The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (41 page)

When Deborah and I got back to our place, she asked me, “What do you think?” I answered, wanting to first get her reaction: “What do
you
think?” We went back and forth like that, neither one of us wanting to take the first step. It wasn’t a very romantic proposal, I admit, but then again I hadn’t really been trained in that department. We did love each other and wanted to be together, and we wanted to be on our spiritual path together, and Sri had told us how that should happen, so we decided to go ahead.

Deborah quickly told her parents, and not long after we got back to San Francisco, on April 20, 1973, we got together at city hall to sign the forms. Then we held a small ceremony and reception in Oakland, at SK’s brother’s house—he was a preacher, and he married us, too. I remember wearing funky white platform shoes, which made me a lot taller than Deborah, and I remember I wore a tie. I think I had shaved only half of my face. I also remember that everyone asked if my parents were coming.

In fact, I didn’t invite anybody when I got married—no one. No family and no friends. Deborah’s mom asked, “Where are your parents and your sisters and brothers?”

“They’re not coming.”

The rest of the guests looked at me with their mouths open. “They’re not coming?”

“No.”

“Why aren’t they coming?”

“Because I didn’t invite them.”

In the ’60s, when things were going smoothly, as they were supposed to, almost with no special plan, we’d say it was a groove. That’s what our wedding was like and what my priority was—very quick and simple, no hassles. Deborah and I were in love, and we were living
together, and that’s what seemed important then—we knew we would also be having a divine ceremony back in Queens with Sri.

The hassle that I wanted to avoid was my mom—we were probably farther apart then than we had ever been, and we had not seen each other for a while. I was still holding on to all the hurt that came from that list of things she had done beginning in Mexico, such as spending the money I had saved for a new guitar. The tension in my muscles when I thought about that was still there—it would take years before that started to release. That’s how I was feeling about the idea of a ceremony, anyway. When Jo asked me why my mom wasn’t at the wedding, I didn’t know what else to say. I told her, “My mom is very domineering, and she would want to change everything.”

I did call my mom afterward, with Deborah next to me, and told her that we had gotten married. I could tell she was hurt. There was silence, and after I hung up I didn’t know what to say to Deborah. When we had our second wedding in Queens with Sri Chinmoy, another very simple and unpretentious ceremony, Deborah persuaded me to invite my family. I remember flying to New York with my father, mother, and my sister Laura on the plane. The whole way over, my mom was letting me have it—making it really difficult—and she didn’t care who heard. All I could do was sit there and take it—this time I couldn’t walk away; she had me. I remember looking at Laura, and she was just shaking her head, trying to look away.

I’d never seen my mom so hurt; I’d never seen her react that way. The whole trip she would bug out and start crying and then get angry again. Laura would try to step in and be the shock absorber, and I would say that this is what I didn’t want to have happen at the wedding in San Francisco. I knew that I wouldn’t have done anything intentionally to hurt my mom, but still I had done just that by ignoring her and keeping her out of my life. I was already getting closer to Deborah’s family than I was to mine—I remember we spent our first Thanksgiving after getting married in Oakland, cutting the turkey and watching O. J. Simpson break another football
record in Buffalo. To me it felt natural. Her family never made me feel anything but invited—“Come on, you want some more sweet potato pie? How about more of this?” Just like that.

I was still young and growing up and evolving, and I still had a habit of going away if I saw a verbal conflict coming, especially with a woman. I could feel a door close, and I would be gone. It was automatic. That was one of the things I had to take care of with the inner work I did. I’ll say it here: all the prayers and the spiritual coaching, all the inner and outer adjusting—I now see that it was really for my mom, which is why I’m dedicating the book first and foremost to her, with my thanks for being so strong and patient.

It would take a few more years for my mom and me to really get together again, and for almost the last thirty years of her life we were the best of the best. Before that, it was rough for a while. It was a crazy time, and I was so discombobulated with thoughts and emotions. I’ll put it this way: I wasn’t all the way present.

Even at our first wedding, when it was just Deborah, her family, and I in Oakland, I told her family that I couldn’t stay for the reception because I had a rehearsal with the band. Once again, they looked at me like they just couldn’t believe it. “Thanks for a great wedding day, everyone, but I got to go and get ready for this next tour.” Deborah knew about it, but I don’t think I was scoring many points in my favor that day. I went out to the car, and because it wasn’t the Excalibur anymore I forgot what to do and had locked the keys inside.

I remember standing there with Deborah while SK worked a coat hanger into the window to open it for me, all the while looking at his little girl so hard I could hear what he was thinking. “Are you sure you want to marry this Mexican cat?” Over the years, whenever Deborah and I got into it, she’d say, “I should have known right then that it wasn’t going to work.” But we stuck it out.

In April of ’73 we started working on the next Santana album, the follow-up to
Caravanserai,
staying with the same jazz flavor and spiritual vibe. By that time we were running on our own steam.
Who was around to tell us anything anymore? Maybe Bill, but CBS had fired Clive Davis around the time we started the new album, which was called
Welcome,
and we didn’t have a tight connection with anyone else at the record company—not the way we had with Clive. The people who came after him did what they had to do, but I never really did work with any other record person who understood and could speak to musicians the way he did, except for Chris Blackwell at Island Records.

There was also no one left in the band to complain about changing our style or going in a different direction—Shrieve, Chepito, and I were the only guys left from the original lineup. Still, that didn’t help me with the transition—the change in the band and the changeover to the next part of my life were still spinning around in my mind. I actually played John Coltrane’s music over and over and over and over, for focus. I still do.

This time the title track, “Welcome,” was actually a Coltrane tune. Shrieve and I talked about who should be on the album. We liked the idea of two keyboards and also two percussionists, which we had on
Caravanserai,
so we kept Richard Kermode and Tom Coster, and there was Chepito, who was the Tony Williams of the timbales, and Armando, who—well, he was the Armando Peraza of the congas! Dougie, of course, stayed with us on bass, with his nice, funky consistency, and we invited some special friends, too—some of the same people from the Bay Area who played on
Caravanserai
—plus John McLaughlin, the saxophonist Joe Farrell on flute, Jules Broussard on soprano saxophone, and others.

For some reason I didn’t pay as much attention to the guitar player as I think I should have on that album. On
Welcome,
I focused on the moods of the keyboard players and congas and timbales and stuff like that. The one tune I really thought about for my guitar was “Flame-Sky,” which has McLaughlin on it. The title comes from something Sri said when I played him the song.

“You’re such good boys, you and John”—he said that endearingly about us. “If you could only see how you affect the audience—both of you inflame their hearts to aspire again to be one with God.
Most people forget, and they invest in a nightmare of separation and distance from their Creator and they play roles they make up, but the only role that is real is the undeniable relationship with the Creator and being in your own light. When people hear this song, a flame will shoot out of their hearts straight up to the sky, which will tell the angels, ‘This one is ready. This one is aspiring and not desiring.’ ”

Another thing I remember about that tune: when John and I did our tour together later that year for around two weeks, we played “Flame-Sky” to open our shows and always closed with “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord.” What a great band—John brought Larry Young and Billy Cobham, and I brought Dougie and Armando. I remember that Armando took on Cobham in one rehearsal after Billy said that he’d never met a conga player who could keep up with him—congas versus drum kit. I thought it ended in a draw, but Armando was still unimpressed. He held up his hands and said, “I don’t need no stickets.”

The first three gigs were really fast and loud, and I could see people yawning and covering their ears and walking out. In Toronto I told John we needed to have a meeting with everybody. “Okay, Little Brother. What’s going on?”

“I think we need to do some sound checks and really rehearse some of the intros, the endings, and the grooves, because all our songs are sounding the same. We need to break down the songs, bring down the volume, and put a groove in some parts. Slow down a few and add some variety. I’m not used to people yawning and walking out of our concerts.”

We had our meeting, and I might have been a bit immature in the way I called out the group for being unprofessional, which hurt some feelings. Eventually I heard that John had said that not even Miles talked to him like that. But I was surprised that nobody else had brought it up. I was feeling that if you’re going to pack a place with thousands of people, as we were doing, you owe it to them not to play like it’s a Tuesday night at some little bar. Something good came from my speaking out, because we started playing different moods, creating valleys and meadows and mountains. It was very
successful. And yes, I was working on knowing how to talk to the band. I’m still learning.

The big question for the
Welcome
album was vocals—who was going to sing after Gregg left Santana? We looked at our record collection again, and we thought about Flora Purim and invited her to join us. She came from Return to Forever and sang “Yours Is the Light.” I really liked Pharoah Sanders’s album
Karma,
on which the song “The Creator Has a Master Plan” was sung by Leon Thomas, who sometimes liked to yodel. Leon was doing his own albums at that point: he put words to Gábor’s “Gypsy Queen,” and he was being produced by John Coltrane’s producer, Bob Thiele. Asking him to record and tour with us was Shrieve’s idea: “What if we get Leon Thomas to sing ‘Black Magic Woman’? Can you imagine that with him?” I said, “Okay, let’s do it!” and Leon agreed. I love Leon’s singing on
Welcome
—on “When I Look into Your Eyes” and on “Light of Life,” with strings arranged by Greg Adams.

My friend Gary Rashid—Rashiki—had just started working with us then. His very first job was to go to the airport and meet Leon, and he was asking, “How will I know what he looks like?” Leon arrived wearing a kind of safari outfit with a big hat and a cane. No problem. Leon became an important part of Santana, recording and then touring with us from spring of ’73 through the end of ’74. But at the start I don’t think he really trusted us to treat him right. He saw that I was eating a specially prepared vegetarian meal every night, so he told our tour manager he wanted something special. “Okay, what would you like?” the manager said.

“Liver and onions”—which I think was like asking for a high-priced menu choice like steak. So our tour manager made sure that at every meal—in the hotel and backstage—a plate of liver and onions was waiting for Leon, and you can guess what happened. By the third day he was done with that. “Don’t you guys get to eat anything but liver?”

The first tune on
Welcome
is “Going Home,” which was inspired by Antonín Dvořák’s
New World Symphony
and was arranged by Alice Coltrane. I asked Richard Kermode to play her arrangement
on the mellotron and Tom Coster to play the Yamaha organ the way she played her Wurlitzer. I’ll be honest: Shrieve and I had Tom in a headlock, telling him he had to listen to Alice Coltrane, to Larry Young, to Miles playing the Yamaha, and God bless Tom, because he never threw up his hands and said, “Fuck it” and walked away. Instead his attitude was, “Okay, I’ll try it.” Once he got the tone down, it was all easier after that.

“Going Home” came out of meeting Alice Coltrane that year, which for me was maybe the biggest realization of my spiritual dream—going from being a dishwasher to meeting the widow of John Coltrane and then getting to make music with her.

We met for the first time in the spring of ’73, when Alice invited me to come stay with her in Los Angeles so that I could meet her and her friend Swami Satchidananda. By that time she had adopted the Hindu name Turiya. I liked Satchidananda, and maybe he was another guru I could have followed, but I can be intense, and I think that Sri’s own power and intensity were good for me. If there’s such a thing as discipline in romance, then that’s Sri Chinmoy, because he is a lover of the supreme, and I tend to gravitate to lovers. When they hug you it’s really close. They’re not going to let go.

Deborah and I were making a life that had two homes, one in Marin County and the other in Queens, at the place we rented on Parsons Boulevard near Sri’s ashram. We were going back and forth, and we had enough trust already in our marriage that she could go to New York and meditate while I stayed and recorded in San Francisco. So when Turiya invited me to spend time with her, which she did after she got to know about me from
Love Devotion Surrender,
Deborah knew that it was an opportunity for me to develop an important musical and spiritual relationship—one that needed to be developed. So Deborah went to see Sri in Queens while I went down to Los Angeles.

We’re all interconnected anyway, but I felt more open than I had at any other time about playing music and learning. I tried to take
all
the lessons I could find from the teachers I could find. You could
say that during this period, all the meditating and discussing and listening I was doing were like peeling an artichoke, pulling away the outer layers to get to the core of who I really was, who I’ll always be, without playing the hide-and-seek games that people play with themselves.