The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (40 page)

Santana, 1973: (L to R, top) Tom Coster, Richard Kermode, Armando Peraza; (middle) Leon Thomas, Michael Shrieve, Chepito Areas; (bottom) me, Dougie Rauch.

My time with Sri Chinmoy lasted from 1972 until 1981, and I believe both Deborah and I felt we got what we needed, that we benefited from his style of spiritual discipline—and that’s exactly what it was, a discipline. In an interview I did back in the late ’70s I said that I was “a seeker with Sri Chinmoy… even music is secondary to me, as much as I love it.” I think many people were surprised to read that then, and it’s still true. I was a seeker—now I feel I’m a guider.

I should be clear: it’s not about music
or
spirituality. For me, music is part of being spiritual, an extension of my aspirations in this lifetime. If I wake up only to be a musician, or only to go to work, or only to do this or that other thing, then I would be missing the big picture. But if I wake up and my first thought is that I am here to be a better person, then the musician in me is just going to come out naturally.

Music is the amalgamation of sound and intention and emotion and wisdom. To this day my chant is the same—“I am that I am. I am the light”—and that’s what I chant if I feel myself scattered, pulling away from my core, if I feel the Universal Tone separating into different notes. I need all that I am to hit that one note and be in tune. Five things go inside that one note: soul, heart, mind, body, and cojones.

I
knew I had made the right decision to be a disciple of Sri Chinmoy when that feeling I had when I closed my eyes and heard him talking and chanting did not go away. The joy, the light, the lightness. When I went back to San Francisco and would visit the meditation center that Sri had started there, it stayed with me. When I would wake up to meditate at four in the morning, I felt the same way.

Love, devotion, and surrender—that’s the name of the path of Sri Chinmoy. Most people think of it as the album I did with John McLaughlin. Some even think that I joined Sri so I could play with John. That’s funny. First, it’s not easy to tell yourself to play guitar next to someone like John; and second, it’s much, much harder to be next to Sri! It was not like joining a garden club and meeting every Wednesday night.

The love part of Sri’s path is the thing that all gurus and spiritual leaders agree on—love is the unifying force of the universe; it’s what holds us together and brings us life. Love is the breath that flows through us all and connects us. Devotion is the commitment to living with spiritual priorities, which was the direction I was already going in when I started to move away from drugs and toward the idea of inner work; it was where I was going when I met
Deborah, who was moving in the same direction. Devotion is not just inner dedication but also listening and learning a new vocabulary so I could talk about the incubation I was going through.

The surrender thing—that part was 100 percent Sri. Surrender was discipline—Sri’s discipline. It wasn’t just about short hair and guys wearing white shirts and pants and looking neat and women wearing saris. It wasn’t just abstinence from drugs and smoking. Surrender was about a pretty strict diet and schedule—agreeing to stop eating meat, agreeing to wake up at five in the morning and meditate for an hour or two hours straight, even when the brain and the body both want to do other things—anything but that. Sri was also one of the first gurus I know of who had exercise as part of his path. Sri was healthy, and he looked it, too.

One of the most important lessons I learned from Sri was his fearlessness—he believed so firmly in what he was doing that even before the whole guru thing was popular, he was doing it right in the middle of New York City. He wanted his disciples to be healthy, so he got us into jogging. Later he got into tennis and he put together teams and played with professionals. He wanted his disciples to be vegetarian, but there weren’t many places that served that kind of food back then—so he inspired people to start restaurants. John McLaughlin and his wife, Eve—Mahavishnu and Mahalakshmi—helped invest in and run a place called Annam Brahma in Queens, which was close to Sri’s ashram. Later, Deborah and her sister, Kitsaun, and I put together one of San Francisco’s first vegetarian restaurants—Dipti Nivas. I think eventually there were more than thirty of them around the world that Sri had helped bring into being.

Sri’s fearlessness in inspiring all this to happen in a world that mostly didn’t understand what he was about was one of the qualities I most respected. He didn’t just take his disciples and move to some jungle overseas, like Jim Jones did in Guyana. Jonestown was all about self-deception and darkness. Sri was self-discovery and light—right in the middle of Jamaica Hills, Queens.

If anyone asked me where Deborah and I lived in the years from
1973 to ’81, I would have said Queens first and San Francisco second. The reality was that between all the touring and recording and running the restaurant, which we opened in September of ’73, we would come out and stay in Queens usually three or four times a year. Each time it would be for around two weeks of meditation and exercise, like a pilgrimage. It was usually spread out through the year, and we were there for some special occasions, such as Sri’s birthday and Christmas, when we had to be there, and I’d make sure Santana’s schedule did not interfere with those dates.

When we were in Queens Deborah and I could relax and settle into the routine that Sri made for us: on most days around 4:00 a.m. we would wake up, take a shower, then go over to Sri’s house, because we were two of the few privileged ones—the first circle of disciples—who would meditate on the porch with him, which was a great honor. Then we would walk or take a nap, and later we’d have breakfast together. Deborah would work in the kitchen or some other enterprise such as the store, selling books and Indian saris, and I would help her or spend time speaking with Sri.

Later in the day Sri would talk to the disciples, play a little music on a toy organ, and get everyone to sing with him. Sometimes he’d sing songs he had written himself; sometimes he’d make them up right there and teach the words and melody to everyone. Then we’d stop and close our eyes and he would speak about music and its special power to make us aspire faster, to achieve a universal feeling of oneness, and to connect the outside—the music that man makes—with the music that everyone has inside but doesn’t always hear. One type of music helps reach the other—from one note to the Universal Tone.

The relationship I had with Sri was different from the relationship Deborah had with him, because I was not with him as much as she was. She would spend a lot more time with him while I was out on the road. I would come back and be overflowing with questions, wanting to know about how things functioned on the way to finding the light, and whether this or that was proper, and what she thought about various things. All the time I was with Sri I never
called him Guru or Master or anything like that, but I showed him respect. He was a guide more than anything else, and it felt like I was part of a fellowship. It was a fellowship that I needed to return to so that I could be with souls who were aspiring toward the same path—just as certain people who want to climb Mount Everest or explore Africa will need to hang together and speak and support each other. Like attracts like.

It took a major commitment of time and energy from Deborah and me, and because of Sri and who he was, we were prepared to do it—a commitment of energy to excellence. For a number of years through the 1970s, our work with Sri was more rewarding than all the things the world was offering—the money, the praise, the other rewards that came from being in Santana.

I knew that I needed to surrender and do the things Sri required if I wanted to get past the ego games, get outside of myself, and have a different view of my persona. It was a commitment like being in the Marine Corps. Once you put on the uniform, you wear the uniform. This was spiritual boot camp—24-7—not just going to church on Sunday. I kept my conviction and my consciousness high, and I could feel much of myself changing. Everything started to change.

I think about it now, and these changes all made sense. It was as if they had been planned. One life change led to another and another and then one more—turning away from drugs and the crazy rock-and-roll lifestyle; thinking about spiritual questions and changing my diet; the band coming apart; finally accepting that I could not fix the break between Gregg and me; going in a different direction with the music; meeting Deborah; meeting Sri. I can’t see any of that happening if I’d still been smoking cigarettes or weed or eating junk food. It felt like it was all supposed to happen—later I understood inwardly that it was the invisible realm working its way through me.

It was my own inner journey, but to the fans of Santana and people around the band I was still the same Mexican guy onstage
with a guitar every night hitting those notes. They didn’t know what was going on until I showed up dressed all in white, with my long hair cut short. Even people close to me, including other members of Santana, didn’t see these changes coming. When Deborah and I got to London at the end of 1972 for the European shows, everyone thought I’d gone off the deep end. Everyone except Shrieve, of course, who joined Swami Satchidananda.

When I got back to San Francisco, everybody including my mother thought I had lost my mind or just given it away. My family and friends from the Mission were the most certain of it. “You’ve been brainwashed. Those people will eat your brain—there is nothing happening but Jesus Christ, and that’s it. Anything else is the devil.” My dad was the one who was cool about it. He honored me by not saying anything, respecting my decision, and allowing me to work it out and find out what it was all about.

To the older guys who had left the band—and of course to Bill Graham and Clive Davis—this was just one more piece of evidence that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was willing to commit career suicide. Most of them didn’t say anything, but I could feel it—and their suspicions didn’t go away until 1975, when we went back to the older Santana kind of music. Until then, every now and then people would point to other Latin rock groups, such as Malo and Azteca, and say, “Man, they’re playing Santana better than Santana is, know what I mean?” I knew
exactly
what they meant, but still I’d look at them and say, “No: what do you mean?”

The one guy who kept at it was Bill. He came by the house a couple of times, and I’d say, “What’s up, Bill?” and we’d talk. One time he was being very polite. “Can I come in?”

“Sure.”

“You know I love you like a brother, like my son,” he said, and he started crying.

I said, “Bill, what’s going on, man?” He shook his head. “The decisions that you’re making are breaking my heart because I can see how hard you’ve worked so far, and it feels like you’re just throwing it away.”

Bill had been taking things hard not only because of my decision to go with Sri Chinmoy and to change the sound of Santana but also because there was a big problem with how things had been managed—
mismanaged
—in our business. Money had disappeared and taxes hadn’t been paid, so the IRS was getting involved, too. Almost all the money we thought we had put away had leaked out. That year, partly because we were told we’d better keep busy to make the money back, Santana played more shows than ever—we were constantly touring.

Yes, our music had changed, but people still wanted to come out and see Santana—they were buying tickets. I said, “Bill, now I’m going to cry. But if I do what everybody tells me to do, man, it won’t be me. I know you want to encourage me to make better decisions, but I’m not going to kill my career, and I’m not going to let anyone kill who I am, either. I have to go through this with Sri Chinmoy, and I’m working on this thing with Deborah.” I told him, “Bill, it’s just that simple.”

By that time Deborah and I were living together. I remember the day I knew we had crossed that line and I could tell that we were a couple. She called me over to her, and she had the keys to the Excalibur in her hand. She was making a face, holding the keys up with just two fingers, like she was holding a dead rat. “What?” I said. I had no idea what she was doing. She said, “Now that you’re with me, you’re not going to need this.” I said, “What do you mean?” Then I got it.

I was thinking, “Who does she think she is? That’s audacity, man.” But I liked how she did that—she had my respect, and I could feel right away what my answer was. I said, “I’ll tell you what—you don’t like it, you get rid of it.” I think Deborah sold it in half an hour.

That’s when I knew that we were in it for the long haul. In April, Sri was talking to us, and he said that he could see we were good together, that we were helping each other with our spiritual progress. He said, “You two should get married.” We looked at each other with questioning in our eyes, because back then young people were not so formal and were pulling away from those kinds of
old, traditional ways. I was twenty-five and Deborah was twenty-two and we were in love, but we hadn’t even been together a year by then. I think we could have lived together forever at that point, but Sri convinced us that he saw something more. “I think your souls need to be tied together—this will help you both with your aspirations even more.”