The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (42 page)

I spent close to a week with Turiya. She opened her house to me, and I was very grateful that she did. I remember listening to her speak about music and her spiritual path and of course about John—but she never called him John. It was either Ohnedaruth, his spiritual name, or a few times she called him the Father. She used to tell me that he never stopped playing, even when he was home, long after a gig. When he had the day off, he’d still be at it—she told me that he could spend an hour just looking at the saxophone in front of him and then another hour fingering it up and down, all over the horn. Finally he’d put it in his mouth and start playing—hallelujah! So first he visualized the music, then he got to the mechanics. I think Coltrane wouldn’t stop thinking about and playing the horn because he didn’t want the stove to get cold—if it does, you have to start all over again.

I also spent time hanging around Turiya’s children. I watched them jump in the pool during the day, and every night after the kids went to sleep she and I would talk for a little bit. She’d go to her room, and I’d relax on the sofa. Then around three thirty in the morning, we’d both get up, and she would play the harp and the piano. I would listen, then we’d both meditate some more.

One morning, almost at the end of the week, we started meditating. When you meditate at three in the morning, the first half hour is like being on a plane flying through turbulence. Your eyes are red, you know it’s dark all around you, you’re trying to stay awake, and you’re shaking. Then all of a sudden things get really smooth. That morning I could see a beautiful flame in the candle that was burning—it was like a flame inside the flame. So in my mind’s eye I went into it, as I had done many times before. But this time I began to feel the presence of somebody in the room besides
Turiya. It was John Coltrane. Then he materialized in my vision. He was looking right at me—and he was holding two ice-cream cones, each of which had three scoops!

I looked at John, and he smiled and said, “Would you like to try some?” Then it was as if Turiya had entered the vision from the corner of my left eye, and she said, “Go ahead and try one.” So inwardly I took one of the cones and licked it, and it was sweet and creamy—just delicious. “Good, huh?” John said.

“Yes, thank you. It’s very good.”

“Well, that’s a B-flat diminished seventh chord.”

“What? Really?”

Then I heard Turiya say, “Try another one,” only it seemed like she was saying this out loud in the room next to me, like she knew what was happening in my meditation.

Man, that
freaked
me out. How did she know? I have no doubt when people read this they’re going to say something like, “Oh, sure—this cat just took too much LSD, and the hallucinations were still coming.” But I stopped doing drugs from ’72 to ’81. Maybe once, a year later, I’d get curious again and try a hit of mescaline, but at that point in ’73 I was really straight—totally clean.

You have to understand that to this day, when I listen to John Coltrane’s music, it reassures me that God never lets go of my hand. No matter how dark things get, God’s still in me, no matter what. For me his music is the fastest way of getting away from the darkness of the ego—darkness, guilt, shame, judgment, condemnation, fear, temptation,
everything
.

It’s not just
A Love Supreme
and
Meditations
and his more spiritual albums. If I hear “Naima” or “Central Park West” or “Equinox” or “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes”—or any of the older ballads he recorded—I find that every note is laced with spiritual overtones. There’s always a prayer in there that anyone can hear.

Even when Coltrane is playing a song, it’s much more than that—and I like songs. I like “Wild Thing.” I like “Louie Louie” and anything by the Beatles or Frank Sinatra. But Coltrane wasn’t just about songs—at least I don’t think he was. His music is about
light, and his sound was a language of light. It’s like the solvent that they put into dirty, murky water: stir, and instantly the water goes back to being clean. John Coltrane’s sound is a solvent that clears the muddiness of distance and self-separation. That’s why we all love Trane—Wayne Shorter, John McLaughlin, Stevie Wonder, and so many others—because his sound reminds us that everything is redeemable. That’s what Coltrane was telling people: crystallize your intentions, your motives, and your purpose for the highest good of the planet.

I never was able to meet Coltrane, but I feel him through so many other people—Alice Coltrane, of course; Albert Ayler; John Gilmore—especially through their spiritual practice and their intergalactic music. Today you can still hear Coltrane in Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock and in the music of Charles Lloyd, Pharoah Sanders, Sonny Fortune, and many others.

I know some people scratch their heads when I tell them that John Coltrane’s music has the power to rearrange molecular structures. I found myself once at an Olympics ceremony—I was talking about the healing power of Trane’s music, and Wynton Marsalis was next to me. He shook his head and made a face. I just cracked up. Maybe Wynton’s changed his perspective, but at that time I could tell he didn’t want to hear what I was saying. You know, it’s such a blessing to be able to play from your soul and to reach many people. It’s also a blessing to be able to listen and hear the healing power that comes from other people’s music. That is what I mean when I talk about the Universal Tone.

Deborah and me, Day on the Green at the Oakland Coliseum, July 4, 1977.

Around 2004 I had a very, very meticulously detailed dream. Check this out: I was in a building in Milan at night. John McLaughlin was there, too, and we could see outside through a window to a park with really bright lights in the middle. They were like interrogation lights, so it was dark everywhere except where the lights were shining, and some guys were playing soccer there, but they couldn’t go too far because they
had to stay in the light. So John and I were watching this soccer-in-the-lights game, and suddenly I saw Todd Barkan—the guy who ran the Keystone Korner jazz club in San Francisco—walking across the park, and with him is somebody who’s carrying some saxophones and pushing a bicycle. It was John Coltrane!

John and I watched the two men come up to the building we’re in, and we were getting more and more excited. Coltrane left the bicycle outside, came up with his horns and some sheet music, and Todd introduced us. “Hey, Carlos, John’s got a song that he’s working on, and I think he wants you to play with him.”

“What? Really?”

Coltrane looked at me. “Hi; how you doing?”

“Uh, hi, John.” I was so nervous, just thinking, “Oh, my God, I’m with John Coltrane, and he wants me to play something with him!” I looked at the music as Coltrane was taking his horns out, and it was a black church song, something like “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord.” I was thinking, “Oh, yeah. No problem. I can handle this,” and I started working on my part.

But when I looked up Coltrane was suddenly gone. I asked Todd, “Hey, what happened to John?”

“Oh, man, somebody just stole his bicycle, so he went looking for it, but I think the thief got away.” So I decided to help him and left the building, and suddenly I was on the parkway between Nassau Coliseum and Jones Beach. I saw Coltrane’s bicycle, but it had been stripped—the wheels and the seat were gone. I picked it up anyway and brought it back with me and found John. Then, with a jolt, I woke up.

Man, that dream left a powerful impression on me. It was still early in the morning, but I had to tell somebody, so I called Alice: “Turiya, I’m sorry to call at this time.” She said, “That’s okay—I’ve already done my meditation. How are you?” I told her about the dream, and she said to her it made perfect sense. She broke it down this way: she felt that the kids playing in the park were the kids who listen to music today, bouncing in and out of the dark, looking for music that will bring them into the light, music like John Coltrane’s. The stolen bicycle with no wheels represented how difficult it was for that music to find a way to get
to people. There was no vehicle anymore to help carry Coltrane’s music to those who need to hear it. His music gets so little airplay and so little press, but it’s important to bring people into the light of his music—to make Coltrane a household name.

I’ve been trying to put the wheels back on that bike since 1972—recording “A Love Supreme” and “Naima” with John McLaughlin, recording “Welcome” and “Peace on Earth,” pointing people to John’s music and to Alice Coltrane’s sound, which, I believe, is sadly overlooked—but her music is really timeless, too.

I have lots of other ideas. I went on a quest to get the Grammy people to name their annual lifetime achievement awards after him: the John Coltrane Lifetime Achievement Award. I’d like to put together an entire album of Coltrane performing “Naima”: three or four disks that include some of the best performances he did of that beautiful song, live and in the studio. I support Ravi Coltrane, John and Alice’s son, and his wife, Kathleen, in all they’re doing to preserve the Coltrane home in Dix Hills, on Long Island, where Coltrane wrote
A Love Supreme
and where he started his family with Alice.

There’s another thing about that dream of John Coltrane and the bicycle, and people are free to say that I’m tripping. They wouldn’t be wrong, either—in some ways I think I was born tripping! But many times it’s hard to tell the difference between dreams and imagination. Anyway, the same morning that Alice Coltrane interpreted the dream, I got a phone call from my friend Michel Delorme in France. I told him about the dream, gave him all the details, and he kind of shrugged it off in his typical way: “Poof! Of course, Carlos. I am on the road with McLaughlin. We were in Milan just last night, talking about you and John Coltrane.”

T
he year 1973 was one of spiritual discipline, and it was also a year of extreme endurance and madness. It felt like Santana was on the road more than we were at home—some nights we did two sets. By my estimation I think we did more than two hundred shows. Why did we work so hard? A big part of it was the feeling
that while people were paying, we should be playing. We didn’t have enough confidence to believe that the audience would still be there if we took time off and then went back to New York or London or Montreux. We also didn’t know better—if our manager was telling us that we needed to be making a certain amount of money, and if we were hurting because of the IRS, who among us had the experience to stand up to that? We were young, we were eager, and we believed in our new music. It was our decision. Nobody was putting a gun to our heads.

What helped me was that I was meditating and my diet was healthy and I wasn’t partying, and Shrieve was the same way. This was when we started to have incense onstage and when I put a photo of Sri Chinmoy in deep meditation on my amplifier. I don’t think I could have made it through that year without the spiritual strength to support what we were doing on the road. We had traveled a lot before, but you can ask anyone who was in Santana that year—there were times it was like going to war. For me, it felt like Shrieve and I were comrades on the battlefield. It was hard, but we were in love with the music, and nobody ever complained.

When I look back on those times, I realize that I wasn’t always the easiest guy to be around. I was like an ex-smoker hanging with a bunch of smokers and telling them that they needed to change. I think that like most people who are not ripe with maturity or spirit, I tended to get all huffy and puffy and holier-than-thou. Maybe I did come across as having a sense of superiority and some kind of rigidness about the spirituality thing. I’ll put it this way: there was room for me to grow, and it took me some time to realize it.

I think a few of us who were following Sri Chinmoy back then felt that we had some sort of key to heaven and that everybody else was a dumbass. I wish Sri in his teachings had also said, “Look, if you’re going to be on a spiritual path you need to be gentle with people who are not going the same way.” I didn’t know it, but I had much growing to do—I was still very, very green at conducting myself with gentleness toward people. By contrast, I could tell from listening to the interviews John Coltrane did that he was very
considerate of other people’s spiritual unfolding, or their lack thereof, whenever he spoke. That was what I needed to aspire to—not just his music. There was a lot of learning going on in 1973.

The other thing that made it easier for me that year was that I think the band was one of the most amazing versions of Santana ever. Actually, I’ll put it this way: in hindsight, that 1973 band—with Leon Thomas, Armando and Chepito, TC and Kermode, Dougie, Shrieve, and me—was musically the best and most challenging band I’ve ever been in. And the thing is, when we were playing at our best we were really just trying to find ourselves.

That lineup was the closest I think Santana ever came to being a jazz band. At sound check we would try out new things, and it was fun. I remember we would take inspiration from little musical segments written by a keyboardist named Todd Cochran, who wrote for Freddie Hubbard and others and recorded his own music, too. He had a song called “Free Angela” that we started doing, which I thought sounded like it could have been on Herbie’s album
Crossings
. To this day we have sound checks and try out new stuff all the time, even if we’re in the same place for two or three nights and have already tested out the system. “You still want to do a sound check?”

“Yes, of course. Let’s try something new…”

I think the best way to explain that year is to start with Japan—that was our first time in that country and that part of the world. Like Switzerland, it became a country Santana came back to again and again, and it was where we found another enlightened music lover, like Claude Nobs in Montreux, who had become a big music promoter there—Mr. Udo. Some people call him the Bill Graham of Japan, because he was the man who really started bringing big rock acts there. I agree with that, but he also earned his moniker because he respects the music and treats the musicians well. He never stopped believing in Santana and what we were doing—ever. He’s always been dignified, a snappy dresser, and always has some great stories—when he laughs he doesn’t hold back. He’s another keeper of the flame, one of the angels who arrived at just the right
time to guide and support us. Mr. Udo is the only promoter I have ever worked with in Japan.

When we came through in ’73, Japan was still very traditional—you could see there were as many people in kimonos as there were in suits. McDonald’s wasn’t there yet, and neither was Kentucky Fried Chicken. Mr. Udo made sure we ate well, though, and he was always the perfect host, taking us out to dinner—he still does that, and I still make sure we leave time for it when Santana goes to Japan. On our last visit there he presented Cindy with the most beautiful, mind-blowing kimono decorated with all this embroidery, which made her just melt—it was fun watching my wife turn into a six-year-old!

Japan has always been the best place to get the newest electronics, especially stereos. The Japanese had Beta-format videos when those first came out and compact discs and DATs when no one else had them. That first time we were in Tokyo, we discovered Akihabara, the district where all the electronics stores were set up, and that’s when I found out that Armando, with all his supreme confidence, was also a supreme bargainer.

He was amazing to shop with and watch. Armando had a routine in which he would go into a store and pick up a tape player or something, put it back down like it smelled bad, go away, and come back to it as if he felt sorry for it. Then he’d say to the salesman, “Remember me? My name Armando Peraza. Here with Santana. This…
thing
… special price for me? How much?” The salesman would be smart enough to know what to say. “It’s three hundred and ninety-five dollars. But for you, three hundred and fifty dollars. And maybe a good deal on some headphones.” Armando would say, “Hmm. That’s not too bad. Write that down for me.”

Often I could tell that this was the first time anyone had asked the salesman to do that. So the man would write down his offer, and immediately Armando would go across the street to another store, where he’d been just ten minutes before. “Hey, remember me? Armando Peraza from Santana? Look at this—same thing you have here. He wants three hundred and fifty dollars. What can
you do for me?” So he would get the price down to three hundred and twenty dollars. “That’s the best you do? Because everyone in Santana is looking for this thing, too—I bring them all here to you. Just write the price down for me—I show them.” You can guess what would happen next. Armando would go back to the other store and walk away with something like a 40 percent discount. Then the two salesmen would phone each other to talk about that crazy Cuban!

Armando wasn’t that way just with electronics—he loved nice coats, and he was a shoe addict, too. It was fun to watch Armando at work—I learned a lot.

In Tokyo, Mr. Udo had us play a whole week at the Budokan, a beautiful arena that had been built for judo competitions. The Beatles had been there in 1966, and it became another jewel in the rock touring world, one of those places every group had to play—and record, if they were lucky. Our shows were taped for TV broadcast and packed every night. I thought maybe it was time for the first live Santana album to come out—and so did Mr. Udo. So we also recorded our concerts in Osaka in another beautiful theater called Koseinenkin Hall. It was such an amazing experience: the love and respect from the audiences, the support from Mr. Udo, the level on which we were playing. When we left Japan to play Australia and New Zealand, I knew we had recorded some of the best music we had ever performed.

We did the tour of the Far East and Australia on a plane we rented—an old propeller plane that Chepito nicknamed the Flying Turtle because all our trips seemed to take forever—I remember that going from Hong Kong to Perth felt like a twenty-four-hour flight. But at the time it didn’t matter, because we were so high on the adventure of it. We’d finish playing a great show and be buzzing, then we’d get on the plane and I’d close my eyes and wake up in a new country I’d never seen before—Indonesia, Malaysia, Australia. I was also really high because the press was complimentary, even though they might have been disappointed at not having
heard the original Santana band and the kind of concerts we were doing back then.