The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (2 page)

I didn’t always feel that way—I didn’t have the confidence that would make me feel comfortable carrying the Universal Tone. I had to learn that from being around other musical shamans and spirit givers, people like Herbie Hancock and Tito Puente, B. B. King and Wayne Shorter. Watching how they rise above the fame-and-stardom thing while their feet never leave the ground. How they accept the nice hotels and first-class seating and awards shows along with the late hours and fast food and early wake-up calls and sound problems. How they serve the music and carry the Universal Tone.

I met a beautiful couple in Saint Louis not long ago who had given away a lot of money to help people who badly needed it. The wife said something that knocked me out: “It’s a blessing to be a blessing.” Those words were perfect. They said what’s been inside me for so many years, even when ego, shame, and guilt have gotten in the way.

I’m just one man. I have feet of clay, like everyone else. I like ecstasy and orgasm and freedoms and all the kinds of things I can afford now, but I am very, very guarded with myself. I keep my darkness in check. Most of the time I try to get the best out of myself by being gracious and consistent and humble, not obnoxious or rude or cruel or vulgar.

Then suddenly: damn it, I blew it again. I had a temper tantrum. I got knocked out by my own ego and said or did things without
thinking. Said something wrong to somebody I care for. Before, I did not know that anger is just fear with a mask. Now I know that, and I know I have to move on. Take a deep breath, forgive myself—get back to the Universal Tone.

People know me as much for being a spiritual seeker as for my music. “Cosmic Carlos,” “Crazy Carlos”—I know what people say, and I have no problem with that. I’m the guy who talks about light and luminosity and always wears dead people on his shirts and jackets. Many people put people on their clothes. In my eyes John Coltrane, Bob Marley, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis—they are inspirers and igniters, finders of blessings and miracles. They are all immortals, still alive in an eternal now. And they make me look good—try them on for yourself.

“Cosmic” to me means being connected. From the place where I am, where I am blessed to be, I have been able to see how we’re all connected. When people call me cosmic or crazy I take it as a compliment and say, “Well—behold. My craziness is working. How’s your sanity doing?”

If people really want to know me, they shouldn’t stop there. They should know that I’m always going to become better and that it took me a long time to realize it’s time to stop seeking and start being. The spiritual goal I was looking for wasn’t something that was far away, at the top of some mountain—or even a few feet above that. It is always right here, in the here and now, in my spirit and music and intentions and energy. I’m constantly hoping to use my energy and blessings for the highest good, to do things and say things and play music that all resonates on the same frequency—the Universal Tone.

When you put out a certain music and energy, you never know whom it will hit and who will be shining with it. Sometimes I’m sitting down to eat and just about to put a fork in my mouth, and someone says, “I’m sorry to disturb you…” and they have a story to tell me. Or they want me to sign something or have a photo taken with them. At that point, food really is not important.

Friends will be eating with me sometimes when this happens, and they’ll ask me how I deal with it. I’ll say, “Look, man, where are we right now?”

“Uh… in a restaurant.”

“Okay. And you know who’s paying for this food? They are. And that nice car outside that’s waiting for us? They helped me get that, and they’re paying for the gasoline, and the house I’ll be driving to after I eat, and I wouldn’t be here eating if it weren’t for them. So if they want to take a picture, hell, take two.”

I put the fork down, I make eye contact with the people who come up to me, and I listen to them. I’ll give them a hug if it’s appropriate.

It’s about accepting a role that I have been chosen for and learning when to make myself available—and when not to. One time in Philadelphia I was stopped on the street by this guy who started hustling me. “Hey, ’Tana! Is that you? No, you ain’t ’Tana, are you? Wait: yes, you are! Well, now, looka here, now—that’s you, right, ’Tana? Man, I got all your shit, ’Tana—the records and the CDs, the eight-tracks, the cassettes, and I just got some DVDs.” This was definitely before iPods. “I know you’re going to help a brother out with the rent now, right ’Tana?”

I told him that my name is
San
tana, not Santa Claus, and that maybe he should have paid his rent first. I walked away, but that name followed me—to this day there’s a few friends who still call me ’Tana. I’m cool with it. We talk about how some things are “’Tana stuff” and some stories are “’Tana stories.” My assistant, Chad, calls me ’Tana, and my friend Hal asks for the Tanaman when he calls the house.

Sometimes it’s about knowing when to leave, like the time a guy came up to me with his wife after a show at Madison Square Garden wanting me to stand next to her for a photo. “Come on, honey, get close to Carlos. Closer! Okay, now kiss him.” I was like, “Hey!” and got away.

That’s a little too close, thank you. Once in Paris, a hotel doorman
was telling me how each of his children had been conceived to Santana music and started to run down a list of all the kids and all the songs. I thanked him before he went too far. That’s all a little too much connection for me—I’m not that universal.

I told myself that this book should be healthful, healing, elevating, informative, raw, honest, and elegant. It should absolutely be entertaining, in a form that anyone, especially my children and family, can read and enjoy, laugh with and understand. There’s so many funny things I’ve experienced that I feel I have to share—experiences that prove God has a sense of humor.

I like to laugh, and I love stories, and I wanted all that in this book, too. One of my favorite stories is about a man who is so successful at business that all he can do is make money, and everything he does or touches keeps making more money, but the more money he makes the more depressed he gets, and he can’t figure out why. A friend tells him about this one special guru who has the secret to happiness and lives in a cave at the top of a mountain way across the ocean—where they always live, right? It was a long, long, expensive trip—on a plane, then a boat, a taxi, a horse, and then on foot. He spends weeks and weeks and finally finds the right mountain and climbs to the cave and goes in. Slowly his eyes adjust to the darkness, and he sees an old man with a long beard meditating—deep, deep, deep. Like, just buzzing. He waits and waits for the guru, and finally the old man opens his eyes and looks at him. “O Wise One, I’ve come a long way,” the pilgrim says. “What is the meaning of all this, of existence?”

The old man just smiles and tilts his head toward a sign by his feet. The pilgrim looks at it—it’s hard to see in the cave. The sign says
HOKEY POKEY
. He’s thinking, “What? Huh?” He looks back at the guru and says, “Hokey pokey?”

“Yup. That’s what it’s all about.”

The lesson is a simple one: you have to have fun with your
existence. At some point you have to stop taking things seriously and personally and getting all stiff, which only paralyzes your creativity and vitality.

I can tell you what I didn’t want this book to be about—I didn’t want it filled with any regrets, remorse, or guilt. You can read other books for that. A friend told me something I kept in mind in writing this: when you go through hell—your own darkest night of the soul—don’t take pictures to show to your friends. Someone else said, “Don’t cry when you see your own movie.” It all makes sense to me.

When somebody would ask me how I want to be remembered, I used to just shrug that off and say,
“Me importa madre”
—I don’t give a damn. But now I say, as someone who consciously and unconsciously is doing things to inspire people to aspire, this book is about accepting the responsibility to raise consciousness in others and to express my supreme gratitude to everyone, every spirit who has guided my life and given me the chance to acknowledge these gifts and share them. It’s through them that I’d like to be remembered.

And as for what I’ve learned: be an instrument of peace. Be a gentleman at all costs. Enjoy yourself—have fun with your existence. Learn to listen to your inner voice and don’t overdose on yourself. Keep your darkness in check. Let music be a healing force. Be a real musician: once you start counting money before notes, you’re a full-time wannabe. Put your guitar down and go outside and take a long drink of light with your eyes. Go walk in the park and take off your shoes and socks and feel the grass under your feet and mud between your toes. Go see a baby smiling, go see a wino crawling, go see life.
Feel
life—all of it, as much as possible. Find a human melody, then write a song about it. Make it all come through your music.

Welcome to my story—welcome to the Universal Tone.
Vamos a empezar
.

I believe I grew up with angels. I believe in the invisible realm. Even when I’ve been by myself, I’ve never been alone. My life has been blessed that way. There was always someone near me, watching me or talking to me—doing something at the right time. I had teachers and guides, some who helped me get from one place to another. Some saved my life. When I look at the whole vortex of things that happened in my life, it’s amazing how many times angelic intervention came through various people. This book is because of them and is written to acknowledge
them. It’s about angels who came into my life at the point where I needed them the most.

Bill Graham, Clive Davis, and my high school art teacher, Mr. Knudsen. Yvonne and Linda—two friends in junior high school who accepted me and helped me with my English. Stan and Ron—two friends who gave up their day jobs to help me get a band together. The bus driver in San Francisco who saw me carrying my guitar and made me sit near him to keep me safe when his route went through a very rough part of town. Musicians I played with who were my mentors—Armando, Gábor, and many, many more. My sisters and brothers, who helped me grow up. My three beautiful children, who are so wise and are now my teachers. My mom and my dad. My beautiful wife, Cindy.

I believe the world of the angels can come through anyone at any time, or at just the right time, if you allow yourself to move the dial on your spiritual radio just a little bit and hold it at the right frequency. For that to happen, I have to avoid making my own static, avoid ego rationalization.

People can change the way they see things by the way they think. I think we are at our best when we get out of our own way. People get stuck in their stories. My advice is to end your story and begin your life.

W
hen I was just a kid, there were two Josefinas in our home. One was my mom, and the other was Josefina Cesena—we called her Chepa. She was a mestiza, mostly Indian. Chepa was our housekeeper, but she was more like one of the family. She cooked, sewed, and helped my mom raise all us kids. She was there before I was born. She changed my diapers. When my mom would try to spank me, I’d run behind Chepa and try to hide in her skirt.

When moms are pregnant, they spank harder and more often. When I was little, it seemed like my mom was always pregnant, and Chepa protected me from a lot of whippings. She was also the first angel to intervene on my behalf.

Things were already hard for my family. Dad and Mom had been married ten years, and he was traveling more and more to play his music and make money. Autlán did not have enough opportunities for a professional musician, so he started to travel for work and was gone for months at a time. You can tell his travel schedule by looking at his children’s birthdays. Starting in 1941, every two years another child was born. My three older siblings were all born in late October. The other four of us have our birthdays in June, July, and August.

When my turn came, Dad decided another child was one too many. The family was struggling financially. “Go over there and cook the tea,” my dad had said to Chepa when he found out my mom was pregnant again. He had gone out and come back with this bag of tea that was toxic and meant to induce an abortion. I’m not sure how many times that happened before I came along, but I know that in total my mom was pregnant eleven times and lost four of her babies. After Antonio—Tony—then Laura and Irma, I was the fourth to come along.

“Boil this thing, and I want to see her drink all of it,” my father told Chepa. But she knew my mother did not want to lose the child. When he wasn’t looking Chepa pulled a three-card monte—substituted one tea for another. She saved my life before I was even born.

It was my mom who told me this story—twice, in fact. The second time, she forgot she had told me and was totally surprised when I told her I knew. It could not have been an easy thing for her to do. Can you imagine telling your child that he was almost aborted? Or that he was almost called Geronimo?

I was born on July 20, 1947. My dad wanted to name me Geronimo. I would have loved it, personally. It was because of his Indian heritage—he was proud of that. I think it was the first and only time my mom put her foot down about our names and said, “No, he’s not Geronimo. He’s Carlos.” She picked the name because of Carlos Barragán Orozco, who had just died. He was a distant cousin
who had been shot in Autlán. I had light skin and full lips, so as a child Chepa used to say,
“Que trompa tan bonita”
—what beautiful lips. Or they would just call me Trompudo.

I’ve seen my birth name listed in some places as Carlos Augusto Alvez Santana—who the hell came up with that? My given name was Carlos Umberto Santana until I dropped the middle name Umberto. I mean, Hubert? Please. My full name now is simply Carlos Santana.

Many years later my mom told me that she had a premonition of what kind of person I would be. “I knew you were going to be different from your sisters and brothers. All babies grab and hold on to the blanket when the mother covers them. They pull on it until they have a tiny ball of lint in their little hands. All my other babies would rather bleed than open up their fists and give it to me. They’d scratch themselves first. But every time I would open your hand, you let it go so easily. So I knew that you had a very generous spirit.”

There was another premonition. My mom’s aunt, Nina Matilda, had a head of hair that was totally white, white as white can be. She would go from town to town selling jewelry like some people sell Avon products. She was good at it, too—a very unassuming old lady who would show up on people’s doorsteps and open up a bunch of handkerchiefs containing all this jewelry. Anyway, Nina Matilda said to my mom after I was born, “This one is destined to go far.
El es cristalino
—he is the crystal one. He has a star in him, and thousands of people are going to follow him.” My mom thought I was going be a priest or maybe a cardinal or something. Little did she know.

People ask me about Autlán: what was it like? Was it city or country? I tell them, “You know that scene in the movie
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
when Humphrey Bogart is in a shootout in the hills with banditos who claim to be Federales? And one of the banditos says, ‘Badges? We don’t need no stinkin’ badges!’ ”

That’s Autlán—a small town in a green valley surrounded by
big, rugged hills. It’s actually very pretty. When I lived there in the early ’50s, the population was around thirty-five thousand. Now it’s around sixty thousand. Only recently did they get paved roads and traffic lights. But it was more together than Cihuatlán, and that’s what my mom wanted.

My memories of Autlán are those of a child. I was only there for my first eight years. At first we lived in a nice place in the middle of the busy town. To me, Autlán was the sound of people passing by with donkeys, carts—street sounds like that. It was the smell of tacos, enchiladas, pozole, and carne asada. There were chicharrónes and pitayas—cactus fruit—and jicamas, which are like turnips, big and juicy. Biznagas—sweets made from cactus and other plants—and alfajor, a kind of gingerbread that’s made with coconut. Yum.

I remember the taste of the peanuts that my dad would bring home, still warm from being roasted—a whole big bag of them. My brothers and sisters and I would grab them and crack them open, and he’d say, “Okay, who wants to hear the story of the tiger?”

“We do!” We’d get together in the living room, and he’d tell us a great story about El Tigre that he would make up on the spot. “Now he’s hiding in the bushes, and he’s growling because he’s really hungry.” We would start huddling close together. “His eyes are getting brighter until you can hear him go…
roar!!
”

It was better than television. My dad was a great storyteller—he had a voice that triggered our imaginations and got us involved with what he was saying. I was lucky: from as early as I can remember I learned the value of telling a good story, of making it come alive for others. It permeated me and I think later helped me in thinking about performing music and playing guitar. I think the best musicians know how to tell a story and make sure that their music is not just a bunch of notes.

We lived in a few different houses in Autlán, depending on how Dad was doing bringing in the money. There was one that was on a little run-down parcel of land in between other houses—my dad probably got a deal on that because he had friends. The best one
was more like a house with a number of rooms and a big yard with a working well. There was no electricity or plumbing—just candles and an outhouse. I remember this house was closer to the ice warehouse than the others. The ice was stored in sawdust to keep it from melting, and we could go get it anytime and bring it home.

From Autlán to Tijuana and even San Francisco, it seemed like we never had much space. We usually had just two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a living room. Mom and Dad always got their room, and the girls got theirs, so we boys would sleep on the couches or in our own room if things were going well with Dad and the money.

I guess my dad must have been doing pretty good when we started in Autlán. Tony and I, and later Jorge, shared a room. But there were compromises. The roof was a little rotten, and I remember getting ready to fall asleep one night when suddenly there was a thud. My brother Tony said, “Don’t move—a scorpion just fell, and it’s next to you.” Next thing I heard was the creature skittering across the floor, running away. Man, that was a creepy feeling.

A sound that is really beautiful is the
plop
of mangos falling down when they’re ripe. They’re big, red, and they smell really beautiful. I would play in the yard, which had mango and mesquite trees, and there were these chachalacas—little birds that are a cross between a pigeon and a peacock. They’d wake us up in the morning because they can be so loud.

That yard had a dried-up well, and for some reason when nobody was looking I decided to throw some little baby chicks down there. Tony saw me and said, “Hey, what are you doing?” and I started climbing down to go get them, and he grabbed me before I hurt myself. “Hey! Don’t go in there, stupid. It’s really deep.” We covered up the hole later on to make sure nothing bad happened.

I don’t think I was a troublemaker—I was just a normal, curious kid. I knew right from wrong. The yard had this old wall that I didn’t know was starting to fall apart. It had all these vines on it, and one day I started pulling on them to get at the seed pods. I’d open them so the seeds, which each had little parachutes, could go
whoosh
and fly away. I was really enthralled with them, so I kept
pulling on the vines until suddenly part of the wall collapsed and landed right on my feet, tearing up my huaraches and smashing my toes.

My feet were bleeding, and I was scared to death that my mom was going to beat me because the huaraches were brand new and I had destroyed the wall. Everybody was looking for me for a long time. Chepa finally found me hiding under my bed. “
Mijo,
what are you doing there?” She saw my feet and gasped. She told my mom, who felt really bad that I was so afraid of her that my first reaction was to run and hide. She didn’t spank me—that time.

Life at home was about living by Mom’s rules. She was the disciplinarian, the enforcer. It was her house, and she was in charge. Dad was gone most of the time, so it was just us kids and our mother, and she could be real intense. My mom and dad were not really good at showing affection and demonstrating their love—to us or to each other. Of course we honored our mom, but she was not the huggy-bunny kind.

Looking back, I realize that she was learning to be a mom while doing all the mom stuff and Dad was learning to be a father—and a husband. My parents did the best with what they had and who they were. They didn’t have any formal education. I don’t even know how they learned to read or write. They taught us, by example, that you make your own way. “Maybe we don’t have much in the way of education or money, but we’re not going to be ignorant or dirty or lazy.”

Mom had a modest beauty about her. She was tall, and her style was elegant but not lavish. She didn’t like extravagant stuff—but she never wore anything that made her look cheap or desperate. We kids saw how she carried herself—she walked differently from the way most other women walked. Even when we were very poor, you could tell she came from a certain kind of upbringing, some kind of privilege.

My mom had a system with us kids. We all had roles, starting from an early age. “Today you two will clean the beds and the floor, and you two will do the dishes and get the pots and pans clean.
Tomorrow you guys’ll switch. And when you sweep I want you to straighten up and make your back look like that broom—straight. Put your spine behind it, and don’t just move that dirt around; get rid of it. When you wipe the dinner table don’t just smear it, clean it up. Get a hot, hot towel so the steam can wipe out the germs. I don’t want any
mugre,
any filth. We’re poor, but we’re not filthy poor. No one is going to embarrass the family or embarrass the name Santana.”