The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (29 page)

Clive will probably laugh at this, but if you played a B-flat
⁷
on a piano he wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. He wouldn’t
care—that’s someone else’s job. Just as Bill Graham did, he understands by hearing you—except he’s not imposing, as Bill could be. Sometimes Bill’s tenacity would get the best of him, and it would alienate me—like, “Dude, back up a little bit.” Clive is expert in the way he uses diplomacy. “For you and your music, this is my heart; for everybody else, it’s work.”

“Clive, that’s so sweet; thank you.”

“No; I’m telling you the truth.”

It’s amazing to attract people who want to go to bat for you and invest in what you’re doing. We were still recording
Abraxas,
and I remember one day the phone rang in the studio and Carabello answered it. “Hey, man—it’s for you.” Carabello had gotten tight with Miles Davis and Jimi, so it wasn’t so strange when I asked him who it was and he told me it was Miles calling. But we had never met. Why’d he want to talk to me? “No, man, don’t fuck around like that.”

“No, really—it’s him.”

I took the phone, and damn, it
was
Miles, with that sandpaper whisper. “Hey, whatcha doin’?”

“Oh, hi, Miles—nice to meet you. We’re recording an album.”

“Yeah? How’s it goin’?”

“We’re learning, you know—learning and having fun.”

He kind of chuckled. “Okay, just checking up on you. How long you doing that?”

“We’re going to take a little time, Miles. We’ve been on the road for a while.”

“Okay. Don’t take too long.”

Over the years, we got to be friends, and he’d call me up and ask how I was doing. My answer was always the same: “Learning and having fun, Miles.”

The
Abraxas
sessions happened before and after our second visit to Europe—actually, our first European tour, because our first visit in April was to play a two-night Royal Albert Hall show featuring
Columbia Records acts such as Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal, and a group from San Francisco called It’s a Beautiful Day, which Bill Graham was managing. Bill’s role with Santana was expanding with everything that was going on—sometimes he would be the producer of the concert we were playing, sometimes the booking agent for the show, and sometimes the guy who got us recorded at the show. Sometimes he was all three.

Stan Marcum was still our manager, and I could tell that even though he had a desk in Bill’s office, they didn’t always agree on things. Bill was a businessman, and there was a side to him that was about the money. I learned in Tijuana that too much power can cause some people to do things that make you want to check your pocket every now and then. But I also knew that it was good to have strength on your side. And that’s pretty much where I landed when it came to Bill.

Most of the guys in Santana had some distrust of Bill—they felt that when he had the chance, he would take more than what should be coming to him. I intuitively felt that what he would bring was worth a lot more than the money that he might have been making. I also know a lot of guys on the scene got pissed off at him because of deals that went bad and some other problems. But even though we didn’t always see eye to eye, I always felt I could trust Bill, that he had my back.

Let me put it another way: when you consider all the other promoters and managers and agents at that time, how much they were taking and how much the artists were getting, I had no problem with Bill.

Bill was closer to me than he was to any other guy in Santana, and I got to see him in action. He was making things happen and getting things done back when the rock scene was still very new. He had used his position to get us to play Woodstock, and he had helped us work out our deal with Clive Davis at Columbia. He took the time to play a Willie Bobo tune and break it down for us. How do you put a price on all that? To me, he put more in than he took out.

Bill was like a big brother to me. He would sometimes ask me over to his house, and I’d get there just as Tower of Power or some other band was leaving. Over the years, he was a friend and adviser and helped us run parts of our business and negotiate a number of important deals. At times, people in his organization represented us and took care of paying bills. Bill wanted to handle all of Santana’s business and take us under his wing, and I was tempted to accept his offer, but he never really became Santana’s bona fide manager.

I had read the Ouija board—I could see what that would be like. It was like my relationship with Miles—sometimes you had a feeling that if you get too close, you’re going to get burned. Bill could be very intense, and I didn’t want to test our friendship. Bill accepted that, but he’d still say things like, “Well, if you’re ever stuck on the ten-yard line and need someone to drive it home, I’m here for you.” He always was there for me, and man, he knew how to drive it home.

David Brown and me at Tanglewood, August 18, 1971.

I know jazz puts certain people off. I think when it comes to some jazz, people pay attention to the tools instead of the house. When you hear music, you don’t want to see the tools. You don’t want to know how many nails it took to build the house. Some people just haven’t heard
Kind of Blue
yet, or
A Love Supreme
. They haven’t heard Wayne Shorter’s music.

Until I knew about Miles and Coltrane, I listened to jazz without calling it jazz—groups I heard live, or maybe a hit on the radio. I liked Chico Hamilton and Gábor Szabó and Wes Montgomery, but if anyone said the word
jazz,
I didn’t want to listen to it. That word made me think about bands in tuxedos playing while people who were also in tuxes ate dinner. It didn’t have fangs and teeth and claws. I wanted stuff that scratched you.

It was Michael Shrieve who got me to listen to Miles and Trane and corrected my twisted perception that jazz is only for old, fuddy-duddy people. He went through my record collection and saw what I didn’t have, and he decided I had to hear Miles and Coltrane. So he brought over a big stack of records for me. I started to listen—“Whoa, what is this shit? This is really different from John Lee Hooker.” I started playing it back and forth. Miles and Trane. Miles and Trane.

I started to get Coltrane inside of me with
Africa/Brass
and the 1962 album
Coltrane,
which included “Out of This World,” and of course
A Love Supreme
. With Miles,
In a Silent Way
and the
Elevator to the Gallows
sound track started it for me, then
Kind of Blue.

I would look at Shrieve and say, “Wow, this is the blues? And this is the same guy who did
Bitches Brew
?”

“Yeah, same guy.”

I was like, “Oh, damn.” I was able to feel what Miles was doing with modal jazz. You could just sit in one groove and make it happen. After a while, his music became more endearing, closer to me—I got more into it because his path really was a story, all the way back to his first records with Charlie Parker.

The album that really,
really
opened it up for me was Miles’s
Bitches Brew
. It had long tracks like “Pharaoh’s Dance” and “Spanish Key”—on that one I could hear the connection to his
Sketches of Spain
album. Those tracks made you want to turn the lights down. One writer called it “a light show for the blind.” It was very visual music. It made so much sense with everything that was happening then—like a man walking on the moon. When it came out I played it nonstop, nonstop, nonstop. I read Ralph J. Gleason’s liner notes over and over—the notes in which he said that after
Bitches Brew,
the world would never be the same. Not just jazz—the
world.

D
uring the first part of 1970, we played Europe a few times—the Royal Albert Hall in England, venues in Germany, Denmark, and Holland, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, where I met Claude Nobs for the first time. Claude
was one of the first people I could respect the same way I did Bill Graham—he had persuaded the government and local businesses to invest in his idea to start a jazz festival, and it quickly became one of the music world’s crown jewels. I could tell Claude liked us a lot, which was a good thing, because even though we had played on the same bill with jazz groups, it had always been for a rock audience. This was different, because this was really a
jazz
festival. We were the strangers there, playing for the people who came to hear Bill Evans and Tony Williams Lifetime and Herbie Mann, when he had Sonny Sharrock on guitar with him.

Claude made it work. He asked us to play outdoors next to the pool, not inside the casino, where most of the big concerts happened—that’s the casino that burned down and that Deep Purple sang about in “Smoke on the Water.” We did as Claude asked, and it was the first place in Europe where I felt a camaraderie that was even more pleasant than the feeling I got from hanging with hippies at the old Fillmore. At that time, people who were different from one another—who came from different generations and wore different clothes—were usually very guarded and polite around each other. In Montreux, it was loose and free—all sorts of people were hanging together, having a great time.

I played Montreux so many times over the years and did so many special shows there that it was really like another home. Seriously, if I could make three or four of me, one of them would live in Switzerland and just soak up the vibe over there. Claude and I quickly got tight, and Santana played there more than a dozen times. Every time we got there he’d open his home to us and show us his collection of recordings and videos—it was like a music museum up there, high in the snowy mountains looking out at the world. Claude was a friend and a collaborator—if I wanted to try something new, he would help make it possible—a concert with John McLaughlin; a blues night with Buddy Guy, Bobby Parker, and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Or the event we did in 2006—we invited African and Brazilian musicians for three straight nights, which was like a festival within a festival. We called it Dance
to the Beat of My Drums after a song by Babatunde Olatunji, who also had given the world “Jingo.” If I wanted to keep playing for three hours, it was cool with Claude. I think it’s important that he be validated in every way possible for all that he brought professionally and personally to musicians—we need more musical laboratories like Montreux, where musicians can come and be open, collaborate, and experiment.

I was still shy onstage then. I didn’t say much into the mike, and I wasn’t doing interviews. But if I wanted to meet someone I was fearless. When Santana played New York City in August—our third time there during 1970—I got to meet some of my biggest heroes, people who were resculpting the musical landscape. Nobody was bigger in my eyes than Miles Davis.

Bill was booking a summer weekend up in Tanglewood—an outdoor festival in Lenox, Massachusetts. It was all rock bands except on Sunday, when he put us on a bill with a big group of singers called the Voices of East Harlem as well as Miles Davis—jazz, gospel, R & B, and Santana. This was Bill’s genius—he created that multidimensional environment consciously and honestly and brutally, and he got a new generation to hear the beauty in all this music. And that was the deal: if you want to hear Steve Miller or Neil Young or Santana, you’ve got to hear Miles Davis. We need more promoters like that today: if you want to hear Jay Z or Beyoncé, you have to hear Herbie Hancock or Wayne Shorter. Wouldn’t that be incredible?

We went up to Tanglewood, and I remember getting there and meeting a photographer who was selling big black-and-white prints of Miles and Ray Charles performing at the Newport Jazz Festival. I bought some, and just as I’m carrying them backstage an amazing yellow Lamborghini drives in, and Miles gets out. I wasn’t afraid, so I went up to him.

“Hi; my name is Carlos—would you be so kind as to sign this for me?” He looked at me and looked at the photo, grabbed a pen, and signed “To Carlos and the best band” or something like that. He knew who I was, so we started talking, and after a little while he
said he had something for me. He went into his shoulder bag and pulled out a tube that looked like a big eyedropper wrapped in cowhide, and of course it was cocaine. Miles looked at me and said, “Try it.”

I hadn’t slept the night before, I’m with
the
Miles Davis, and I did something that I later felt I shouldn’t have done. Cocaine put a distance between my heart and me, between me and the music. My body rejected cocaine as something that made my soul feel disenfranchised—it would say, “This is not for you.” When I remember that Tanglewood performance, I still cringe because it felt like I couldn’t get myself into the center of my heart. It wasn’t the same problem I’d had at Woodstock, but I have the same kind of regret. I decided again to make it permanent: I’d never take what someone else gave me, no matter who it was.

Tanglewood had a beautiful audience with all kinds of people, many of whom, as they had at Woodstock, came up from New York. The festival was much, much smaller and was run much tighter. There were only three bands that Sunday. I loved the Voices of East Harlem. They were all about power to the people and positive message music, and they had that black church energy. There’s also something about a hip choir, you know? Donald Byrd and “Cristo Redentor”; the Alice Coltrane albums, with their heavenly voices; Duke Ellington’s Sacred Concerts. I think it’s the prayer feeling about them that I like—the sound of voices together going straight up to God. If it has a funky, African feeling in it, I can never put it aside. The Voices had a great bass player, a young guy with a huge Afro—Doug Rauch. I called him Dougie. He became a good friend of the band and even traveled with us before he joined us. He had a nice, burly sound on bass, like an older, acoustic tone, but with a Larry Graham technique—slapping, funky. He was part of a new wave of bass players that included Chuck Rainey and Rocco Prestia with Tower of Power and Michael Henderson with Miles—they were all moving the music forward and playing music that wasn’t just R & B and wasn’t completely jazz. They were all supremely important to Dougie. The next year he moved out to San Francisco
and ended up playing with the Loading Zone and Gábor Szabó and finally Santana.

At this time, Miles’s band was getting big with the rock audience. Other jazz musicians had played for hippies, but I think the difference with Miles was that he had been listening to rock and funk groups and was bringing his music closer to rock. Without a shadow of a doubt Betty Mabry, who was his wife then, was a big reason for this. She helped transfigure her man. She got him out of those Italian suits and into leather trousers and platform shoes. She didn’t want to hear any old, mildewed music at home, so she got him listening to Sly and Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Chambers Brothers, and the Temptations. His record collection started to be broader—as they say now, Miles expanded his portfolio. I’m pretty sure Betty turned him on to Santana.

Another thing was that, like Betty, most members of Miles’s band were closer in age to the hippies than they were to Miles. You can hear that in the way Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland played; you can hear that they had been listening to Sly and Larry Graham and Motown. Some of them were starting to use fuzz tone, and Chick was using a ring modulator. Even Miles was using wah-wah and echo.

When I heard him in Tanglewood, Miles’s music was already changing from
Bitches Brew
. His group played a song called “The Mask” that made you feel like you were in an Alfred Hitchcock movie—something’s about to happen, and you can’t get out of the way. Miles’s bands were masters of mystery and tension—they never played anything mundane or obvious. It was like what my friend Gary Rashid told me once—he agreed that Miles was a genius, but he said a big part of that genius was Miles’s habit of surrounding himself with four or five Einsteins. The music always depended on who was in the band—also on what they ate and what they were thinking that day and what was going on between them.

I began to keep track of all the musicians who played with Miles—my own little list in case I got lucky enough to play with any of them somewhere down the line. At Tanglewood, Miles still
had Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett
and
Jack DeJohnette with him as well as Gary Bartz, Dave Holland, and Airto Moreira. By the end of the year, the band started to change—Jack, Dave, and Chick were gone, and Michael Henderson and Ndugu Chancler were stirring the pot. Keith had stayed.

Keith’s amazing, man. I have to say something about him for a minute. He’s just fucking unbelievable the way he can create right on the spot. You can tell by the way he sits at the piano and improvises a whole solo show. To me, he represents a brand-new soul coming to this planet with no fingerprints, no preconceptions, no preconceived notions of what music should be. He’s a giant of innocence and courage to be able to come in with a blank mind and sit down and play the way he does. I’m totally the opposite—I honor myself with melodies. I have to have some kind of melody that I can dismantle in different ways; then I try to refine it and present it the best way I can. I collect melodies like a bee collects pollen—“The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”; “Wise One”; “Afro Blue.” To hear a person who discards all of them and gives you something that’s 100 percent fresh—that’s why I love Keith so much. What he does honors music: he goes onstage absolutely not knowing what he’s going to do.

I’ve studied and listened to so many tapes of Miles’s bands from around this time that I could tell how the sound of any given tune would be different each time they played it. The rhythm was always flexible, and the music always seemed to match the players. When Wayne Shorter was with Miles, the music sounded perfect for his horn. When Bartz came in the music sounded like it was a comfortable fit for him, too.

Miles knew what he was doing even when he didn’t know beforehand what was going to happen. He was playing for a young rock crowd, and he knew he was bringing his music onto their turf, but rock bands could not come into his jazz world. He wasn’t shy about it. I met him for the first time that day in Tanglewood, and we got to be very close. Later he used to tell me, “I can go where you guys are, but you can’t come to where I am.”