The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (18 page)

In the ’60s, the worst thing you could call a person was not the
n
word or some other ethnic name. The worst thing you could call a person was square. Woo—that was a horrible thing to say to somebody, and it made me think of that guy in the Dylan song who walks into a room and tries hard to understand—“Ballad of a Thin Man.” The opposite of being a square was smoking pot and doing LSD.

Another big change: suddenly there was this thing called a love-in, and the movie
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner
became passé. There were these young white chicks hanging with whomever they wanted—black guys, brown guys, older dudes, and younger ones, too, like me. Later, once I left home, it was on—with hippie chicks, groupies, whatever you want to call them. It was beautiful to discover that flow—the kind of connection that happens when a girl wants to share herself with you because she loves the way you play. Oh, man. That started in junior high school, but it was as much self-deception as self-discovery. How many times do you want to make it in the back of a VW van before you say, “Come on, let’s go hang out and talk”? Well, honestly, I wasn’t counting, either.

You could see office guys saying, “I want some of that,” loosening their ties and hanging out, smoking weed. The next thing you know they’re not square anymore, and they’re not going back to the office.

I think people tend to idolize certain places and times. My attitude then was that I actually didn’t care to be accepted, man. I didn’t want to fit into a clique—to be a hippie or a freak or this or that. I’ve always been anti-clique. For me, the music was it. The Fillmore was a place where the music was it, and you could be a hippie or not, and you could hear new music. The ’60s were really about experimenting with music. I didn’t like folk or bluegrass, but
after a while I started realizing there was something even in the trippiest jams that came out of bluegrass playing.

I got together with my friends and went to as many of those shows at the Fillmore as I could afford or sneak into. In addition to Carabello, who was my age, I was hanging out with people who were a little older than I was. Sometimes I’d be a little short and ask for a dollar or two from the people in line so I could get in. One time I tried to sneak in with Carabello, but I got caught—he ran one way, and I went the other.

That’s how Bill and I first met! He looked at me and shook his head, because everyone was trying to get in for free. We knew he was the guy we had to convince. Once in a while, if I got him off by himself, I’d say, “Bill, you didn’t let me in on Wednesday or yesterday, but I have to see these guys at least once. I don’t have money, but if I had it I’d give it to you.” He’d look at me with his hand on his hip and not say anything. Then he’d jerk his head toward the door, and I knew I was in.

I don’t know if Bill remembered me from the days before I did concerts for him. Only later did I see that everything he did helped me understand the value of music—that concerts cost money and that musicians and everyone else who helps make them happen should get paid. He had this thing that started at the Fillmore. He’d go up to the mike and introduce the band, always in the same way: “Ladies and gentlemen, from my heart—Santana!”

That knocked me out every time. Then Bill would come up to us after the show and say, “You owe me money.”

“What? Why?”

“Every time I introduce you, you owe me five dollars.”

We’d just crack up. “Okay, man. Here you go.” But he was serious. He’d stand there and count it. It was a great lesson. Anyone who does something of value should get paid.

Bill wasn’t the only one in town who was doing happenings like the ones at the Fillmore. Chet Helms was a promoter who was producing the same kinds of concerts. Sometimes Bill and Chet worked together; sometimes Chet did his own concerts at the Avalon
Ballroom, on Sutter. Those shows were easier to get into, a lot looser. Later I learned the way Chet paid bands was also kind of loose. A few times we played at the Avalon we got a big brick of weed. Then it’d be our job to sell it and get money for food and rent! To me, Bill Graham was 50 percent Dick Clark, 50 percent hippie. Chet Helms—he was hippie, hippie, hippie.

I spent most of ’66 catching what shows I could, still working at the Tic Tock, still playing gigs with Michael, Danny, and Gus, and still going to school—and when I say “going,” I mean getting marked as present, then going off and doing my thing.

We still didn’t have a name for the band, and I was still listening to new blues records and albums that pushed the blues further. John Mayall came out with the album
The Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton
. It was the first album that showed me that British players were checking out many of the same people I was—Otis Rush, Little Walter, and Freddie King—so I started paying attention to them, too.

The Butterfield Blues Band came out with their second album,
East-West
. It had Delta blues, like Robert Johnson, and Chicago electric blues, too, as the first album did. You could hear that the band had been listening to jazz as well—they did tunes like Cannonball Adderley’s “Work Song,” in which the harmonica played the same line the trumpet and saxophone played on the original. The title track was a groove that stayed mostly on one chord and had an Indian flavor with a four-beat bass pattern. I could hear the connections that were going on in the music. The song had a vibe like the Chico Hamilton and Gábor Szabó stuff I was getting into, but it was more in the electric blues pocket and was purely instrumental—the electric guitar was up-front and center stage. I could also hear how other guitarists were working it together with electric blues—I knew Bloomfield’s solos on that album note for note.

I wasn’t the only one listening to that album—you could tell
many brains were being expanded by the same music. People were opening themselves and digging deeper into the music.
East-West
was a model for a lot of Bay Area bands. They could hear that the vocabulary of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan was not that far from the vocabulary of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. The mind is a creature of labeling and encapsulating and filing things into categories. But this was music that was begging the soul to tell the mind to shut the hell up, turn up the volume, and not worry about what to call anything.

We had been exclusively a blues band at the beginning, but in ’66 we started doing “Work Song” and “East-West” in our shows, adding them to the older R & B numbers we did, such as Ray Charles’s “Mary Ann.” We were still jamming for ourselves and a few friends more than we were playing gigs. We’d get together in friends’ basements or play outside in the Presidio or in the Panhandle, near Golden Gate Park—anywhere we could make music without getting chased away by the cops or getting yelled at because of the noise.

Then we ran into Chet Helms, who told us he had heard us playing in the Presidio. “Yeah, I used to hear you guys in the park—you’re good. Why don’t you try out for the guy who auditions bands in the afternoons at the Avalon?” We went over there, and the guy running the auditions was a low-level folk musician with one of the jug bands in the Bay Area. He stopped us in the middle of our first tune. I think it was “Jingo.”

“No, no. This won’t do. You guys are in the wrong place. We don’t want that kind of music here.”

The guy wasn’t even listening to our music—he was judging it against some idea of what he thought should be played at the Avalon. I called him out. “Hey, man—you play kazoo or washboard or whatever. You call that an instrument? You call yourself a musician? What the fuck do you know about music?” I was ready to get into it with him. My guys had to hold me back. That was the end of that audition.

It didn’t matter. By the summer of ’66 the band was getting better, and I was getting a reputation. At one of our outdoor jams in the Panhandle I was taking a solo. I opened my eyes and recognized Jerry Garcia and Michael Bloomfield in the audience—they were checking me out, nudging each other with their elbows, and smiling about something. Another time I ran into some guys who told me they lived in Daly City. They were looking for a guitar player and had heard about me. Would I come over and play with them? Sure, man.

But when I got to their place I said, “What kind of music do you guys play?” I should have asked before they picked me up. “The Who.”

“Really? Drive me back. I thought you guys liked the blues.”

Another band wanted me to join up with them, and their thing was the 13th Floor Elevators—psychedelic stuff. “No; sorry. I can’t. I don’t like that music, man.”

I was still a teenager, doing the teenager thing. I was confident in my taste in music, and I could be cocky about my playing. The first time I ever spoke with Michael Bloomfield, I acted like a punk. It was at the Fillmore after one of the Butterfield shows, and he was standing around with a few people adoring him, and I walked right through the circle and said, “One of these days you’re going to know who I am, and I’m going to cut you!”

There was silence; everybody just stepped back. Michael looked at me and smiled and without a pause said, “I want you to—I encourage you to. That’s how this music keeps going.” Later on I found out that Michael was a very sweet guy, and I wondered what monster came out of me back then to make me say that. Definitely some of it was the same insecurity other young musicians were feeling at the time, but I felt I had to apologize to Michael again and again, especially when he picked me to play on his live album with Al Kooper. I kept saying, “I’m still so embarrassed. I must have been fucked up.” He always came back with a positive reply that was typical of his attitude: “Man, I respect you for speaking your mind. It’s okay. I still want you to cut me!”

It’s probably true that I was fucked up—by that time I was starting to party. At one of those outdoors gigs playing at the Presidio, I had met two guys—Stan Marcum and Ron Estrada. They were two beatnik dudes, a bit older than we were, and they always hung out at North Beach. They just really dug our music. Stan was a barber, and Ron worked as a bail bondsman, and we all got friendly. They had a house together near 18th and Castro, where I would hang out, and they would play music all the time. They introduced me to Bob Dylan’s songs, showed me how to listen to the Beatles, and what LSD was. And later they became Santana’s first managers.

Stan and Ron were fans, but they were also trying to help me out with my music. What did they know about management or getting the right musicians together? Well, we were in tune with each other, and that’s what mattered. We would be talking, and one of them would have an idea, and they’d tell it to me—like they thought I should join another band that was going around at the time. The band’s name was Mocker Manor, and they needed a guitar player. I told them I didn’t know—what kind of music did they do? Did they play the blues? What does the band’s name mean? They couldn’t tell me.

The name came from something Ringo Starr said in the Beatles movie
A Hard Day’s Night.
So we went to hear them and they were wearing mod sort of clothes and their music was going toward a Grateful Dead thing. They had a bassist who was really good, but they were playing a blues that sounded like early Rolling Stones. I gave it a try and wanted it to work. But every time we practiced a tune we’d get it down one way, then they’d go smoke a joint and forget everything we had just done. They’d look at me with that “Would you just relax?” expression. “Relax? We’re wasting time. Why don’t we learn the song once and just get it right?”

Stan and Ron gave me this look like, “Lighten up!” They decided to try to fix me. They all went out for lunch and left me behind with a big fat joint—like half the length of a drumstick. My assignment was to sit there, listen to some music, and light it up. I remember I put on the Yardbirds album that has “For Your Love” on it. I started
smoking it, and it smelled good—not like the skunk you get today that leaves you with a headache. After a few minutes I could feel everything becoming… softer. Colors seemed brighter, and all the parts of the music were clearer. I know some people don’t necessarily feel it the first time they smoke. I definitely did.

I immediately saw what I was doing—being a dictator with the band, going against the grain of the music. I realized I needed to accept and embrace a different approach from the one I thought was working. I was on the wrong side of that mind-set. Not everything needed to be thought out and over-rehearsed.

I didn’t stay long with Mocker Manor, and Stan and Ron agreed with me. “You’re right. This band is not going anywhere.” But I did start lighting up. Getting high on weed is not like dropping acid or taking peyote or doing cocaine—or shooting heroin, which I did twice before I stopped.

People who smoke don’t necessarily want to do cocaine and heroin and crack. Marijuana still carries this incorrect negative stigma that goes back to the 1930s, and parents still call it the devil’s weed to scare their kids so they don’t get lost.

But we hippies had a saying: “You can’t find yourself till you lose yourself.” You have to let go of everything that you’ve been taught and find a way of being happy with your own existence and bless all your imperfections. It’s a way of seeing your own ego, pulling all the levers and controlling your behavior, like some Wizard of Oz behind a screen. But you can see the feet sticking out from under the curtain and say, “The jig is up. I’m no longer emotionally invested in allowing you to have power over me.”

I noticed when I started smoking weed that some people use it to escape and some people use it to find themselves. I also noticed that drugs of any kind didn’t necessarily make someone hip or deep. Cocaine can amplify your personality, but as Bill Cosby said, “What if you’re an asshole to begin with?” Grass and peyote, those are medicines from Mother Earth. Crack and heroin and meth, those are laboratory drugs, man-made—they can imprison you, turn you into a serious habit monster.

I’m not promoting anything but the freedom to be real and have self-perception. Weed gave me an aerial view—it opened up my senses to multidimensional multiplicity. In ’66, I started smoking a lot. It was easy to get and wasn’t that expensive. I could smoke and function on the street and play music. But it was illegal, so I found ways of stashing it on myself and hiding it at home.