Carlos Santana interview with The Times Nov 2005: Many hippie returns

From thetimes.co.uk by Robert Sandall The Sunday Times, 6 November 2005

He played at Woodstock while out of his brain on LSD. But at 58, Carlos Santana isn’t just a 1960s relic: stars like Beyoncé and Dido have made him a legend all over again

BUT ONE notable outpost of the mad idealism of the 1960s counterculture can still be found here. In the suburb of San Rafael in Marin County, on the other side of the Golden Gate bridge, lives a musician for whom time appears to have stopped somewhere between the “summer of love”, when he got his first break playing the Panhandle in 1967, and the Woodstock festival, at which he and his band performed, to devastating effect, two years later. Carlos Santana says amazing, time-warped things, and really believes them. He describes himself to me as “an American Indian reincarnated as a rainbow warrior, who still believes in peace, light, love and joy and rainbows”. He thinks that “If more people took mescaline, peyote and LSD, there wouldn’t be so many derelicts on the street wasting their lives away.” In 25 years’ time he reckons there will, somehow, be free water, electricity and education for everybody on the planet. “I really believe this,” he says, his only proviso being that we all, yes, you guessed, “love one another with dignity and respect and integrity”.

What makes this doubly amazing is that Santana is not some 58-year-old acid-addled relic that time forgot. Measured in terms of album sales, he is the most successful rock musician of recent years, bar none. His name will, for most people, for ever be associated with his early hits, particularly the tracks with which he established the Latin-rock sound: ‘Soul Sacrifice’, ‘Oye Como Va’, and ‘Black Magic Woman’. After these, little was heard of Santana for the last quarter of the 20th century until, out of nowhere, he came blasting back with his 1999 album, Supernatural. This sold around 25m copies and blanketed the world, going “multi-platinum” in 27 countries. Critics have pointed out that Supernatural and its two sequels, Shaman and the latest, All That I Am, are Santana albums mainly in name. They were dreamt up and co-produced by one of the big beasts of the American record business, Clive Davis, and comprise mostly duets, with Carlos soloing away on guitar alongside a partner who is typically a younger, sexier singer, such as Mary J Blige, Dido or Michelle Branch. In other words, they’re a bit of a mutton-dressed-as-lamb marketing ploy.

Critics, however, don’t get to make much of an impression in Carlos’s world. “I’m still playing the blues,” he says, cheerfully. “I’m just putting it in context. I’m not so closed-minded now. I embrace and understand how other musicians shine their light and touch people. I didn’t see that before.” He compares the audiences at his concerts today to those of the circus troupe Cirque du Soleil. “There are children, parents, grandparents, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me, Santana, it’s to do with the music that brings a cohesive oneness within the family. That turns me on. Since Supernatural I’ve changed my life as a person.”

But he has not sold out on his hippie principles. He is no jive-talking longhair who spouts about “universal brotherhood” and “sharing” all the way to the bank. He has lived in the same comfortably sized house — the only one he owns — for the past 30 years. For most of those, he and his wife, Deborah, have run a small charity, the Milagro Foundation, out of an office near their home. Much of its funds derive from Santana’s royalties: 25 cents from every album sale go automatically to Milagro. Anybody unhappy with this arrangement can apply for a refund.

This year, Milagro has helped the families of firemen killed in 9/11 and victims of the Asian tsunami, but its most munificent gesture so far came at the end of the world tour Santana undertook in support of Supernatural. All the profits from the most lucrative gigs of his career, totalling $2.5m, net of expenses and tax, he donated to Desmond Tutu to help tackle South Africa’s Aids epidemic. “That was one of the three highlights of my life,” he says. The other two he nominates are “being with my wife, Deborah, and playing with Miles Davis”. You might have expected that such a remarkable act of generosity — one of the largest sums ever given away by a rock star — would have guaranteed him a presence at this year’s Live 8 concerts. But Carlos doesn’t hang with the rock celebocracy, he isn’t part of Geldof’s gang, and no invitation was forthcoming. What a terrible oversight, I say. “No, that’s not terrible, man,” he shoots back. “I’m a maverick. I’m on my own path.”

In fact, Santana has always been something of a misfit. His most recent public display of unbelonging came at the Academy Awards earlier this year, where he performed a duet with Antonio Banderas of a song from the movie The Motorcycle Diaries. The televised sight of Carlos sporting a Che Guevara T-shirt (and how 1960s is that?) created a furore comparable to the moment when Janet Jackson flashed a nipple at the Super Bowl. The big difference was that Santana wasn’t trying to outrage middle America for publicity purposes. He simply hadn’t twigged that Guevara is no longer discounted as a poster-boy rebel, harmlessly adored by dopey students. These days, Che is viewed as a communist terrorist, a Castro honcho who tortured people.

“I didn’t know he did that in Cuba, man. I only know the guy who lost his life for the poor people of South America. I apologised to those Cubans in Miami after they said I needed to educate myself about how Che tortured Christians.” He sounds suddenly narked. “But you could say Jesus was responsible for the killing of millions of American Indians, because that was done in His name. When do you do the Christian thing and forgive and move on? The American Indians have just about got over losing their land, so when are those guys gonna get over Castro taking their casinos? I’m not just that nice little Mexican who plays guitar and keeps his mouth shut: I’m gonna tell you what you need to know, man. That’s the Che Guevara in me.”

Carlos and his five brothers and sisters grew up in a tiny village in northern Mexico, Autlan de Navarro, where the streets were unpaved and chickens ran riot. He remembers the place looking “like a Sierra Madre movie”. The Santanas were poor “but not ignorant, dirty poor. We had a sense of dignity and duty”. Carlos was enthralled by his father, who scratched a living playing the violin in a local band. “He was a supremely charismatic guy. He could get your eyes like a snake charmer. When he played he would suck you into his world, like a shaman. I wanted to be able to do that.”

When he was eight, Mrs Santana moved the family to the border town of Tijuana, to be nearer Cary Grant and the other Hollywood stars she loved. Not long after his 16th birthday, Carlos took off for San Francisco, where he worked as a dishwasher in a restaurant. By now he was obsessed with blues guitar and soon got caught up in what he calls “the consciousness revolution” that exploded in the Bay Area soon after he got there. “My university was the Fillmore West,” he says proudly, alluding to San Fran’s premier hippie venue, run by the promoter Bill Graham, the first man to spot his talent. “I graduated with high honours. I don’t regard music as background jazz. I play to awaken you to your own potential.” He recalls the first time he pulled off his father’s trick — mesmerising an audience with the sound of his instrument — at a free concert at the Panhandle. The Santana Blues Band, outsiders on the predominantly white, middle-class Haight-Ashbury scene, were for some reason performing a version of the Mary Poppins tune Chim Chim Cheree. “I closed my eyes to play a solo and when I opened them, there was Jerry Garcia smiling and going, ‘Yeah,’ like, approving…”

Santana were the last big band from the Bay Area to sign a recording contract. Within months they had bagged a slot at Woodstock, thanks to Carlos’s friend Bill Graham, who agreed to help out the festival’s promoters on condition that they let this Hispanic guitarist and his group — now known collectively as Santana — play low down on the bill.

The performance that was to make Santana into a household name internationally nearly ended in drug-induced disaster. When they arrived on site in upstate New York, Carlos was given LSD by Jerry Garcia. He thought he had timed the dose right, but then the schedule changed, and before he knew it he was on stage, out of his skull, in front of half a million people. “I was in the amoeba state, when you can’t make a sentence and everything is like liquefied colours. All I remember was how the neck of my guitar wouldn’t keep still. It was like a snake.” The anguished expressions of a curly-haired, moustachioed Carlos — later beamed around the world via the Woodstock movie — were him “trying to keep this snake from dancing all over the place. I was thinking, ‘Please, God, keep me in tune and on time…'”

Woodstock was the making of Santana: by 1970 they were selling as many albums as the Beatles. But the fame, drugs and girls that success brought didn’t agree with space cowboy Carlos. Much as he liked his acid trips, cocaine — the hard drug rocketing in popularity among the early-1970s rock fraternity — was not his thing. “And I was never into free sex.” Carlos’s main ally in the band, the drummer Michael Shrieve, has recalled how it was most nights back in the hotel after a show. While the rest of the band improvised orgies in the hot tub, “girls would come into Carlos and my room and then leave, bored, because we were looking for something else”. Santana says now that he felt “blind-sided by the scale of the success. I needed a sanctuary from all that craziness”.

He found it in three ways. He married Deborah, the mixed-race daughter of a jazz musician, and a formidable lady who was having no truck with rock-star self-indulgence. “When we met I was driving this big Excalibur car that was something Hitler would have been proud of. She just grabbed the keys and looked at it like it was a dirty diaper. Then she said, ‘Now you’ve got me, you don’t need this any more.'” As well as running their household (three children, now grown up), Deborah keeps a beady eye on the Santana/Milagro office, where this interview is taking place. Stern messages from her about smoking and other unacceptable behaviour are prominently displayed on the noticeboard.

Shortly after their marriage, Carlos became a follower of an Indian mystic much in vogue in California at the time, Sri Chinmoy. “That was almost like joining West Point. I shaved my hair, stopped eating red meat, abstained from sex as much as possible.” Between 1972 and 1981 he called himself Devadip, meaning “the eye, the lamp and the light of God”, until he tired of writing cheques in exchange for spiritual instructions. “It’s easy to be the Pope, man. Everybody does everything for you. Let me see you deal with the traffic jams and the bills, everyday life.” He doesn’t need “Jesus or whoever” to help him through now. Spirituality, he says, is about sharing. “Ice cream, tacos, hamburgers, sex. They’re all better when you share them.”

The other change he initiated in the mid-1970s was a shift of direction that many fans, and friends like Bill Graham, saw as career suicide. He digressed from the successful Latin-rock formula into jazz. “I thought I was following John Coltrane. I wanted to understand how you could play one note and it could sound like the Pacific Ocean or another galaxy. How you could play a few notes and hear children, birds, bombs dropping in Vietnam, riots. Coltrane could do that better than anybody. It was the universe playing him.”

The public took the hint and, despite periodic efforts to revive a commercial sound in the studio, Santana vanished from the charts for 25 years. Carlos calls this period “suspended animation” but says that his band carried on doing good business on the live circuit: “Out of 10 concerts, seven would sell out.” More interestingly, he says he didn’t really mind not being so successful for all those years, and the way he puts it, I believe him. “Somebody once said that ‘success and failure are two impostors’, and I don’t hang around with impostors. I saw Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison all die because none of them knew when to get off the stage. They were trying to keep the same high 24 hours a day. That’s why I am not a prisoner of this Santana thing, man. I know when to let that guy go.”

It’s time for him to leave the promotional stage and return home to Deborah, for lunch. I can’t resist asking him, finally, when he last took LSD. “Hopefully tomorrow!” he says, laughing, and then recalls a moment that is classic Carlos. “The last time was in 1987 at Niagara Falls at night. The sound of millions of gallons of water raining down was the same sound as the millions of prayers I heard when I stood at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. I swear to you it was exactly the same.” To clinch his point, he adds: “The one thing I know, man, is sound.”