The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (50 page)

After that jam with CT in ’87, Jim gave me a cassette of it, and I left it in the car. The next day Deborah went shopping in that car, and when she came back she asked me, “Why don’t you play like that?” There was that question again, the one she asked after the Amnesty International concert—sometimes she’d say that and I’d have to think, “What does she mean?” Before I said anything she was already asking me the name of the song on the cassette.

“What song?”

“You know, that song you played with CT. I heard it and couldn’t drive. I had to pull over.”

I decided to call it “Blues for Salvador,” not only for Sal but also because San Salvador was going through some hard times then, with an earthquake and a civil war. That song inspired my last solo album as Carlos Santana. I love it because it has Tony Williams on it, and more of Buddy Miles’s singing, and that band—CT, Alphonso, Graham, Raul, Armando, and the rest. I dedicated the album to Deborah, and the song “Bella,” for Stella, is on there, too.

“Blues for Salvador” won a Grammy as the year’s best rock instrumental performance—the first Santana Grammy, but not the last.

Wayne Shorter, John Lee Hooker, and me, backstage at the Fillmore, June 15, 1988.

Maybe it looks like I’ll record with anybody, especially after
Supernatural
—“Carlos the Collaborator.” And maybe I still have a lot of spiritual books to read, because I’m supposed to see the same thing in everybody, but in music I don’t, and I won’t. There are some songs that even if you put them into me intravenously my body’s not going to let them go in. It’s like, “Thanks for asking me to play on this tune—I mean, thank you for inviting me, but I don’t hear myself in that.” I’ve said no to certain musicians because quite frankly I don’t like their music. I’m actually surprised they would even invite me. It’s never been about money at this point: it’s mainly about whether I’ll like a song ten years from now.

In the ’80s I recorded on albums by McCoy Tyner and Stanley Clarke and my old friend Gregg Rolie and Jim Capaldi from Traffic. In ’85 Clive Davis asked me to play with Aretha Franklin, which was
perfect because I was working with Narada Michael Walden at the time, and so was she. She
is
the queen of soul. I could not say no to her. Or to Gladys, Dionne, or Patti, but I did once say no to another R & B singer because her version of “Oye Como Va” was a little too LA slick for me. I know she was disappointed, because I had told her that I would do it.

It would be a privilege to do something with Willie Nelson again or Merle Haggard. Anybody in the Coltrane family of musicians I would say yes to, and I would say yes to almost everybody in the Miles family. I said no to a West Coast rapper because the song he sent sounded corny and plastic. I can still hear myself with Lou Rawls.

These days collaborations don’t happen in the studio—they’re just files e-mailed between engineers. I’ve adjusted to that. I’m lucky because I was born with a highly active imagination. I can close my eyes and you can grab a Sam Cooke song and I can play on it as if he were next to me and I can say, “It’s an honor to work with you, Mr. Sam Cooke.” Imagination gets past time and distance and separation, which is what any collaboration has to do, too. Imagination is like, “I’m right here, and you’re right here, and let’s get it on.”

Prince is a bad dude, a giant dude. It would be an honor to do something with him from scratch. I have the songs that would work for us. He’s a hell of a guitar player, a hell of a rhythm guitar player, and he’s sat in with Santana a few times. I’ve heard him play piano, and sometimes he goes into a Herbie place. He’s a
genius
genius. The only thing is, we’d have to find common ground—swamp–African–John Lee Hooker stuff—so it doesn’t get slick-a-roni. I like it down and dirty and barefootin’, and I think that’s what he loves about the music, too. We got to go to the jungle, man.

T
he best-paying jazz gigs today are usually the festivals, and many of them take place in the summer. The winter before the summer of ’88 I asked Wayne Shorter if I could start a rumor. “A rumor about what?”

“That you and I are in a band going on the road.”

He smiled with a twinkle in his eye, as he often does, and said right away, “Yes, you may.”

Wayne and I brought together a group that we thought was perfect for both of us: there were two keyboardists—Patrice Rushen, who brought an element of Herbie Hancock, and CT, who brought elements of Joe Zawinul, the church, and some McCoy. Plus we had Alphonso, Ndugu, Chepito, and Armando. We split the set list between some songs Santana usually played and Wayne’s originals. I asked him if he would mind doing “Sanctuary” in a boogie way. I think I got a couple of dirty looks from somebody in the band, but Wayne smiled and said, “Yeah, let’s do it”—and he took that song back to his early days in Newark.

We did twenty-nine concerts together, and we should have called it the Let’s Do It tour—it was fun and different every night. I think Wayne could feel that there was a camaraderie in the group. I’m glad Claude Nobs helped us record our performance in Montreux. We did a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Backstage before we went on, Wayne, Armando, Ndugu, and I were hanging with Greg Phillinganes and a few guys from the Michael Jackson tour, which was in London at the same time. John Lee Hooker, the original Crawling King Snake, was also in London, and he came by. I called it Hanging with Some Heavy Hitters. I couldn’t have been happier than I was that night.

Playing with Wayne taught me how he goes into a melody. It’s like a blind man checking out a room for the first time, or like a dancer trying out a stage so he can memorize it. He purposely plays almost as if he doesn’t know how to play, with a lot of innocence. But his playing is not naive: it has an innocence and purity, without desperation. It’s like he’s having fun discovering even though he already has everything that he’s looking for.

Playing with Wayne gave me courage—courage to go deep and high. It made me play with more vulnerability instead of just bringing the hard licks that I’d practiced and prepared, which can be like a shield that you carve carefully before you come out of your room. Wayne taught me to present myself as open and vulnerable, inviting the other player to present his or her wisdom. It’s an invitation to learn together.

Wayne does that when we talk—he’ll ask a question not because he doesn’t know the answer but because he wants you to hear the answer yourself. Then all of a sudden things start to fix themselves. You don’t have to try so hard—sometimes you don’t have to try at all, and if you try harder you end up making it worse. That’s what I really learned from Wayne—and Herbie, too. Okay, you can be upset. But like Wayne told that member of his band one time, “What did you
learn?
”

There were some strange things, too, that happened on that tour. Every night it seemed Chepito was going through a new crisis. Thank God Wayne’s wife, Ana Maria, was there, because she would dismantle it. He seemed close to the edge all the time, saying stuff like, “Chepito is very upset today” and “Poor Chepito. He’s going to die next Tuesday.” It was always going to happen on a Tuesday. Armando would look him at him and say, “Why wait? Do it now, goddammy.” You could hear the tears suddenly stop. “Okay. What time is rehearsal tomorrow?”

Miles was part of the big jazz tour that we were on, and when he peeked in on our show in Rochester and was getting ready to leave before we had played, Chepito almost lost it. He went running up to Miles. “Wait—you haven’t heard Wayne and Carlos and me. Where you going?” Miles looked at him and just said, “Chepito, you’re still a bad motherfucker,” and walked away. “Did you hear what Miles called me? I am a
bad motherfucker!
” Then the tears started again, because he was happy.

Chepito always reminded me of Harpo Marx with a voice. Clown, troublemaker, and super talented—all in one. Earlier that year there had been a memorial concert for Jaco Pastorius, who had been killed in ’87. He had come to our concert in Miami the night he died, but afterward he hadn’t been able to get in some other club, and that led to a fight with a bouncer. Jaco went into a coma that he never came out of. Backstage at the tribute concert in Oakland was everyone who had a connection to Jaco or Weather Report or Miles: Wayne, Joe, Herbie, Hiram Bullock, Peter Erskine, Armando,
Chepito. I had a bootleg tape of Coltrane we were listening to, and Marcus Miller came in. He said, “Hey! How’s everyone? What’s going on? What are you listening to?” We waited a second, and I said, “It’s good stuff—you should check it out.”

“Yeah, okay. Sounds good!”

I’m not sure if Marcus could make out who it was—the recording wasn’t the best quality—but Chepito picked up on this and couldn’t resist. He went, “So who are you?” Marcus looked at him and said, “I’m Marcus Miller—I play with Miles.”

“Yeah, I know Miles, but I never heard of you. What do you play?”

“I play bass.”

“Hmm. Okay, never heard of you.”

Marcus was hooked, and he tried explaining some of his other credentials, but Chepito just kept saying, “Never heard of you, man. Sorry.” Of course Chepito was just pulling his chain. By the third time he said that, Wayne and Ana Maria and Herbie were cracking up, and Marcus finally realized: “Oh! Okay—very funny.” That was definitely one of Chepito’s finest moments.

One night on that ’88 tour I said, “Hey, Wayne, you look so happy, man. What happened?”

“Miles just gave me back the rights to my song.”

I suspect that it was “Sanctuary,” because that was one of Wayne’s tunes on
Bitches Brew,
and it ended up with Miles’s name on it. I was happy for Wayne, but this happened almost twenty years after that song got recorded. Some things you have to watch out for in your life as a musician. Sometimes you have to stand up and say, “Look, man, this song is my song.” And you have to do it yourself. Even if you’re standing up to someone like Miles. That was the kind of advice I got from Bill Graham and Armando—you don’t have to be crass or vulgar or get upset, but speak up. The worst thing anyone can say is no.

The other thing that happened on that ’88 tour was that I got to see firsthand how certain jazz musicians were treated on the road compared to the way a Santana tour was run. I expected that things would be different in terms of the quality of hotels and the
backstage thing—I’m not talking about that. Although I did get upset once when we were picked up in what looked like a laundry truck instead of a car.

I’m talking about a lot of stuff the concert producers were not paying me and Wayne for, like putting our likenesses on big posters and T-shirts and broadcasting the concert on the radio and recording it. None of that was ever okayed by us; we were getting paid only for the gig. Even then it was standard practice in the industry that if your show was to be recorded for radio or TV you were to receive another payment besides the fee for the concert. Same with merchandise.

So I found myself speaking up a lot on that tour, and I know to some people I must have looked like a prima donna—I remember some of the other jazzmen on that tour looking at me that way. But I just didn’t want to cooperate with an old-fashioned plantation mentality that seemed to be standard for jazz festivals and clubs. “Turn off those cameras, man, and don’t turn ’em back on until you guys ask permission and negotiate with us properly.”

Experiencing all that on the ’88 tour made me realize that it was imperative for me to be more hands-on with my own business. I have Wayne to thank in a way, because that tour forced me to be even more of a leader with Santana. I realized that some people around me weren’t even asking me questions, like whether I wanted to be on the radio and how much I thought I should be paid for it.

“Oh, it’s for later release on CD, but it’s to raise money for a charity.”

“Okay, what charity?”

The fact that these questions weren’t coming my way really started to bug me, and suddenly it all became a priority, and I became more involved with the band’s business decisions.

In a way I was waking up to the responsibility of caring how Santana was presented, so that the feeling and the message and even the spelling was all correct and accurate on album covers and posters and advertising and tickets. A lot of times other people just don’t have the same consciousness as you do or are too busy or just
don’t have good taste. I remember thinking about how abysmal some of Miles’s and Coltrane’s album covers were. I started to demand to see everything—artwork, photos. “Okay, these three are the best—we’ll choose from these. These over here I don’t ever want to see again. Got it?”

The first example of this was
Viva Santana!,
which came out in ’88 and was a compilation that showed how far Santana had come in twenty years. It wasn’t just a “best of”—it told the Santana story through thirty songs and included a booklet with new original artwork that also used images from the covers of older albums. There were a lot of details and work that went into it, and everything came through me—this album I actually produced from top to bottom. We also did a documentary in which I talked about the band and myself and which included footage of Santana performing. It came out on VHS, then later on DVD, and now I think you can find most of it on YouTube. It really was the first attempt to show and explain Santana’s complete history, from “Black Magic Woman” to “Blues for Salvador,” in one package and in all the new technology and formats of the time.

At the same time we wanted to do a twentieth-anniversary reunion tour. It made sense—
Viva Santana!
was all about our history, so why not? Things were good between Gregg and Shrieve and me; Chepito and Armando were still in the band; and we had Alphonso to play bass, because Dougie was gone. David was not well at all, and we already had Armando and Chepito, so Carabello, who had his own band, didn’t come. We did a lot of tunes from the first three albums mixed with newer songs, and we ended the show with “Soul Sacrifice.”

I remember that whole project—the CD and the documentary and the tour—gave me more confidence in taking charge and having opinions about things beyond just the music. And I learned to have more and more confidence after the tour with Wayne—in many ways, I think the anniversary and tour helped to give birth to a whole new Carlos. The old Carlos was a nice guy who left a lot of things for other people to do and didn’t want to know about them. “I’ll just play
the guitar, and you go take care of that.” The new Carlos didn’t want to be a control freak, but he decided there were things that he needed to be more hands-on about. It was that simple.