The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (56 page)

Supernatural
did so well and helped bring in so many new fans that all Santana albums were selling again, including the first album
and even
Caravanserai
.
Abraxas
was a hit again—on CD. Young people were checking out our history, our whole catalog. Because of Bill Graham and the “all future formats” clause he had included, we were earning money on those albums at the same rate as when they first came out.

Santana used to travel sometimes in business-class seats and sometimes in economy and sometimes we stayed in motels. After
Supernatural
we were flying first class and staying at really amazing hotels. We started doing business as a partner with other businesses—helping to make their products, not just giving product endorsements. Our first partnership was with the Brown Shoe Company. We created a whole line of shoes under the name Carlos. Now we also make hats and tequila through these same kinds of relationships.

Our deal with Arista had to be redone, because they had gotten us cheap for
Supernatural
and they wanted to be sure they had our next album. The usual way that big record companies followed up a megaplatinum album was to give the musicians a big bonus, which really was an advance that had to be paid back in the end. But if the next album didn’t do as well, then the musicians would be stuck owing money until they had another hit. That’s what happened with Prince and Warner Bros.

Deborah came up with another idea, and we told our lawyer, “Let’s ask for a nonrecoupable bonus—so it’s really a bonus, not an advance that we have to earn back.” It would be a lot less, but we didn’t mind. “Let’s see what they offer,” we said. Arista made a nice offer, and that’s why
Shaman
came out on Arista. Real money is when you don’t have to pay it back.

The album changed our live shows, too. Our set lists were changing more and more back to songs. We pulled away from jams, and Chester and I didn’t write as much as before. CT stayed with us until 2009, but I think his desire to leave started with the
Supernatural
tours and the changes we were going through. After
Supernatural,
we pursued some albums that came out of the same idea, working with a lot of artists who brought their hearts so graciously to the collaborations—from Michelle Branch and Macy Gray to Los Lonely Boys and Big Boi and Mary J. Blige and all the others.

Everyone wanted Santana on all the TV and awards shows and we were trying to accommodate everyone and it was getting crazy. We even had trouble getting to
The Tonight Show,
so when we finally were able to get to Los Angeles with enough time we scheduled two tapings in one week. It was fun, and I remember Jay Leno was so gracious—he came up to me after we were done to tell me how grateful he was that we had been cooperative, and if there was anything he could do for me I should just let him know.

I knew exactly what I wanted. “Jay, you know I’m a huge fan of Rodney Dangerfield.” He’d been on
The Tonight Show
many times, since back in the Johnny Carson days, so I asked Jay if he could get me some of those recorded appearances to watch while we’re on the road.

The next day my office got an overnight package containing some DVDs—three hours’ worth of Rodney Dangerfield on
The Tonight Show,
from the ’60s up to his most recent appearance. He told some of his funniest jokes on that show. Man, I still watch those DVDs—I think my favorite parts are when Rodney would say something that pushed the limits of mainstream TV, and Jay would say something like, “There goes the show!” and Rodney would remind him, “It’s okay, it’s eleven thirty at night.” I love that kind of back-and-forth—Johnny or Jay reacting to him but really just egging him on.

In the summer of 2000 we did
Supernatural
live in Pasadena—all the songs with all the singers—and Arista shot it for home video. They asked me who else I wanted on the show, and I told them right away—Wayne Shorter. He hadn’t been on the album, and he was the one who didn’t fit into the picture, but I knew Arista had to say yes. Wayne and I decided to play “Love Song from
Apache,
” which Coleman Hawkins recorded and which I had played in ’94 in Montreux with Joe Henderson.

Wayne played a solo on the tune during rehearsal that caught everyone’s ears—everything went into slow motion, and the last note sounded like a falling star. You can hear it on one of the bonus tracks on the DVD. I felt so grateful to be able to do that concert, because everybody who played on
Supernatural
came and brought their best. But Wayne, he’s that bright angel on top of the Christmas tree. Here’s what he said that night about
Supernatural:
“This kind of album that reaches so many people is not even about the music. This is about social gathering and common knowledge of humans.”

I was thinking, “That’s exactly right. Woodstock was a gathering, and
Supernatural
is one, too. That’s the hope we should have every time we make an album or do a show: I’m playing tonight, and this won’t just be about the music—it’s a gathering.”

Supernatural
happened because I didn’t step in my own way. I had the willingness to trust Clive, and he got on the phone with everyone and made it happen. For years, everywhere I went I heard Santana—radio stations, shopping malls, movies. The strange thing is that Arista fired Clive not long after
Supernatural
and put L. A. Reid in charge. The deal for
Shaman
was done with him.

Supernatural
’s biggest impact was on my schedule. The longest time I spent on the road with Santana was from the summer of ’99 through 2000, and it required a lot of energy. I found myself doing five to ten times more interviews than I had done for any album in the past. We’d play, we’d travel, and I’d get up in the morning for yet another press conference. I know this is part of the job—it always was. I’m just saying that it was more intense than it ever had been before, and it required me to be present and convincing at a lot of radio stations and to talk about the making of the album again and again. People are curious—they want to know things about their favorite music, and you want to give it to them, but it can take a toll.

The good thing was that Santana is a band that has always been strong and ready for the road, so when
Supernatural
hit, we could
handle all the dates that came to us. We weren’t coming out of retirement or anything like that. But the tours were longer than five weeks sometimes, so we had to suspend the Santana family rule for a while. At the end of 2000 I made a promise to cool things down for at least a year—we didn’t even start recording again for around six months.

Meanwhile, people—a lot of corporations—started dangling obscene amounts of money in front of us just to travel and play just one set. “We’ll pay all the hotels, all the air travel, and you get paid two and a half million dollars for forty-five minutes.”

No, no, no. I said, “There is no Santana right now—none.” I know the expression that you should strike while the iron is hot, but I unplugged the iron. I had to stop. There were problems with my being away so long, and I wanted to keep the family from falling apart. It made me realize that love should not be for sale.

I did an interview with a newspaper in Australia recently, and the interviewer asked me why I was one of the few survivors of the Woodstock family. I said that I had learned to listen to my inner voice, and my voice told me that it was going to help me so that I would not overdose on myself—so that I wouldn’t OD on me. Too many people who aren’t here today OD’d on themselves.

Then I told him, “When you come to my house, man, there’s no Santana there. It’s just Carlos.”

“What?”

“Yeah, there’re no Santana photos or posters or gold records in the house. I need to separate the person from the personality.” I still have to remind myself to do that. Sometimes it’s as Miles said in the liner notes for
Sketches of Spain:
“I’m going to call myself on the phone one day and tell myself to shut up.”

Around the time that
Supernatural
came out, this was our domestic rhythm: we were living in San Rafael in a nice house with a hill in front and beautiful hedges and flowers. There was an A-frame building nearby that I called the Electric Church, which
was a term I got from Jimi Hendrix. That’s where I kept my musical life, where I got phone calls about work and hung out at night when I wanted to play music or listen to recordings or watch basketball or boxing. It was where I kept all my guitars, a Hammond and a Fender organ, drums, congas, and other percussion instruments. It had a special place for my records and audio and video collections. When friends such as Hal Miller and Rashiki would visit, they’d stay in the Church—it had guest bedrooms and a kitchen, too—and I’d come by around ten and we’d make plans for the day or they’d just run errands with me. In the ’90s I loved to drive out to Sal’s school to pick him up, even after it wasn’t cool anymore for me to do that.

About a hundred yards from where we lived was a house we built for Jo and SK, Deborah’s parents. My mom and siblings weren’t too far away in the Bay Area, so the kids really got to know their family. Our house was all about Deborah and the kids—no Santana stuff. When Jelli and I started hanging out a lot, we’d especially love to watch
MADtv
. I’d tape the episodes, then she’d come over to the Electric Church and laugh till she was rolling on the floor. But if the show got into anything that was too grown-up I’d tell her to cover her ears. Then she’d laugh even harder.

All the kids got into playing music for a while. They studied piano with Marcia Miget, and I used to take all three of them to their lessons. Marcia calls herself a river rat from Saint Louis—she knew all about her city’s musical history, including Clark Terry and Miles Davis and Chuck Berry. She taught Sal and Jelli piano, and Stella studied alto sax. I’m happy that I never missed any of their “graduation recitals.” I remember Sal doing a great job with “Blue Monk” and Stella playing a Pharoah Sanders ballad with beautiful tone and flow. Only Sal stayed with music, which is absolutely fine. I like the idea that all three of them have known what it feels like to hold an instrument in their hands and make music. Marcia was like a Santana family member for a while—she runs her own school now in San Rafael called Miraflores Academie.

We had a big German shepherd named Jacob—Jacobee, the
kids called him. Sometimes he would get under the fence and go running around the neighborhood and Deborah would call me. “Hey, your dog got out again, and the Smiths want you to get him before he eats their cat, okay?” I’d put down the guitar and stop watching the TV. “Wait: who are the Smiths?” Then I’d go get Jacob.

I loved watching that dog when he was doing the things that made him jump and run around, his tongue hanging out as he was trying to catch up with his breathing. One time I took Jacob and the kids to Stinson Beach, around a half hour away from our house, and the dog found a dead seagull in the sand. It was like he just found a gourmet meal—he jumped on it and bit at it and started rolling in it, man. He needed to get that nasty stink on him.

I was thinking, “Damn. How much do you have to love something to throw your whole body into it like that?” You want it so bad you want to wear its smell. I started to think about how that happens in music—how some musicians go for it, get into a song, and squeeze their bodies in between the notes.

One time Jaco Pastorius and I were playing with some jazz cats at a special session, and the other musicians asked him what he wanted to play. He smiled at me, then said, “Fannie Mae,” which is an old jukebox song by Buster Brown—not the kid who lived in a shoe but a blues singer of the 1950s and ’60s. The tune is a simple blues with a shuffle. The other musicians either didn’t know it or didn’t want to play it, but Jaco started it off and got into it just as Jacob got into the seagull on the beach. He was just so into the feel and heart of that song. I kept thinking, “That’s the kind of spirit and conviction I want to have in Santana.”

I got the kids to jump into the ocean so Jacob could run after them and wash off that seagull funk. It’s really something to watch someone be himself.

(L to R) Salvador, Angelica, Deborah, Stella, and me, 1998.

In 1998, Santana had just gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in some people’s books that meant that our best work had already been done—as a friend said, “You got the stature, now it’s out to pasture.” You know what
Supernatural
was like? It was like getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, then coming out of retirement and taking your team all the way to the World Series. Retirement? Not yet.

I’ve spoken a lot about the phone ringing and hearing Miles or Bill Graham or John Lee on the other end and feeling like that was validation. After
Supernatural,
if I had an idea for a special concert or a benefit, or even if I just wanted to give praise to someone, it felt like I could pick up the phone and call anyone. And people called me back. It could be someone at HBO or MTV or
Rolling Stone
. Or it could be someone in Hollywood.

It could be Plácido Domingo—we asked him to sing on
Shaman,
and he did it in one take. He finished the tune like a bullfighter who had just dealt with the devil and won. I wish I could do a whole album just with him. That cat is brutally good.

In fact, there’s a lot I wanted to do, and now I have—including albums like
Guitar Heaven
and
Corazón.
I want to do an album called
Sangre,
which honors my dad, and record it with my children, Cindy, and my sister-in-law Tracy, who’s a great singer and songwriter—I call her Sil. And we are working on
Santana IV,
which will finally reunite the guys who are available from the original lineup—Shrieve, Carabello, Rolie, and Schon—and a few guys from Santana today. When we’ve talked about this there’s a different tone in our voices, like everybody is yearning to visit it once more. We’ve actually rehearsed a few times, and the chemistry was immediately there—a sacredness and a natural chemistry. Maybe we can tour this band together with Journey—each band playing separately, then getting together at the end. I have to give credit to Neal for initiating and diligently pursuing this idea and making me think, “Okay, maybe we can all get back together, jump on our horses, and ride—not into the sunset, but into a new sunrise.”

I can take a deep breath now and say that it’s a good time to be alive, because there are very few obstructions and it’s not a struggle anymore to manifest music that brings a lot of people together. One of the best compliments I ever received was from the bassist Dave Holland. We met backstage at the Hollywood Bowl one time with Wayne, Herbie, the great Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, Cindy, and others. Dave said he needed to tell me something, as if he’d been holding on to it for a while. He said, “Every time I’ve heard your music or seen you in any configuration you always achieve commonality with all people—young
and old, black, white, and brown.” I have a lot of respect for Dave and for what he had done with Miles and on his own afterward. I was humbled. “Thank you, man. That means a lot.”

I love creating music that connects as many people as possible, not only to each other but also to their own divinity. My thing is to use what I have to try to open hearts and minds and to help people crystallize their own existence, reach a deeper awareness, and find their real purpose in life. That’s it. That’s the alpha and the omega.

W
hen we finally got back into the studio in 2001, the pressure was on to follow
Supernatural
with something that was just as big. We started working on
Shaman,
and we had one tune that I knew was going to be as big as anything that had come before it. “The Game of Love” was not just a great song—we had invited Tina Turner to sing on it, and what she had done made it incredible. Unfortunately we couldn’t release it at the time, and then Michelle Branch did a great job with the song, giving it a different feel, and it became a hit. Still, I’m glad that we were able to include Tina’s version on the
Ultimate Santana
collection in 2007, so people can know why I feel that way about the song.

While we were making that album I’d be in the studio every day, and it was taxing my brain because I’d be concentrating so much on each song—getting the mix right and getting all the parts together. I would get home late and go straight to the Electric Church. I was still getting late-night calls from John Lee Hooker, and once I surprised him and called him on his birthday, and he said, “Man, when I hear your voice, it’s like eating a great big piece of chocolate c-c-cake!” I told him, “Man, it’s
your
birthday, and I feel like you’re giving
me
the present.”

I came home one night and was so tired that I went straight to bed instead of going to the Church to wind down. I woke up the next morning, and the phone rang—someone was calling to tell me that John Lee had passed the night before. I was numb. I needed to be alone and let the feelings go through me, to hold a guitar. I
went to the Church and saw the answering machine. I had one message—it was from John Lee, from the night before. “C-C-Carlos. I just wanted to hear your voice, and I wanted to say that I
loves
God, and I
loves
peoples.” He hung up, and that was it.

My philosophy is that being conscious means knowing that you are a creator. Yes, there’s the supreme creator, but he gave you free will so that you can be the creator of the movie that is your life. Be that creator—work with what you are given.

Around 2003 I went back to Autlán, and this time it was with my whole family—all my brothers and sisters, and my mom in a wheelchair. She was in her glory, because everybody who remembered her made a beeline to her so that they could hold her hand. “Oh, Josefina! We missed you—
te hemos echado mucho de menos
.”

I was there because the town had put up a statue of me—
Supernatural
Carlos, not young, hippie Carlos. I remember I thought it was too big—my hands were huge, and the guitar was not any model that I knew. Maybe it was a one-of-a-kind original.

This was an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate myself and share who I am with others, but it was also an opportunity not to OD on myself. I still feel like I’m learning to receive and smile and be gracious.

So when I was asked what I thought of the statue, I made a joke about pigeons using it for target practice, and people started cracking up.

On that trip I was overwhelmed with memories of my dad when we were in Autlán and I was very young—riding close to him on the bicycle and smelling that Spanish soap. I was thinking about how it felt to know that he had different eyes for me. But this time I felt proud of it and was not uncomfortable about it anymore.

At one point it suddenly dawned on me that my dad was missing from our group and I just started sobbing. I had no idea that was coming. It was like something had been accumulating since he had died until it had to burst, and I had to excuse myself. I went to the
bathroom, and my eyes were all red. I remember I was pouring water on my face when my brother Tony came in and said,
“Está bien?”

“Yeah, man. I’ll be right out.”

“Qué pasa?”

“I can’t stop thinking that Dad’s not here. I’m sorry I didn’t do this kind of event earlier.”

“No, Carlos,
está aquí
—he’s here.” The town officials had just put up a big picture of José, and some mariachis came out and started playing music, and there he was.

The town of Autlán put the whole thing together—the statue, the mariachi music, everything. I wasn’t involved. The guitar in the statue got stolen a little later because it was just attached, not built in—but it was as big as a sofa, and I guess the thief thought, “How can I hide this thing?” They found it later in a ditch and put it back so that I wouldn’t just be playing air guitar.

In 2005 Santana played Mexico City for more than one hundred thousand people in the country’s biggest outdoor plaza—Zócalo. I wanted to give the crowd as much of the old Santana as I did of
Supernatural
. To me it felt like Santana and Mexico never got a chance to really get to know each other, so I wanted to show them the full story of the band. We started sounding like Sun Ra—Sun Ra and Jimi Hendrix. People were looking at each other—“
Donde
‘Maria Maria’?” It was a nice break from the stiff
Supernatural
set lists. It was almost like a collective LSD thing, watching the musicians stretching and having fun and playing like kids again. Then we played songs from
Supernatural,
and people were freaking out by then. I found out that in Mexico, when they claim you, they
really
claim you.

These days my set lists are still like that—open and flexible, respecting the different Santanas—from
Abraxas
to
Supernatural
and now welcome to
Corazón
.

By 2003, the Milagro Foundation was five years old, and Deborah and I were constantly looking for ways to utilize energy and to give
hope and spiritual support to people. The greatest support anyone can give is to remind people that they’re significant and that they have value, that they’re a beam of light no matter what they have or don’t have. Real philanthropy isn’t about pushing money—it’s about moving light, and it doesn’t matter how many zeros you have to the right in your bank account as long as you have a 1 on the left.

That year Deborah put together a party in our home for Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Artists for a New South Africa to deal with the AIDS crisis that was happening in their country. I had first heard Archbishop Tutu talking on
Larry King Live
around 1983, and he said something really amazing then. He was talking about apartheid and the way the brutal South African government had its knee on the throat of black South Africans, but what was really happening was that black South Africans were looking up at the oppressors and saying, “Join us in our victory—celebrate with us. We’ve already won.” I was like, “Wait a minute: what did he just say?” I heard a song right there.

Twenty years later apartheid was gone, and the African National Congress—no longer a terrorist organization—was running the country. We were dedicating all the profits from the entire Santana tour that summer to ANSA to support organizations fighting AIDS. Governor Brown came to our house with other dignitaries, and Santana played, then Sal played. The archbishop spoke, and everyone donated money to help cover his travel costs. It was maybe the best example of being able to bring together everything I had—my music and shows, my family, my friends and contacts—to help accomplish something that had to be done.

Billy Cosby’s wife, Camille, was the connection to ANSA—Deborah and Camille are old friends, and Camille had produced a documentary on the AIDS crisis. When I saw the movie, I said, “Damn. This situation is about as real and desperate as things can be.” It was a cycle of neglect that was just getting started and could be stopped with the right medicine and compassion in the right places. Camille’s documentary convinced me that the problem would go on for a long time if something wasn’t done right away.

In August we were able to present the organization with more than two million dollars, and we stayed in touch with ANSA and Archbishop Tutu. Three years later, in September of 2006, Deborah and I hosted a special event in Beverly Hills to help celebrate the archbishop’s seventy-fifth birthday and to talk about the lives that had been saved and what had been done to stop the epidemic. A month later, we went to visit South Africa along with a group of friends, including Samuel L. Jackson, to see what had been done.

I can tell you about meeting Nelson Mandela and other stuff that I will always treasure. But what I will never forget were two things: the first was seeing around fifty people do a traditional dance, way, way out in the rural country, where they didn’t have any electricity or running water. As they were dancing, one of them would step out and throw his leg above his head and slam it back on the ground at the same moment as the rest of them were clapping and singing and hitting on the 1. I remember Sal saying, “Not a flam,” and he was right. “I know how they’re doing that and why it’s so tight and synchronized.”

Samuel Jackson said, “How, Sal?”

“Two things—it’s in their history, in their DNA. It’s not last week’s beat. And no TVs or other things like that, so no distractions.”

The other thing I remember from that trip was going to a clinic and seeing the real faces of AIDS—the people who had been dying but were then recovering. But it wasn’t just the sickness—it was the extreme poverty, despair, and sadness. That’s what I really felt. I remember that when Deborah, Jelli, Sal, and I were helping to hand out boxes of supplies to the families of AIDS patients, one old lady had been sitting there for a long time by herself, lost in her thoughts, wearing a blank, faraway look. When we came to her, she looked up at Deborah, then at me and Salvador, and slowly became more present. Then she realized that the box of flour, sugar, and canned foods we were holding was for her, and suddenly she started crying.