The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (36 page)

The making of
Caravanserai
was when Santana really got into people working separately in the studio—Shrieve and Dougie and Chepito would get their tracks together and come to me and say, “Okay, we need you to come in and play your solo.” I’d hear it for the first time right then, and I’d wet my finger and point it up in the air like an antenna on the Empire State Building and let the melodies and inspiration come to me—I was thinking “Nature Boy”; “Love on a Two-Way Street.” Gábor Szabó licks. They’re all on that album. People would tell me later, “Whoa—that was a great solo on ‘Stone Flower.’ ” I’d say, “Thank you, man,” and be thinking, “I hope nobody busts me for it!”

For two reasons my favorite song on
Caravanserai
is still “Every Step of the Way”—first because it sounds like what we really loved back then: Herbie Hancock’s
Crossings
. The song also reminds me of Shrieve because he wrote it and because of how we played together. Shrieve was there to complete the journey that became
Caravanserai.
He was in my corner, and I was in his—we helped each other complete it. When it came time to figure out the order of songs for the album, he and I kept making cassettes of different sequences. Then separately, we would drive around San Francisco and listen to them. We would give them to each other and discuss them until we knew exactly how the tunes should run. More than any Santana album,
Caravanserai
was meant to be a full album experience, with one track connected to the next—a body of work like
What’s Going On
or
A Love Supreme
.

I remember telling Shrieve, “I found the word
caravanserai
when I was reading something by Paramahansa Yogananda.”

“Wow, sounds great… what does it mean?”

“The caravan is the eternal cycle of reincarnation, every soul going into and out of life, from death to life and back again, until
you arrive at a place where you can rest and achieve an inner peace. That place is the caravanserai. How you live now determines how you will live again, if you can get there. Reincarnation is in your hands.”

It made a lot of sense to me—the cycle that happens to all of us: mineral, vegetable, animal, man, divinity. It’s in our hands. I remember thinking that I was glad I had become acquainted with Eastern philosophy, because up until then I thought that you just die and that’s it—you go to hell just for living. That’s why we put the quote from Paramahansa Yogananda’s
Metaphysical Meditations
on the album cover:

For me, Armando Peraza was the most important person to come into Santana that year—maybe any year. He played in two tunes on
Caravanserai
—he added bongos on “Fuente” and later joined Santana on congas. He was one of the top four
congueros
to come over from Cuba in the 1940s, along with Patato Valdez, Francisco Aguabella, and Mongo Santamaría. Since the ’60s, he’d been living in San Francisco.

Armando was older and wiser than all of us—he was almost fifty then. He had been in the game for years. He was older than Miles Davis, which was another reason he didn’t take any mess from him. Armando was compact and tough. You could hear it in his congas—Armando was like a cheetah and a laser. He penetrated, and he was really fast. Meanwhile, alongside Armando, Mongo had a beautiful, burly, fatherly sound. It was a great combination.

Armando was an amazing spirit and force in the band. For me, he became a mentor and a tutor and a divine angel. He told me things when I needed to hear them, and he told great stories. He
had stories about all the people he’d played with and the crazy things he’d done. He’d challenge people with his credentials—his badge of honor was that his first gig after arriving in New York City was playing with Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich. “Afterward they both wanted me to come play in their bands,” he’d say. Then he’d say, “What’ve you got?”

Another thing Armando liked to do: after a gig he’d look at his hands. He had tiny little hands and a big, big sound. Armando would say, “And I don’t use a goddamn sticket, man.” In his vocabulary, it wasn’t a drum stick. “I don’t need no goddamn sticket.” He had his own way of speaking—instead of saying, “Don’t gimme that shit,” it was “Don’t gimme that shick.” If he was into the way somebody played, it would be “I like that guy’s shick.”

I was called Carlo. McLaughlin was Maharishi, not Mahavishnu. Lionel Richie was Flannel Richie. There was Argentina Turner, Roberta Flop, and that Weather Report guy, Joe Sabano. “Hey, Carlo, you know I was with Sabano when he wrote ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’?”

“Really, Armando?”

“Yeah, I helped him out.”

There was one story Armando told all of us a few times about being in Tijuana, where he did a little bit of everything—he was a dancer, a baseball player, and a bouncer. One night he bet a bartender that he could jump into a bullring and deal with the bull. You want to talk about full circle? Years later a beautiful, elegant woman saw him with me on the street in Daly City, California, yelled out his name, and came over. She said she was the wife of one of the Nicholas Brothers, then she said, “How come you don’t remember me? I was with you in Tijuana when you bet that bartender that you could face the bull!”

Armando turned to me. “You see, Carlo? Sometimes people accuse me of being senile, but I just have a great memory.” I still don’t know what that means.

I first read about Armando on the liner notes to one of the early Leon Thomas albums, which describes him playing in New York
City. The first time I heard Armando play was in a park in San Francisco in 1968—he and a guy named Dennis were going at it. Nobody was buying or doing anything—there was just a big crowd focused on the two of them. They finished, and people were freaking out, jumping up to give them a standing ovation. Armando came straight over to me, sweating and not caring. “Carlos Santana?” He knew who I was.

“Yeah?”

“Someday I want to be in your band, man.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Oh, man, that would be an honor.”

“But I can’t do that right now because I’m playing with Cal Tjader at the Matador. Come see me.”

Another time, in New York City, Carabello told me that Armando was sitting in with Mongo at the Village Gate. We took a cab straight to the club, and all these drummers were there—on my right was Roy Haynes, and Tony Williams was on my left. Mongo was playing his songs—including several cha-cha-chas and “Watermelon Man.” Armando was up there, too—putting more and more “something” into the music. Then all of a sudden it was just Armando and Mongo—what everybody came for. The look they gave each other was, “You’re my friend, but I got something I need to show you.”

I’ve seen Armando go up against Francisco Aguabella and Billy Cobham. He’d do his thing, then pull back a little and put his hands out like a toreador working a cape—“
Eso
—there you go! What’ve you got?” Every time musicians like that get together, the walls start to sweat. I swear to you, they actually do rearrange the molecular structure of the joint.

Armando was still one of the most important people to come into my life—he was another angel who showed up at just the right time. He carried so much music inside him and could be such a character. By being the way he was, he instilled confidence in me. He helped me believe in what I was doing and where the band was going. I needed that in 1972, because when we finished
Caravanserai
all the people around us were shaking their heads, saying we had gone too far.

By that time Santana was almost six months past the first breakup, when Stan and Carabello were let go. Carabello was around, playing with other folks in the Bay Area, and starting his own band. David was trying to get himself together. But Stan was hooked, and eventually he became another drug casualty.

One good thing was that it hadn’t been a messy divorce—at least not financially. We never fought over royalties or anything like that—we don’t even now. But it was messy in the sense that people were very disappointed in each other, laying blame and guilt on each other like I don’t know what.

Santana was moving forward, and I was the one talking for the band inside and outside the studio. When we were finished with
Caravanserai,
Clive Davis asked for a meeting at CBS’s studio. It was just Clive, Shrieve, and I.

Clive was definitely not happy. He had heard the music, and he was not smiling. It was one of the most important meetings we ever had about Santana, as important as the one we had with Bill Graham before Woodstock. By that point, with the band falling apart, Bill and Clive were handling a lot of the energy around us, trying to help us keep it together. But when it came to the music, Shrieve and I were the ones to go to.

There’s a funny thing that Clive does sometimes, usually when he’s in his own office. He’ll look away from you and talk to you indirectly, through one of his people: “Uh, Harry—tell Carlos that we should release the album on this date.” Meanwhile I’m in the same room; I just heard him say it. It didn’t matter. “Uh, Carlos? Clive thinks that we should release…”

I remember we were sitting across from each other, and there was a candle on the table between us. Clive was looking right at me. It probably seemed strange to Clive, but I kept looking at that candle when we spoke—not to ignore him, but I knew something was coming. I knew he was going to try to persuade me to take the
band in a different direction. But we were too deep into this thing with
Caravanserai
to turn it around.

Clive said, “I’m sorry; I have to ask. Why would you want to do this?” I have to say that he came into the conversation patiently. He was not pushy, just very gracious. I said, “Why would I want to do what?” He said, “Clearly there’s not one single within a thousand miles of this album. There’s nothing here to take to radio and get a hit with. It feels like you’re turning your backs on yourselves. The jazz stuff is great, but there’s already a Miles Davis; there’s already a Weather Report. Why don’t you just be Santana?”

I said, “It’s going to go like this, man. This is a body of work—the whole thing is a single.” I kept looking at the flame of the candle because I didn’t want to look in his eyes and be swayed into saying, “Okay, let’s go back to the studio and create another
Abraxas
kind of thing.”

I bored my eyes into the candle. I knew Clive was doing his job, and I knew Bill felt the same way. They were both right—there was no single on
Caravanserai
to take to radio.

I remember Quincy Jones once telling me about Ray Charles standing up for his music—the two of them had come up together in Seattle. When Ray got ready to do songs with strings and voices—a produced, pop kind of thing—some people who liked his R & B sound said, “I can’t get with that. I don’t like this ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ or ‘Crying Time.’ What are you doing?” Ray’s answer was, “Well, man, you’re not going to be ignorant your whole life, are you?”

I wasn’t going to put it that way. I had too much respect for Clive, so I said, “Clive, thank you for coming here and saying what you needed to tell us. You need to do what you need to do, and we need to do what we need to do. But we can’t be doing another ‘Black Magic Woman’ over and over and over. We can’t go back—with all the changes in the last few months, we literally cannot go back. We have to learn to change and to grow.” Clive didn’t really argue, he just thought for a moment. “Well, I do need to tell you there’re no singles in here.”

Clive was disappointed, but he didn’t try to put the screws to us: “Do it this way or else.” It wasn’t that kind of thing. Clive has always been very artist-friendly. He’ll give it to you straight, but he’s not a person who’s going to make you feel like a stupid child who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Bill Graham was kind of like that, only he would be straight without pulling any punches. When he heard what the title was going to be, he said, “
Caravanserai
? More like career suicide.”

“Career suicide”? Okay, it sounded a little like
Caravanserai
. Ha-ha. But no, I didn’t think we were doing that.

With all I know now I believe I still would make the same decision today. But I could not argue with Clive—I knew he was right in his thinking and that he was looking out for our best interests as well as Columbia’s. In hindsight what I wish I had said was, “Clive, let us do this one, and the next one we’ll work on together, okay?” But I didn’t know how to do that then—how to be diplomatic. Now I know. It’s all in the wording—all in the timing, presentation, and tone. Today I want to be able to invite people to invest emotionally with me and not consider it my music or theirs—it’s
our
music.

Columbia put out
Caravanserai
two months after
Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles! Live!
There were no hits on the radio and no gold records coming from either album, but they got great reviews. In
Rolling Stone,
Ralph Gleason really liked
Caravanserai
and reviewed it along with Miles’s
On the Corner,
but the general reaction was “What the hell is this?” It still sold well because a lot of people were curious about it, and we got so many compliments from musicians for that album. But without a radio single, sales went down compared to our first three albums. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t go back. We had to go forward, and
Caravanserai
is what we felt was right at that time.

A few months later, in ’73, there was an argument over money at CBS, and they let Clive go. Clive, in his way, had adopted us, as Bill had. Like Bill, he had a system and the right people working for him so that he could say with supreme conviction, “If we work together and you come with me, I’ll get on the phone, and your
music is going to get on the radio. You are going to get not only gold but platinum records.” Clive and his people always know how to get music into the mainstream. Santana was still able to continue, but with Clive gone, there was never the same feeling at CBS.