The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (37 page)

Gregg left San Francisco by that summer—he got to the point where he was really over the whole rock scene. He started a restaurant with his dad in Seattle, where he’s from. I knew I was going to miss him. But he was just too caught up in what he wanted to do away from Santana at that point, just as I was focused on where I thought Santana should go. If there had been any chance for reconciliation and getting back together, it was gone by that point. I had been doing a lot of jamming with other bands around the Bay Area starting that spring and summer—playing in concerts with folks like Elvin Bishop and Buddy Miles; Malo, my brother’s band; and Azteca. In July I was invited to be a featured guest with Tower of Power at the Marin County Civic Center—they were on a double bill with the Loading Zone. I showed up in my Excalibur with two blond chicks who were friends of Neal’s. I got out my guitar, and we went backstage.

This is the night when Deborah and I first really noticed each other. When I saw her, I remembered she had been with Sly—she looked like she was Sly’s girlfriend. This time Deborah was by herself, looking very attractive in her eyes and her skin and holding herself with elegance. It was in the way she walked—like a queen—which was something I would come to know over time. I didn’t know yet that she was from a musical family or that her dad was a famous blues guitarist. I didn’t even know her name.

I was very single at that time, not really looking. In those days, women found their own way—guys didn’t always have to take the first step and do the walking and talking. I know what Deborah says in her book about my chasing her. But in my book, it went down like this: I went to get a drink from a water fountain, and when I straightened up she was right behind me. She really looked
beautiful and had long eyelashes. We spoke for a little bit. Then I soloed on “You Got to Funkifize.” I went home, and the next day the phone rang. It was Lynn Medeiros, Jerry Martini’s old lady—Jerry is the saxophonist who helped put together Sly & the Family Stone. Lynn said that she and Deborah were working on a cookbook—favorite recipes by the ladies of rock musicians. Would my lady like to participate?

Man, I saw right through that. Come on. But it was nice and charming and kind of funny the way they did that. I said, “Okay, no. No lady over here. Thanks. Sure, I’d like to talk with Deborah. Put her on the phone.” That’s how it started.

Our first date was a week or two later, and it didn’t take long at all. She loved music, and she understood musicians, and she wasn’t someone who would get between a musician and his music. She was young and beautiful and was very close with her family, which attracted me. She talked about her mother and grandmother a lot. She had a strong foundation and confidence. Looking back on it now, I think that’s what attracts me most about women. Whether they are with you or not, they’re okay—they may want you, but they don’t need you. I don’t like women who are needy or whiny. If there’s any of that “Oh, without you I’m just nothing” stuff, then I know I got the wrong one. Got to go!

Deborah also had an inner beauty as well, a divine kind of spark. I found out almost immediately after we started dating that she was aspiring to a higher consciousness, as I was. She was reading about Swami Satchidananda and I was reading Paramahansa Yogananda and we were both disenchanted with the trappings of the rock-and-roll lifestyle and disappointed with people who were close to us. For some reason we always got to talking about that when we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge—the hurt and disappointment that came from people going their own way and getting lost.

Whatever happened between her and Sly is in her book, and that and what was happening with me and my band had left us both needing support and consolation. I think a lot of what brought
us together so quickly was that we were both like birds with broken wings: we needed mending. We were consoling each other.

There was still a hole in me from what happened with Santana, and Deborah came and stood next to me at the right time. Dougie Rauch used to say that everybody has a hole to fill. Some people try to fill it with sex or drugs or money or food, but everybody has a space inside that they need to fill—that’s the closest I ever heard Dougie get to having some kind of philosophy.

Did I know Deborah was the one at that time? I knew how I felt at that moment, and that was all I was thinking about. I was open to the possibility without even thinking about it. I think the important thing, looking back on it, is that people should know that you don’t attract whom you want or whom you need. You always attract who you
are
. So if you do whatever inner work needs to be done and deal with who you are, then your heart will be open and you can be flexible and vulnerable again and invite in your queen and take your existence to another level. I don’t believe it was a coincidence.

Deborah was sexy and exciting, and she made me comfortable. There was a side of her that was very generous and nurturing. Very soon after we started dating I had the feeling that one reason we met was that I needed help cleaning my inner closet. Then she started asking me to come over to Oakland to meet her mom and dad.

Deborah was the younger daughter of the Bay Area bluesman Saunders King—he was black, his wife, Jo, was white, and they were serious, churchgoing people. SK had been known around San Francisco during World War II, playing blues and ballads for black servicemen with his big band, or “orchestra,” as they called it back then. He had a smooth way of singing songs—“S.K. Blues” was his big hit in ’42.

SK had history. He was one of the first electric blues guitarists on the West Coast, the same generation as T-Bone Walker—he had heard Charlie Christian playing guitar with Benny Goodman, and that was it. SK got his own instrument, put a band together, and was playing in shows with Billie Holiday when she was at the top.
From what he told me later, I got the idea that he sometimes got her West Coast band together for her. SK had known Charlie Parker and worked with him. SK was also a veteran of the old TOBA circuit—the black-owned Theater Owners Booking Association, the
real
chitlin’ circuit—and he had toured through some rough places and stood up to some serious racist shit.

To understand just how respected SK was, you have to know that B. B. King called him his personal god. SK’s response to hearing that was, “B. B.? I knew that boy before he knew how to hold the guitar.”

SK didn’t have a problem with his daughters getting with guys who had some sort of public profile. He had practice with that: Deborah had been with Sly for a while, and SK’s older daughter, Kitsaun, was dating Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the time. Years later, Kareem and I would tell each other SK stories—he told me that he got some advice from SK when he was getting beat up while he was with the Milwaukee Bucks, which I guess was the only thing they could do to stop him. SK told him to defend himself, to not wait for the referee. Just once, just one good hit. He did, and that was all it took—opposing players started to leave him alone.

Later, when I started to call him Dad, SK would tell me stories. One of his favorites was about playing on a session with Louis Armstrong—a radio broadcast, I think. Everyone was looking over the sheet music before they went on the air, except for Louis. When they asked him what he was going to do if he didn’t know the music, he said that to him playing music was like walking through an orchard full of fruit trees and that each note was like a fruit hanging off a branch and that he was going to pick only the ripest ones.

Another time SK was looking upset, and I asked him what happened. “Man, I got this phone call last night, and this cat starts talking to me. I could tell he was a musician, but he was calling me the
n
word. I can’t stand it when someone calls me outside my name.” That’s how they talked about it in SK’s generation.

SK said, “I didn’t even know who it was! I hung up and I got so
angry and suddenly I said, ‘I know who that was.’ It was Dizzy Gillespie, but I didn’t care. I got back on the phone and called him. ‘Man, don’t you ever call my house and call me outside my name again, you hear me? My name is Saunders King, you got that? Now I know why they call you Dizzy.’ ”

Kareem and I used to talk about how long it took to get past the probation stage with SK. He wouldn’t even turn his head to look at you; and with a toothpick in his mouth, he looked like Otis Rush. You can talk about Checkpoint Charlie and airport security and all that stuff, but it only scratches the surface of how it felt each time Deborah took me to her parents’ home. It took a while to get SK to actually open up.

It was Deborah I was getting close to, not her parents. But the more time I spent with her, the more I spent with all of them. I was getting another family. I remember Armando looking at me not long after I met Deborah, then just shaking his head, like he was thinking, “It’s too late to save this guy now.”

Caravanserai
was released in October of ’72, and, as we had for our other albums, we got ready to go on the road, playing concerts to help introduce our new music. Santana was then Shrieve, Dougie on bass, Armando, Mingo and Chepito on percussion, and two guys on keyboards—TC and Richard Kermode, who had a bad, straight-ahead
montuno,
a consistent Latin feel in his playing and was steady like a horse. In my mind, TC was the Keith Jarrett of Santana, and Kermode became the Chick Corea. Kermode had been in Jorge’s band, Malo, and I remember my mom telling me that I should be more careful about taking musicians from my brother’s band. I didn’t think I
took
him—my thinking was that Santana was another opportunity for musicians, and if they wanted to they could try playing with us, see if it worked, then decide what they wanted to do. That was a really nice combination—TC and Kermode.

The
Caravanserai
tour started in North America in October. It
was Santana, Bobby Womack, and Freddie King—rock, blues, and soul groups all together. I was in heaven, man, playing next to those legends. We played a number of chitlin’ circuit venues that didn’t usually have rock bands, so there were a lot of black folks in the audience who normally wouldn’t come to a Santana concert, and of course there were a lot of white rock fans catching Bobby and Freddie, whom they normally wouldn’t go and hear.

The one problem was that when we started playing the longer pieces from
Caravanserai,
our fans started screaming. “Hey, Santana—play ‘Oye Como Va’!” They weren’t shy about it, either—I’d be into a long, slow solo, and suddenly somebody would yell at the top of his lungs: “Play fuckin’ ‘Evil Ways’!” Oh, man. I remember turning around and looking at Shrieve, and then we’d go into “Stone Flower.” The people got loud on that tour. Other bands were picking up on that—I remember Freddie King saying, “Hey, Santana, that’s some weird-ass shit you’re playing now. Why don’t you play some ‘Black Magic Woman’? I like it better when you just play some blues.”

Changing musical direction is never easy, but that first tour after
Caravanserai
felt like it caused the most tension—both inside the band and between us and our fans. It even caused tension within my own family—my mom couldn’t understand why I would play original music, and my dad was still trying to figure out the structures to Santana songs. Both of them thought I was crazy to change Santana around. Meanwhile, we were on the road, and I was thinking about Deborah a lot and about my growing spirituality. I was meditating, and I had been introduced to a new spiritual guide by Larry Coryell.

Coryell and I were already going down the same path musically—he was a guitarist mixing jazz and rock intentions before I ever thought about doing it. He had even cut tracks with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Coltrane’s bassist and drummer, the year after John moved on. Earlier in ’72, before I met Deborah, Coryell came through San Francisco and stayed with me. We meditated together, and I noticed a photograph he carried with him—it was in a little
frame, and it was scary. It showed a man in the middle of meditating so deeply that the photo was humming! His eyes were half closed, and it looked like he had a small smile on his face. I asked Larry who it was. “This is a transcendental picture of Sri Chinmoy in a high state.”

A
very
high state—I could feel the intensity from the man just through the picture. I would come to know that photograph and that face very well—I’d soon be meditating on the photo, just as Larry did, and would continue to do so for almost ten years. That face became the note I would use to get myself in tune with a Christ consciousness, a Buddha consciousness.

Sri Chinmoy was a guru who had moved to New York City from India and had started an ashram and meditation center in Queens. Larry was one of his first disciples, but that didn’t matter; if Larry had asked me to come meet him then, I think I’d have run the other way. But nine months later, after getting together with Deborah and finishing
Caravanserai,
I was ready. It started with John McLaughlin—he found me in a state of openness and helped plant the seed.

Here’s how it happened: just before the
Caravanserai
tour began, John called me about doing an album with him. I guess because of the Buddy Miles album, some people saw I was open to collaboration, and John knew that we both had a special place for the music of Coltrane. John’s album that year,
The Inner Mounting Flame,
connected with me in the same place—so it made sense. Later I learned that Mahavishnu was the name that Sri gave to John.

But John had been a guitarist in Tony Williams’s group—the guy who played with Miles on
In a Silent Way
and then on
Jack Johnson
. People ask me if it was intimidating to play with John back then—it’s
always
intimidating to play with John. He was busy restructuring the way a guitar sounded in jazz—in
music
. What could I do next to him?

It’s funny—I had no problem sticking up for Santana’s music; I could do that on my own. But when John asked me to record with
him, I spoke to a lot of people, including Shrieve and Deborah, before saying yes. I remember Armando had good advice: “Don’t worry, goddammy.” (He’d say “goddammy” instead of “goddamn it.”) “You let him do his shick, let him play. When it’s your turn, you already got something he don’t have.”