The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (21 page)

Gregg, Carabello and I saw B. in concert when he came back in December of ’67, and I was able to study him almost in slo-mo, waiting for him to hit those long notes of his. I was thinking, “Okay, here it comes—he’s going to go for it. There it is. That note just freaked out everybody in the place, man.” People were in the hallelujah camp. I noticed that just before he would hit a long note, B. would scrunch up his face and body, and I knew he was going to a place inside himself, in his heart, where something moved him so deeply that it was not about the guitar or the string anymore. He got inside the note. And I thought, “How can I get to that place?”

Years later I was invited to the Apollo Theater to play in an event with, among others, Natalie Cole, Hank Jones—the great jazz pianist—Bill Cosby, and B. B. King. B. came up to me beforehand and said, “Santana, you going to play it tonight, man?” He rarely calls me Carlos.

I said, “I’m waiting for you to tell me, man.”

“Come on: we want to hear the blues.”

So I hit it. After I played, we walked out, and B. grabbed me. “Santana, I want to tell you, you don’t have a good sound—you have a
grand
sound.”

Shoot. I graduated right there. To be knighted by B. B. King himself? “Thank you, sir.” That’s all I could think to say. I don’t remember getting back to the hotel that night.

Bluesmen are not always so gracious. Buddy Guy can be a headhunter. If you’re playing with him and don’t come in the right way, he’s going to make sure he’s looking at you while he’s dissecting you. His attitude is, if you can’t keep up, get the hell off the stage.

Albert King wouldn’t even wait for you to start. Once at a blues festival in Michigan, Albert Collins went to meet Albert King and said, “I just wanted to meet you, shake your hand, and tell you how much I enjoy your music.”

King replied, “Yeah, I know who you are. I’m going to kick your little ass when you get onstage.”

I love these kinds of blues stories. To me they grab the essence of what the blues life is about—the attitude and the cockiness and the humor. Here’s another one: there was a blues revue in 2001 at the Concord Pavilion in Concord, California, with an incredible lineup. I had to be there. I got there just as Buddy Guy was arriving. “Hey, man, good to see you here!” he said to me.

“What’s going on, Buddy?”

He looked me up and down. “I hope you didn’t make the same mistake Eric Clapton made.”

“Oh, yeah? What mistake is that?”

“Coming over to see me without a guitar! But you know I always bring two.” He started laughing, with all his gold teeth shining.

Then he pulled out a flask. “Santana, I know you meditate and stuff, but I got to have my little shorty dog. I need to tune my guitar—why don’t you pour me some and help yourself to some, too?” So I did, and immediately he said, “Hey, whoa! You trying to get me drunk? You put more in mine than yours.”

“No problem, Buddy. I’ll take the bigger one, man.” He’s constantly testing me. I’ve gotten used to it.

That night he played an incredible set, connecting with people as he always does, walking out into the audience while he plays a solo, because he wants people to smell him, and he wants to smell them, too. He’ll do his big buildup thing, playing a solo and building the energy to the point where you know a big sustained note is coming. There’s a noise he makes with his mouth that you can hear—a grinding and churning, like it’s coming from all the way down in his gut—before he hits the guitar and the note comes up and hangs forever: loud and long and deep and soulful, and he’s got everyone in the crowd with him and he knows it. He grins with all those beautiful golden teeth, like he’s saying, “Shit—I
willed
this goddamn amplifier and this guitar to sustain like that. I can do it as long as I want.”

Then there’s the song that has the lyrics, “One leg in the east / One leg in the west / I’m right down the middle / Trying to do my best”! And the women start screaming. Every time I see Buddy, he’s creating a riot, you know?

He brought me out, and we jammed a little bit. He finished his set, and we were backstage, hugging and sweating, and I was just floating, man. Off to the side, we saw some people coming like it was high noon at the O.K. Corral: four big bodyguards, dressed up real sharp, two on the left, two on the right. Behind them was… who else? B. B. King himself, on the way to the stage—his band was already playing.

Buddy pushed me around a corner. “Carlos, stand here so B. won’t see you. When I call you, come on out, okay?” He had a twinkle in his eye.

“Sure, whatever you say.”

Buddy stepped in front of the whole procession, blocking the way. They got up real close, and B. said, “Hey, Buddy, what’s up?”

Buddy looked at him without a smile. “B., how long have you known me?”

He said, “A long time. Where you goin’ with this, man?”

Buddy took his time. “Well, there’re things about me you don’t know—like I have a son you didn’t know I had.” Then he called to me: “Come here, man,” and he put me right in front of B., holding my shoulders. B. was still focused on Buddy, wondering what he’s up to, and all of a sudden he sees me and starts laughing. “Buddy, you ain’t nothin’ but a dirty dog—come here, Santana!” He gave me a huge hug.

Buddy was right. I am his son, just as Buddy and I are B.’s sons.

B. grabbed our hands. “You’re both walking out with me. Come on!” We went onstage together, and B. raised our hands above our heads like we were prizefighters, and the crowd went, “Yay!” Then B. turned to us with a serious look. “Okay, you guys can get out of here.”

It was time for Daddy to go to work.

Back in San Francisco when I was living with Stan and Ron, every few weeks we’d put on classical music and clean the house with hot water and ammonia from top to bottom. It was easy for me to get used to that kind of group living because of how I grew up with my family, especially my mom. She encoded that in my DNA. And when you’re a hippie, man, everybody wants to share that joint. We shared food and weed and money and chores.

In our house, most days we woke up, ate breakfast, and went to work getting gigs and finding new musicians. Intention was focused on the band: time, energy, money. Sometimes Stan would bring musicians over—we would play with them until six in the morning. We were trying out new players, but we were also just jamming and being social.

We did a few gigs at street fairs and small clubs like the Ark in Sausalito with the bass player Steve De La Rosa, who was really good and very attentive to what the drummer was doing. Drummers went in and out for a while. There was Rod Harper, who was good on certain kinds of songs but not on others. Then we found Doc Livingston, who came from somewhere in South Bay. He had certain mechanics—he could play double bass drums, but the thing I most liked about him was that when he played with mallets he could create a kind of vortex to play in. Real drummers don’t need to be told when to get some mallets out. But he didn’t know about just playing funky. That was too bad. I had a feeling he wasn’t going to last, because he was a real lone wolf. Every time we had a meeting Doc would be off somewhere else, looking at the floor.

One night we played in a jazz bar. It was called Grant & Green because that’s where it was. A bassist jammed with us on “Jingo”—he was tall with green eyes and dark skin and was really the most gorgeous-looking black man I’d ever seen.

David Brown was basically a silky person to be around—never angry, no strife. He loved Chuck Rainey’s bass playing. As Jimmy Garrison was with Coltrane, David was always way behind the beat, never in the middle. I knew it was on when I heard him—I don’t
like bass players who play with too much precision. But I couldn’t look at David’s feet when we’d be playing a song because it would throw me off—he was that far back. Later, when Santana got its sound together, it all made sense—David laying back in the beat, Chepito Areas hitting it way up front—a balance of precision and conviction, you know?

He may have been behind the beat, but I’ve never seen anyone pick up women faster than David Brown. He was a chick whisperer. He would scratch his chin and go up to a woman real close and say something in her ear. He’d take her by the hand, and they’d walk off.

We asked David to join us that same night.

We started to look for another conga player, too. I’m not sure why we had to, but Carabello could be such a goofball sometimes, showing up late or not at all. He’s the only person I know who made a U-turn driving on the Golden Gate because he forgot his Afro comb. One time we were playing the Ark, and Carabello was using the kind of conga that has the skin nailed onto it, so the only way to get the right pitch is to warm the skin. He put the conga near a stove in the kitchen to heat it up and left it while he checked out a chick. He came back, and that thing looked like a pork rind—it had a big hole in it, and it smelled horrible.

I said, “You know what, man? You’re not getting paid.”

“Oh, man, that’s cold, man.”

“No, it’s not cold. You don’t play—you don’t get paid. You should have stayed here with the conga, man.”

Anyway, we had to drop Carabello for a while. Then Stan was down listening to the
congueros
at Aquatic Park when he met this cat named Marcus Malone. He was really good—self-taught, a self-made showman. He had no knowledge of clave or anything Cuban or Puerto Rican. But that wasn’t going to stop him. He had the idea for “Soul Sacrifice” and could make “Jingo” pop. I started hanging around with him more and more.

He was very, very sharp. Marcus “the Magnificent” Malone. Everything he wore was burgundy. He had a brand-new Eldorado:
the upholstery and everything was a beautiful maroon. You can see it in the early photos—Marcus rocked a different style. We were street—he was slick. He was a player, and he was a street hustler. He’d step out from rehearsals and say, “I got to call my bitches”—and we would wait.

I was with Marcus the night that Martin Luther King Jr. got shot. We had a gig that night at Foothill College in Palo Alto, and he was driving. I started crying, and he said, “Man, what’s wrong with you? Why are you crying?” He was too tough, I think, to let his emotions show that way.

“Man, what’s wrong with
you?
” I replied. “Didn’t you hear they just shot Martin Luther King?”

He was like, “Oh”—and he just looked straight ahead.

Marcus was a tough dude, man. He had a lifestyle that was very different from ours. I don’t think we could ever get him to come over to our side of thinking—to let his girls go and trust the music to make it happen for him. He’d say, “No, man. You’re freaking hippies taking all that LSD and smoking pot and shit. I gotta deal with my bitches—they’re taking care of me.”

The band and I got tight with Marcus’s mom for a little while. She had a big garage and didn’t mind if we kept our instruments there and used it to rehearse. Years later I figured out that her place was very close to what is now the Saint John Coltrane Church. The one thing she asked was that we help her by painting her kitchen—so one day we all got to it and painted that kitchen. Of course I had no experience with that, but I don’t think we made too much of a mess of it.

It only took a few weeks—but by July of 1967 we had the foundation of Santana. I’m still amazed at how fast it came together. That’s how much talent was walking around San Francisco then. Also, it’s not like we said, “Let’s make this a group of people from different backgrounds—black, white, Mexican.” It’s just that we weren’t cut off from that opportunity. Among all the bands in San Francisco, we were closest in this way to what Sly did with the Family Stone. The city had all these cultures living close together, and
when Stan, Ron, and I started to look for musicians, we opened a door and it didn’t matter who walked in—they fit if they had the music and the right personality.

It took a lot longer for our sound to develop. A few years later Bill Graham would say that we were like a street mutt: we had so many things mixed together we couldn’t know who we were. He said that as a compliment. We continued as the Santana Blues Band—sometimes just Santana Blues—but as our music started changing we didn’t know what style to call it. I already could see that the blues elevator was too crowded and that we needed to let that one go up and wait for the next one. Everybody was playing some style of blues—Paul Butterfield and John Mayall were laying it down. Cream and Jimi Hendrix were playing the blues, only louder. A year later, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck’s band would come in with their heavier sound.

In ’67 we had many new ideas and influences in the band. Everyone liked Jimi, the Doors, and Sly & the Family Stone. David was into Stax and Motown. Gregg brought his passion for the Beatles and was into Jimmy Smith and Jack McDuff. Doc Livingston also liked rock bands. Carabello was still hanging with us and still turning me on to Willie Bobo and Chico Hamilton. Marcus loved Latin music, blues, and jazz. He was the one who first turned me on to John Coltrane.

Not that I was ready for that yet. I was at Marcus’s place in Potrero Hill, near the projects and near where O. J. Simpson grew up. He left me in the back room while he went to check on his women. It was like an assignment: he left me with a joint and put on
A Love Supreme
. “Here, help yourself, man.”

The first thing I heard was Coltrane’s volume and intensity. It fit the times. The ’60s had a very loud, violent darkness that came from the war and riots and assassinations. Coltrane’s loudness and emotion reminded me of Hendrix, but it sounded like his horn was putting holes in the darkness—each time he blew, more light came through. The rest was kind of mysterious—I couldn’t make out the structure or the scales. I mean, I could play blues scales, but
it just felt so alien to me. I remember looking at the album cover and seeing his face so calm
and
intense—it looked like his thoughts were screaming. It was one of the first times I realized the paradox of music: it can be violent and peaceful at the same time. I had to put it aside—it would take some time until I was able to understand Coltrane’s music and his message of crystallizing your intentions for the good of the planet.