The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (51 page)

When your eyes are open, inspiration can come from anywhere. Here’s one example. I’m a huge fan of Anthony Quinn. Some people think he’s Greek, but he’s actually Mexican. He’s my favorite actor. I liked him in
Zorba the Greek
because of the advice he gives to the white guy: it’s a very important part of the movie. Zorba tells the man he needs some madness—because how else can he cut the rope and be free? Anthony Quinn was crazy—good crazy. I’ve seen his sculptures. And I know Miles, and the two of them had a profound mutual admiration for each other.

In ’75, when I was reading Sri Chinmoy’s books or other spiritual stuff, I was more interested in Anthony Quinn’s book
The Original Sin,
the first autobiography I ever read. He wrote about driving in Hollywood with a little kid in the passenger seat who did nothing but rag on him, telling him that he wasn’t worth anything, that he was nothing but a Mexican monkey playing plastic games, like all the people in Hollywood.

Of course that kid was part of himself—it was his guilt trying to put him in his place. We all have that same guy inside. There ain’t nobody who’s going to put you down more than you. But there’s a difference between being brutally honest and just being brutal. It really was a therapeutic book for me, because it connected with the same ideas and philosophy I was reading elsewhere. Anthony Quinn was asking the same questions—how to evolve and not make the same mistakes everybody around you is making. How to develop a bona fide spiritual discipline, with or without a guru.

He also wrote that he didn’t want to go to church because he didn’t want to apologize for being a human being. Whoa—
Original Sin
. I got it. Just what I had been thinking.

At the end of 1988, I was watching Quinn in
Barabbas,
in which his character is in prison and gets out because Jesus took his place
on the cross, and in my head I kept hearing “You need to play San Quentin.” I was thinking, “What?”

“You need to play San Quentin—that’s the message of this movie.”

“This movie I’ve seen so many times?”

“Play San Quentin.”

I used to be able to see the prison from one of my first homes in Marin County. By ’88 I was living just a mile away. Having kids and a family makes you think about what you have and other people don’t and about the freedom you have to find your purpose and fulfill it. Those days there weren’t that many people wanting to play prisons—B. B. had played San Quentin a few years before, and I heard that only black prisoners went. I also knew about Johnny Cash playing Folsom State Prison—everybody did. My level of confidence was very high, having just done the tour with Wayne, and the guys in the Santana reunion band were gracious enough to be crazy enough to go do it with me.

I put that concert together myself—I arranged a meeting with the warden, Dan Vasquez, a Mexican dude. He said, “Let me get this straight. You want to do a concert in San Quentin? You need to come and walk the yard with me so you can see what you’re getting into.” I said, “Okay.” So even before I signed a contract to perform there I had to sign a waiver saying that if I got caught in any kind of trouble—if I were held hostage, for example—my family and I wouldn’t hold the prison responsible for whatever happened.

Then I stepped outside the offices, and we walked to the prison gates. I had guards with me, and as we stepped through and the gates slammed shut, the sound felt like a chunk of ice running down my spine. The first thing I saw were four guards, all with shotguns, walking a black prisoner somewhere. He was shuffling along in chains, and he had more hate in his eyes than I’ve ever seen in a human being. Then one of the guards with me said, “Look up at the ceiling,” and it was pretty high, but it was full of holes from shotgun blasts. “Those are from warning shots. Normally we have to shoot only one time up there—they know that the next time we’ll shoot them.”

We got to the yard, where everybody was doing things like lifting weights and playing basketball—whites, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans—and people started to recognize me. “Hey, ’Tana, is that you? What you doin’ in here, man? Hey, Carlos, what you doin’?” One guy got my attention. “Carlos, I just tried to cross the mountains from Mexico, and the next thing I knew they put me in here.” He was just a misplaced soul trying to get in the country, and he wound up in San Quentin. The warden said, “I see you’re connected with everybody here, man.”

We did two concerts outside in the yard—one for the hard-core criminals and one for the lifers. We did the set we were doing for the reunion tour but included some special songs that you’d think of doing in a prison: Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal,” the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine.” We knew this was going to be a tough audience because we needed to reach blacks and whites and because maybe this wasn’t any one person’s music anymore. You can’t buy enthusiasm in San Quentin.

At first they were all just checking us out. By the second song they started to loosen up. I could see the energy changing in their postures and faces. By the third song it felt like they were thinking, “Hey—these guys can bring it.” By the fourth song they started to let the music in and smile and forget for a moment where they were. I mean, when I first walked in there I could smell the fear and the controlling of emotions, how bottled up everything was. How they could just explode. I could smell their skin, the clothes they were wearing, even their thinking.

There’s a photo from that show in San Quentin that’s on the wall in my office. I’m playing, and you can see some very hard-core prisoners on one side. You can zero in on them and see that they were hearing the music. I didn’t say much in those concerts—I let the music carry the message: this is required listening to help you not be a victim or a prisoner of your self, to help you change your mind about things and change your destiny. The message is the same inside prison walls or on the outside.

In a funny way, my life has always been local—everything that happens comes from where I am. John Lee Hooker was living in the Bay Area at this time. He was the Dalai Lama of boogie. Shoot, he should have been the pope of boogie as far as I’m concerned. We got to know each other. A lot of times we’d be playing, and he’d say, “Carlos, let’s take it to the street,” and I’d say, “No, John, let’s take it to the back alley,” and he’d say, “Why stop there? Let’s go to the swamp.” I miss him so much.

A John Lee boogie pulls people in as strongly as gravity holds them to this planet. He is the sound of deepness in the blues—his influence permeates everything. You can hear him in Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” or in Canned Heat’s boogies. That’s nothing but John Lee Hooker. When you hear the Doors, that’s a combination of John Lee and John Coltrane. That’s what they do; that’s the music they love.

The first time I heard John Lee, of course, was in Tijuana—on records and on the radio. As I said, there were three guys that had a lot of deep roots in their blues—Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and John Lee Hooker. Lightnin’ lived in Texas, and Jimmy Reed was probably the most viral when I was listening to the blues in Mexico, but he was long gone by the end of the ’80s. He made Vee-Jay Records a lot of money.

In ’89 John Lee was local to the Bay Area. He was living not far from me, in San Carlos, which is near Palo Alto. We met a few times and talked, and at some point he actually invited me to his house for his birthday, which was the first time I really hung out with him. I brought a beautiful guitar to give him.

When I walked in, I saw that everyone was watching the Dodgers on TV, because that’s John Lee’s favorite team. He was eating fried chicken and Junior Mints. No kidding—Junior Mints. He had two women on the left and two on the right, and they were putting the mints into his hands, which were softer than an old sofa. I stepped up and said, “Hi, John. Happy birthday, man. I brought you this guitar, and I wrote a song for you.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“It sounds like the Doors doing blues, but I took it back from them and I’m returning it to you and I’m calling it ‘The Healer.’ ”

John Lee chuckled. He had a slight stutter that was very endearing. “L-L-Let me hear it.”

I started playing, and I made it up right on the spot—I knew how he did the blues, how he played and sang. “Blues a healer all over the world…” He took the song, and when he recorded it, he added to it in his own way. I said, “Okay, we’ve got to go to the studio with this, but I just want you to come at one or two tomorrow afternoon, because I don’t want you to be there all day, man. I just want you to come in and just lay it. I’m going to work with the engineer—get the microphones ready, get the band to the right tempo. You just show up.”

“Okay, C-C-Carlos.”

When John Lee showed up we were ready. I got the band warmed up—Chepito, Ndugu, CT, and Armando—no bass, because Alphonso didn’t make that gig. John Lee and Armando were checking each other out like two dogs slowly circling each other—they were the two senior guys there, and you could really tell that Armando needed to know who this new older guy was. He was looking at him slowly, all the way from his feet up to his hat. Just sizing him up. John Lee knew it, but he just sat there, tuning his guitar, chuckling to himself.

Armando threw down the first card. “Hey, man, you ever heard of the Rhumboogie?” He was talking about one of the old, old clubs on the black music circuit in Chicago, opened by the boxer Joe Louis back before I was even born. John Lee said, “Yeah, m-m-man. I heard of the Rhumboogie.” Armando had his hands on his waist like, “I got you now.” He said, “Well, I played there with Slim Gaillard.”

“Yeah? I opened up there for D-D-Duke Ellington.”

I saw what was going on and stepped in. “Armando, this is Mr. John Lee Hooker. Mr. Hooker, Mr. Armando Peraza.”

We did “The Healer” in one take, and the engineer said, “Want to try it again?”

John Lee shook his head. “What for?”

I thought about it and said, “Would you mind going back in the booth, and when I point at you, would you be so gracious as to give us your signature—those mmm, mmm’s?” John Lee chuckled again. “Yeah, I can do that.” I said okay. That was the only thing he overdubbed that day—“Mmm, mmm, mmm.”

“The Healer” helped bring John Lee back for his last ten years. He had a bestselling album and a music video—everything he deserved. We started to hang out more and play together. I would see him in concert, too. He had a keyboard player for many years—Deacon Jones—who used to get up onstage and say, “Hey! You people in the front—you might need to get back a little bit, because the grease up here is hot. John Lee’s about to come out!” I have so many stories like that as well as stories about John Lee calling me—sometimes during the day, but, like Miles did, mostly late at night.

I remember John Lee opening for Santana in Concord, California, and we had finished our sound check and he’d been waiting for me on the side of the stage. We were done, and he started talking to me while we walked away. The soundman came running up. “Mr. Hooker, we need you to do a sound check, too.”

“I don’t need no sound check.”

“But we have to find out how you sound.”

John Lee kept walking. “I already know what I sound like.” End of discussion.

One time there was an outdoor blues festival in San Francisco, and I went to support my heroes—Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and others. The crew came running up to me, saying, “John Lee’s on stage, and he called out to you to come over and join him.” They’d already set up my amp, so I went over, and he was up there by himself, looking great, as he always did, in a suit and a hat. His guitar was on his knee. As soon as he saw me, he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, a good friend of mine—Carlos Santana. Come on, man.”

It was a beautiful day, and from the stage I could see the sky and birds and the Golden Gate Bridge, and all the blues lovers in the audience. I held on to that image and closed my eyes and joined
him onstage—just he and I. It was like playing along with a preacher on Sunday morning—I waited for my time to step in, but while he was singing I could hear his voice telling me to start playing. I opened my eyes, and we were together in a groove, playing off each other. I heard his voice inside again, telling me to keep playing, so I closed my eyes and kept going. When I finished there was huge applause—people were freaking out. I looked around, but no John Lee!

I played a little more and thanked the people and went backstage, where John Lee was talking with a young girl. He looked up with that smile he had. “Hey, man, y-y-you did pretty good out there.”

“Yeah, but why did you leave me, man?”

“W-W-Well, I was done.”

I’ve always known where my heart is in music, but I really liked some new bands and guitarists that were coming up at the time. Vernon Reid reminded me a little of Sonny Sharrock and Jimi. His band, Living Colour, was from New York City and was one of the first all-black rock bands. Vernon’s a strong, funky player—fun to play with live. Vernon is a monster freak and has a beautiful heart. He and David Sancious both have quietness in their faces and a lot of wisdom, and, like me, both are into Sonny Sharrock.

Vernon played on
Spirits Dancing in the Flesh,
the Santana album released in 1990. I think about that album, and I hear the balance of Curtis Mayfield and John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix doing gospel songs, singing God’s praises, and rocking out. Prayer and passion. Alice Coltrane gave us permission to use John’s voice on one song. It was nicely recorded, but I still needed to feel raw emotion—I’d rather hear mistakes, you know what I mean?

There is nothing about singing to God and Jesus that should be whiny. The song should come from your heart and deep inside, not just from your mouth. An album about God has to be very honest and raw. A person who’s a little out of tune but totally for real is better than someone who’s trying too hard or being phony.

I wanted to work with a singer like Tramaine Hawkins, because with spiritual music I have to be very selective: sometimes people can get a little plastic when they praise Jesus. I won’t mention any names because I don’t want to hurt any feelings, but there’s a difference between whining and soul. When I hear Mavis Staples, Gladys Knight, Nina Simone, and Etta James, I hear a huge difference between them and singers from the other side of town, where the girls whine too much—black or white. They might be in tune, but it’s not real.