmark, or Yasuhiro “Fuji” Fujioka, who has the Coltrane House in Osaka, Japan. And there’s people like Michael Cuscuna, who keep reissuing the music so it doesn’t disappear from the stores or the Internet. It’s more than just loving the music—it’s being supremely dedicated to nurturing and preserving the history any way they can.

Years later Michel gave me a compilation he called
Intergalactic Wayne Shorter
—Wayne’s best live performances in France. Incredible music—one of my favorite mixes to this day. Michel and I still meet in France, and he still turns me on to new old stuff—old music that’s being discovered for the first time. He also turned me on to a nice expression to use when the music’s not happening, or when something’s obvious—“Poof!”

Michel’s tapes were the beginning of my own library of rare recordings, including vinyl albums and tapes and videotapes and DVDs—I still have them and treasure them. I always had a special
room for that collection and other things, such as my guitars and amplifiers, drum kits, and percussion. Now all that music, which used to take up a whole wall, can fit onto a few iPods, so I designed some that I occasionally give to friends—one of them contains all the music ever made by Bob Marley, and it’s colored red, green, and gold. Then I have one decorated with a stick figure of a trumpet player that contains every piece of music Miles ever made, including all his rare live recordings and sideman gigs—when he played on other people’s records. Same with Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, and other message givers like them.

Other than the music, which I
was
ready for, I bought one thing for myself that year that maybe I wasn’t quite ready for—a car. And not just any car—a special-edition, fire-engine-red Excalibur Phaeton convertible. It was beautiful. It was a 1970 model and looked like it had been made in Germany in the 1920s. It had running boards, a three-hundred-horsepower Corvette engine under the hood, and cooling tubes coming out of the engine compartment. Check it out on the Internet. This was a classic when it was new.

I never had a car before that—actually, I really didn’t know how to drive. Until then I had gotten rides from my friends who drove. With the success of Santana, we all had stuff to do and less and less time to do it in. Carabello and Gregg didn’t have time to come and pick me up, even for rehearsals. It was getting annoying. I thought, “I got to get me a car and learn how to drive.” In that order.

So I went to a dealership in San Rafael that sold these cars—Annex Motors, I think it was. They looked at me in my hippie clothes when I walked in, and a guy in a suit and tie immediately came up to me like he was sure I had walked into the wrong place. “Yeah? What do you want?” I was staring at the car. “How much is that car?” I asked. He rolled his eyes and got ready to walk away. I told him, “No—I want to buy that car. Here…” I gave him the business card of Sid Frank, the accountant Bill Graham had connected us with. “Call him. He’ll take care of everything.” Later on Bill found out that Sid was ripping us off—and Bill, too—and was ready to kill him.

Sid came around with the check, I signed the papers, and the salesman pulled the car around and gave me the key. I was like, “Okay, thanks. See you all later,” and I started driving away. I was fine on smaller streets, but I had to get on the 101 freeway to get back to my place—that’s when I started having trouble. I was driving around twenty miles an hour in the slow lane, cars whizzing past, just hoping I wouldn’t get hit. Now I think there wasn’t much chance that was going to happen—you could see the Excalibur from miles away. But on that day I was squeezing the steering wheel like you squeeze juice from an orange. It was a powerful engine, but I was just crawling along—good thing it was automatic transmission, too. Right away the highway patrol saw me. Two cops pulled me over, and then another car came. Four cops were looking at the car and at me, trying to figure it all out.

I think I’ve just been lucky in situations like that one—there was always a good cop riding with the bad cop. One guy wanted to do a search, but the top guy came over and said, “Okay, I need to see your driver’s license.” Suddenly I realized I didn’t even have one yet! The cop looked at me with no surprise in his eyes. “I
know
you don’t have a fuckin’ license because if you did you wouldn’t be driving that way.”

He took a closer look at me. “Hey, wait a minute: aren’t you Santana?” Then it looked like it all made sense to him. He thought for a minute and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” He turned to one of the other cops. “You—come over here,” he said, then he looked at me. “Give him the keys.”

“What?”

“We’re driving you home. You’re coming with me, and he’s going to follow us in your car. And you see this other guy over here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he’s going to pick you up tomorrow and teach you how to drive.”

Can you believe it? That’s how things were. I think it was a smart move on the cops’ part, because if I was going to be driving their stretch of the 101 in that kind of car with that much power, it
would be better if they helped me. Thanks to them, in around four days I had my confidence together, and I had my license.

I think that story says a lot about how well known Santana was in San Francisco by 1970—we were local heroes, even to some cops. That car was also a lesson in limitations and keeping the ego in check—it attracted a lot of attention in the following two years. One time I was driving on a two-lane road when another convertible came roaring up next to me, the people all hanging out and shouting—“Santana, man, we love your shit! That’s a bad car, Santana!” Only they weren’t watching the oncoming traffic, and along came a big bus that almost hit them head-on. I had to pull over and stop because my heart was beating so fast. I thought, “That’s not good. Those guys almost got killed because of me and this stupid car.” I didn’t want that on my conscience.

I toned down the Excalibur and got it painted black, which I know was like going from a 10 down to a 9.5. But it actually looked really, really good that way. I’ve driven many different makes since then. I’m not Jay Leno, and I don’t try to collect them, but I like a good car. These days I have a Fisker Karma with blue flake paint that I like—I love when the electrical system takes over, and it just purrs. Great stereo system, too, which is important.

That year I got to feel what it was like to become a celebrity, someone people recognize, and I learned how to act graciously—even when I was trying to eat or just drive down the road. If you don’t like people disturbing you, maybe you’re in the wrong business. It happened so fast and so strongly that it even affected my family—my dad told me that when he was playing with a Mexican big band at La Rondalla he got more recognition and respect because of our name. My sisters told me that people would call all the Santanas in the San Francisco phone book trying to find me. They had to change their number a bunch of times, and this went on for a while. My mom told me once in the ’80s that she was shopping at a department store downtown and needed some help, but the salespeople kept dismissing her. Then they saw her credit card and went, “Oh, you’re Santana’s mom?” and they got nice and helpful.

You know my mom by now—she said, “I don’t need anything from your damn store” and walked out.