The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (43 page)

The last concert of the tour was in New Zealand—Christchurch—and I remember the band being so together, as if we had made it to the summit of a mountain. It really felt like the best concert of the tour, the best that band had ever sounded. We didn’t record all our shows back then, but I knew that fans were able to either record Santana in concert or find people who did. I knew that there were bootlegs floating around, although it wasn’t as extreme as the Grateful Dead’s situation with the Deadheads and all the taping and trading that went on. For some reason, though, I wasn’t able to find a recording of our Christchurch show until 2013, when we got a copy through one of our dedicated Santana followers. We call them the gatekeepers because they know more about the band and its history than just about anyone. The recording needed to be fixed in the studio, because the tape had deteriorated and was wobbly. But once it was repaired, the playing sounded crisp, and it validated everything I remembered feeling about the show. There was a sense of adventure in our playing; we were stretching out and trying new things, even on the last date of the tour, and there was no more turbulence—no problems with the structure of songs or the segues. It felt like the show just played itself—it was that good. It still blows my mind.

From there we went back to the United States and toured for another five weeks. It was during this period that Deborah and I got our spiritual names from Sri, which he had promised us the year before. Devadip, which means “lamp of God” and “eye of God,” was my new name; Deborah’s new name was Urmila—“Light of the Supreme.” At this same time, Deborah and Kitsaun were getting ready to open Dipti Nivas, the vegetarian restaurant that Sri asked us to start in San Francisco because he would not accept any donations. He preferred that his followers do the kinds of things that expanded his message of love. “Do not try to change the world,” he would say. “The world is already changed. Try to love the world.”
A new vegetarian restaurant aspired to that spiritual goal and was the kind of contribution he wanted.

The restaurant opened in the Castro, which was becoming known as the center of San Francisco’s gay community, and as the neighborhood grew it helped all the businesses there. At first I wasn’t sure if we were ready to run a restaurant, but I got to see Deborah in charge, and because Kitsaun was also a disciple by then, I knew the two of them would be okay. I remember Deborah once going up to a tall drag queen and saying, “Excuse me, sir. There’s no smoking allowed.” He looked like he had spent half the day getting himself together. He looked down at her and put out the cigarette. Deborah was no-nonsense when it came to that.

Soon anyone who was vegetarian or was thinking about giving up meat or was just curious came by. The frittatas and casseroles and fresh juices were delicious, and the place got great reviews. Deborah and Kitsaun started doing meditation classes there, and bands such as Herbie Hancock’s came in to eat when they were in town. The name for what we were doing was what Sri first called it—a love offering. People could taste our intention and feel what we had to offer on a spiritual level. Dipti Nivas stayed popular for a long time.

The next leg on our tour was Santana’s first real run in Central and South America—ten countries, including Mexico. It was my first time playing there since I left in 1963. In fact the first show was in Guadalajara, in my home state of Jalisco, so you can imagine the attention I was getting. I’ll be honest: I don’t think I was ready for it. I was still getting myself together spiritually, still figuring out my identity. And musically I was much more American than anything else, still loving the blues and the jazz of Miles and Coltrane. In my mind, even before I met the press in Mexico I was already thinking that they’d be wanting to claim me. You know what the first questions were when we started doing interviews? “Why don’t you play Mexican music? Don’t you like music from your home country? Why don’t you speak Spanish?”

Asking me those kinds of questions was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The reporters would do the press conference in a very confrontational way. My mind was spinning with all kinds of possible answers, like: “I’m not Mexican, I’m a Yaqui Indian, like my father.” Or “You know, what you think is Mexican music is really European—two-beats and waltz rhythms. Even the word
mariachi
comes from the French word for ‘wedding.’ ” But interviewers were looking for a lesson in music history about as much as I was looking for an interrogation.

Things between those Mexican writers and me did not get off on the right foot. There was a bit of a war between us that went on for years: even my mom heard about it back in San Francisco. Friends would send her the newspapers, and she’d call me. “Can’t you tone it down a little bit? You might be telling them the truth, but you’re pissing them off like crazy.” She read everything. “Why are you so angry?” she’d say. My whole family has been like that—Tony, Jorge, now Maria—checking up on me, asking me to watch my words. That’s a family tradition now; even if I sometimes have to respectfully disagree with them, I love them even more because they care so much.

Things did get better with the Mexican press over the years, and it never stopped me from going there and playing the same kind of shows I do everywhere else in the world. It took time—when I went back after
Supernatural
hit I think that was the first time I really felt comfortable being Mexican and being in Mexico, even with all the questions I would get. One thing’s for sure: there never was a time I did not feel the love of the people when I played there. Mexican audiences always made me feel right at home—even that first time, in ’73.

One highlight of that tour made me extra proud of being a Mexican. When we got to Nicaragua, Chepito’s home, we agreed to play a benefit for the survivors of the huge earthquake that had hit there just before Christmas the year before. Actually, this was the second benefit we did—the first one was in California the previous January, with the Rolling Stones and Cheech and Chong. This time we
played in a soccer stadium right in Managua, where the earthquake had hit. Who was the emcee for the show? I couldn’t believe it—Mario Moreno, or, as every Mexican knows him, Cantinflas!

Everyone in Central and South America knew the movies of Cantinflas and loved him. He was like all the Marx Brothers rolled into one—making fun of rich society people; getting away from the cops; getting over without changing who he was. The fans crowded the airport when he arrived. When he got onstage at the stadium, the placed was packed. He went up to the mike and said, “
Hermanos, hermanas!
I got a phone call while I was in Barcelona that I was needed here to be master of ceremonies tonight, and I said right away, ‘Of course! For my brothers and sisters in Nicaragua, of course.’ ” The stadium was filled to the top, and everyone was cheering. Then Cantinflas got serious. “I have just one thing to ask.” The whole place got quiet.

“Whoever took my wallet, can you give it back?”

Man, I’ve never heard such a huge explosion of laughter. It wasn’t just the sound; you could feel it. In a single moment fifty thousand people who had been messed up by the earthquake and by months of waiting for help all let go of their tension and their worries and were laughing together. It really was spiritual. With one small line, just a few words, Cantinflas connected with every person in that place. That was a huge lesson to me—the power of laughter.

It also reminded me that in church when I was growing up I saw a painting of people on Judgment Day—those who were damned and going to hell and the other, lucky ones who were going to heaven. I was still a kid: this was supposed to inspire me? I would think, “Keep that to yourself,” and I’d take what little money I had and go to the movies to see Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis acting goofy. I’d laugh my ass off. I’ve always loved comedies and comedians—especially those who know how to make fun of themselves without being racist or vulgar.

Laughter can be a very spiritual thing—if you ask me, I think getting in a good, gut-busting round of laughter is worth more than
a month of meditating. It can take you away from yourself, help you let go of a lot of layers of fear and anger. If you get someone laughing,
really
laughing, you’re dealing with Christ consciousness and Buddha consciousness and divine illumination. To me, Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor and George Lopez are all holy men in the way that each of them looks at life and finds a way of making fun of it. It still makes me laugh to think of how Mel Brooks dropped Count Basie and his big band in the middle of the desert in
Blazing Saddles
and had the black sheriff ride by on his horse with the Gucci saddle—that’s comic
and
spiritual genius. There’s so much going on in that one moment. Laughter is lightness, and if you don’t have a sense of humor things can get dark really quick.

One of the other lessons to come out of that tour of South America in ’73 was that because I spoke Spanish, I got a lot of practice doing interviews and talking to the audience from the stage. More and more I was stepping in front of the band in public, even though Shrieve and I were still making the decisions together about the music.

Bill Graham produced that first Nicaraguan earthquake relief concert back in January of ’73, and I think that had to be another reason he and I were so compatible. I always believed that music could help people who needed help, and I still do, and in fact that’s how Bill got his start—producing concerts to raise money for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, then to help some people who had been arrested, and the one thing that never changed about him was that he never stopped doing benefits and fund-raisers and putting together concerts for good causes, no matter how big he got. Being around hippies and that San Francisco thing, he couldn’t have ended up any other way—doing what he could to help people and to protest what was wrong.

Remember the S.N.A.C.K. concert Bill put together in 1975 with Bob Dylan and Neil Young and other bands that raised money for after-school programs? Or when he helped raise two million dollars after the ’89 California earthquake with all those rock bands
and even Bob Hope? Whenever he called me for stuff like that, I would always say yes—put Santana’s name on the list. In fact, put us on the list first, because I know he could then use our name to get other big names.

Just before Bill died, in ’91, we were talking about an American Indian benefit at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View to mark the anniversary of 1492—“ 500 Years of Surviving Columbus,” we were going to call it. The last phone message he left me was about that project: “Stay well, my friend. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

By the end of ’73, we were all tired of being on the road, and Ray Etzler was our new manager. Bill was still overseeing the business side of Santana, and though we really managed ourselves, we hired Ray to take care of stuff that needed taking care of, like dealing with Columbia Records, which seemed to be less and less in our corner.

Welcome
came out that November, and we had wanted our next album to be our concert from Japan. We had heard the tapes of our concerts in Osaka, and they were great—they caught the band at its best, and we were really proud of it. We had a great plan for bringing that music out, for making it an entire Santana concert experience: three LPs, with a booklet and images from Japan, including one of the Buddah, all done by talented Japanese artists. The album included a tune we put together during those concerts and named after Mr. Udo.

It was beautiful and ambitious and the music was fresh, but it was nothing that Columbia could handle. With the album cover and packaging and the three disks, it was just too expensive for them. They didn’t believe it would sell enough. Even after the Japanese finally released
Lotus
in the summer of 1974 and it became the bestselling import at the time, Columbia wouldn’t budge, and even Bill couldn’t make them. That’s how different things were after Clive was forced to leave. I was learning just how bureaucratic things could be in the United States and how differently record
companies were run in Europe and Japan. You know what Columbia did around the time
Lotus
came out? They put together a single-disk greatest hits album, as if we were some over-the-hill group, and released it around the same time. That was a low point.

We’d pushed so hard to be as good as we were on that album, to deliver hundreds of shows that year, that if you look at the Santana schedule for the first half of 1974, you can tell I was recovering—everyone in the band was. There were a few Santana shows, but most of my energy and intention was focused on meditating and being with Deborah in Queens. I did a few spiritual concerts with Deborah and John and Eve McLaughlin, and sometimes with Alice Coltrane and her group, and sometimes when Sri was there he would start the night and read his poetry.

Hanging around Turiya inspired me to write some spiritual melodies, and when she heard them she surprised me by coming up with some arrangements to go along with them—symphonic oceans of sound, tides flowing in and out. Those first tunes became “Angel of Air/Angel of Water” on the
Illuminations
album, which was the first album to have my spiritual name on the cover. All the planets aligned to make that one happen: Turiya was in between record companies at the time, and Columbia agreed to it but wasn’t expecting any radio hits, so the attitude was that they’d figure out what to do with it when it was finished. Basically, Columbia told us, “Go and have fun.” The album was like
Abraxas
—no hassles at all—but the music really took me farther away from that classic Santana sound than almost any other recording—farther away but closer to where my heart was.

We did the sessions at Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, where Frank Sinatra used to record, because Turiya knew it and there was space for a full string section. Everything was done live, and it was amazing to be in the same room with Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland—both of whom had played with Miles—and Armando and Jules Broussard and Tom Coster. There was a great vibe: Armando would tell a story, and we’d crack up, then Turiya would say something that made us all laugh even harder. Everyone thinks
of Alice Coltrane as being a serious, deeply spiritual person who was somehow close to the divine and was not allowed to joke around. But she loved to laugh and have fun.