The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (26 page)

Then Jerry held his hand out. “Do you want it?”

“Want what—what you got?” It was mescaline. That’s how casual it was in those days—I took it right away. I was thinking, “I’ll have time to enjoy this, come back down, drink a lot of water, get past the amoeba state, and be ready to play by tonight. No problem.” Right.

Things were definitely more messed up at Woodstock than we had thought. Because of all the traffic a lot of bands were having trouble getting to the festival, so the organizers had to ask the bands that were there to play or there would be big gaps in the flow of music. Of course I didn’t know this then. I remember hearing Country Joe and the Fish onstage when things were just starting to get elastic and stretch out. Then suddenly someone came up to us to tell us that if we wanted to play, we had to get on stage
now
. It wasn’t Bill—I didn’t even see him around. We didn’t argue—we just grabbed our instruments and headed to the stage.

It was definitely the wrong time for me. I was just taking the first steps on the first stage of that psychedelic journey, when things start to melt when you look at them. I had played high and tripping before, so I had the confidence to go for it and put on the guitar and plug it in, but I remember thinking this was not going to be representative of what I can do. When a trip starts happening, all of a sudden you’re traveling at warp speed, and the tiniest things become cosmically huge. The opposite happens, too, so everything is suddenly the same size. It’s like that scene in Kubrick’s movie
2001
when the astronaut is traveling beyond Jupiter with all the lights whizzing by—it felt like I was almost at the stage of giving birth to myself again, and we were just starting the set.

When we got onstage we saw that they had set us up really close to each other, which was great because that’s what they normally did back home, and the roadie guys had come through. I think that was the best thing that happened to us that day: we could really see and feel each other and not get lost. Then someone announced us,
and we could see the huge crowd in front of us—our album was just about to come out the following week, and “Jingo” wasn’t being played yet on the radio, so unless people in the audience were from the Bay Area or worked for Columbia Records, there was no way they had heard about us. It’s one thing to play to a crowd that big, and it’s another thing to be totally unknown doing that. But I had other things to think about.

The rest of the show is a blur—
really
a blur. We started with “Waiting,” the first tune from our album, and that was like our sound check. I was tripping, and I remember saying inwardly, “God—all I ask is that you keep me in time and in tune.” I kept myself locked on the usual things that helped me stay tight with the band—bass, hi-hat, snare drum, and bass drum. I was telling myself, “Don’t think about the guitar. Just watch it.” It turned into an electric snake, twisting and turning, which meant the strings would go loose if it didn’t stay straight. I kept willing the snake not to move and praying that it stayed in tune.

Later I saw myself in photos and in the Woodstock movie. All those faces I was making while I was playing reminded me that I was trying to get that snake to hold still. Then I saw the guitar I was playing—a red Gibson SG with P-80 pickups—and it all made sense. I always had trouble keeping that guitar in tune, and even though I needed a new one, the band had voted collectively not to spend the money. That’s how Santana still was then—a collective. It was that way until at least the middle of 1971. Not long after the festival I got so frustrated with that guitar in a rehearsal that I ended up throwing it against a wall and breaking it, which forced the band to get me a new one.

We only played forty-five minutes at Woodstock, but it felt twice as long. Each note I played felt like it started as a blood cell moving inside a vein and pumping through my body. I had the sense of everything slowing down—I could feel the music coming up inside me and out through my fingers—I could watch myself pick a note on the guitar and feel the vibration go into the pickup, through the wiring inside the guitar, down the guitar cord to the
amplifier, out the amp speaker into the microphone, through the cable into the big speakers on the side of the stage, out into the crowd, and all the way up the hill, until it bounced and we could hear the echo coming back to the stage.

Later I thought about the tunes we played at Woodstock, and I realized I had forgotten everything about the first half of our set. I did remember the last few songs, including “Jingo” and “Persuasion,” and I remembered that we did “Fried Neckbones” as an encore. And of course “Soul Sacrifice,” which ended up in the movie. I remember hearing the crowd yelling and clapping, then I remember going off the stage and turning back to see Gregg behind me. He had a look of victory on his face, like, “Yeah! We
did
it.” Then Bill Graham caught his eye and gestured him to turn back around, like he was saying, “Not so fast—look at the crowd. Savor this moment.” Gregg turned around, and his face was like a little kid’s—just amazed. I turned and did the same thing. I think Bill was probably more proud of us than we were, because we were all just a little shell-shocked.

It’s funny when I think about it. With everything else that was happening then, all the people and noise and getting hustled on and off, my last thought before leaving the stage was, “I’ll never trip again—not for a gig this important!”

For me the best thing about being connected to Woodstock is that most of us are still around to talk about it—Gregg, Carabello, Shrieve, Chepito, and I. We’re alive and vibrant. Most of all, we still stand for the same things that Woodstock represented—consciousness revolution coated with peace and love and music. The audience was filled with people who had a deep, emotional investment in making change happen. It wasn’t just people wanting to smoke a joint and get laid—although many did both—and it wasn’t about wanting to sell T-shirts or plastic flowers.

The original Woodstock wasn’t about selling anything. It wasn’t regimented or organized enough for that to happen. In fact that’s
the beauty of it, and that’s why people are still talking about it. It came together naturally and was about using music and peace to show the system that there were a lot of freaks out there who wanted their voices heard. They wanted the freedom to be who they were, and they wanted the war to stop: “Hell, no, we won’t go.” We were saying that the war wasn’t over there, in Vietnam. It was right here at home, between the government and the hippies at Woodstock—between the system and the people who have no voice. In ’69, we had a generation with an agenda, and the groups that played Woodstock helped get that agenda out into the world and gave the people a voice.

The one problem back then was that there was no middle ground—that was not good, either. Some people were saying if you weren’t supporting everything America was doing, you were not being patriotic. Meanwhile a lot of hippies were making rules of their own and talking about the servicemen who were coming back home injured or without legs—calling them baby killers. Now it seems that we are back to that same thing—people judging people and making decisions without knowing enough—and there’s still no middle ground.

The true hippies thought for themselves and helped bring about a change that we needed in America. There are not enough hippies right now, in my estimation. And besides, I don’t care who you are—part of the system or a hippie—you have to learn to think differently from the crowd. Think for yourself and work for a better world. Don’t do anything with violence, but do make an extreme change to your own mentality. Question authority if it’s not divinely enlightened. Thomas Jefferson said it his own way—rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God. In that sense, both Jesus and Jefferson were downright hippies.

That’s the real lesson of Woodstock. The first Woodstock came and went, and two other Woodstocks have happened since 1969, but there’s only one of them that stays in our minds, and that’s because of the peace, love, and joy. I remember when I was asked to play the twenty-fifth anniversary—I was touring Australia. I asked
them to tell me who else was in. “Nine Inch Nails, Cypress Hill, Aerosmith, Guns N’ Roses.” I said, “Man, that’s not Woodstock—that sounds like nothing but white guys. In ’69, we had Joan Baez, we had Richie Havens and Sly. What happened to women, and where are the black people?” I believe those are the questions that Bill Graham would be asking if he had been there in ’94. I told them if it was going to be a Woodstock you can’t have just one color of the rainbow, you have to have them all. They heard me—they added black and female performers, and we played Woodstock again.

In ’99 they tried it one more time, but the message was gone—no more peace and love. By then, for the experience to be true to the original Woodstock, they would have had to invite music from all over the world—Native Americans, African people, Chinese people—like the Olympics but without the competition. In ’99, it was about just one kind of music and soft-drink sponsorships and the TV broadcast. It was about corporate stock, not Woodstock. I didn’t play at that one—no way.

In 2010, we did a concert with Steve Winwood in Bethel, New York, just a few hundred yards away from the original Woodstock site. I had just proposed to my wife, Cindy, a few days before, and I was on such a high. I had a free afternoon, so I went to walk around what used to be Max Yasgur’s farm—you can still go there and see the field where five hundred thousand people gathered. It was a very emotional experience for me. They now have a museum there—and there were some people visiting who had seen Santana play that afternoon. “We were here the first time—it’s great to see you again,” they said. It was so gratifying to go back there and hear that.

To tell the truth, I think a lot of my memories of what happened onstage at Woodstock have been shaped by seeing myself in the movie, which didn’t come out until almost a year later. The first time I saw the movie was when Santana was back in New York City in 1970. I remember I liked the way the director showed all the stuff that was happening by dividing the screen into three parts,
but I hated that wide-angle lens he used that made me look like a bug.

Devon Wilson, Jimi Hendrix’s girlfriend, took me to see the movie the first time. She told me that when she had seen the movie with Jimi, it had totally messed him up. “When the part with you guys came on, you should have seen his face. He couldn’t stop talking about Santana.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Jimi really liked your performance, man. He loved the energy.”

I had another conversation with Devon not long after Jimi’s death, and she really shocked me when she told me that Jimi had once said he would have liked to have been in Santana. I still get dizzy thinking what that would have been like!

I think our music was really crisp at Woodstock, and with so many other kinds of bands playing there, I can see that we would have stuck out. Shrieve was really on that day, like a horse running free, and Chepito was playing his timbales with absolute conviction and fire, giving those hippies a taste of a kind of music they’d never heard before. We were rehearsed, like a car ready to hit the track—some of the other groups were discombobulated and still in the pit, waiting to get it together. We were hippies, but we were professional in our way. Also, some of the other groups suffered when it rained after we played—I remember talking with Jerry later, and he told me that the stage was wet when the Dead played and that their guitar cables were shocking them, so they couldn’t really step on the notes. They had no insulation and no ground, so it was literally like putting your finger in an electric socket. Who can do a show like that? Jerry said that it was the worst they ever played.

If you ask me, from what I heard on the album and saw in the movie, there were three acts that had it together in terms of their music and their energy. Sly was number one—he owned that whole weekend. Then it was Jimi Hendrix, with the amazing way he presented the national anthem and the rest of his show, even though most of the crowd had left by then and it was already the
middle of Monday morning when he played. Then there was a bunch of groups fighting for third place—but I think it was either the Who or Santana, and that was it.

We didn’t stick around to see the rest of the festival after our show—it was time to go. The helicopters were flying people out to make room for the bands that were coming in—it was chaotic, and it wasn’t like there was a backstage where you could just hang. I was still tripping and wanted to go and hibernate. The other guys were talking, but I kept quiet—I was afraid someone was going to say something about my playing out of tune. We had had enough, man. We ended up hanging out for a while in the lobby of some Howard Johnson–type hotel away from the festival, and then it was back on the road.

Woodstock was important to Santana: it was the biggest door we would ever walk through with just one step. But until I saw the movie, Woodstock had in many ways just been another gig, and for us 1969 was a summer full of big shows. After Woodstock we played pop festivals in Atlanta, New Orleans, and Dallas. We were on the road for another two weeks before we got back home, so you can imagine that by then it was all fading away in my mind.

I’ll never forget two amazing things from those national tours. The first happened in Boston, where we played just after Woodstock at the Boston Tea Party. We were walking around Cambridge when suddenly we heard “Jingo” on the radio. A rush of energy went through my body when I realized that it was our song. Of course we all started talking about it, and then the excitement shifted to: “Man, it sounds like crap—we got to get a real producer.” It was true—the music sounded really thin. You just couldn’t feel our energy coming out of a little radio speaker. That was an important lesson—to think about how people would be hearing our music. “Jingo” was our first single, but it didn’t get picked up by many stations, so Columbia went with “Evil Ways” as the second single, and that took off later.

The second thing happened when we played a few shows in October in Chicago. It was our first time in that city, and for me Chicago only meant one thing—it was the home of the electric blues! We had a day off, and we were staying at a Holiday Inn. I heard that Otis Rush was playing on the South Side in a rough part of town—it might have been at Theresa’s Lounge. I couldn’t persuade anybody to go with me. “No; today’s a day off, man. I’m going to get a hamburger, then go to my room and relax.”