Carlos Santana: The Epic Life of Carlos Santana (2000)

From rollingstone.com March 2000

A tale of angels, devils, gurus, Tijuana whorehouses, buried secrets and redemption after thirty years of rock & roll

His meditation spot is in front of the fireplace. On Carlos Santana‘s property in San Rafael, California, about twenty minutes north of San Francisco, there are two buildings. The house closer to the water is where the family lives: Santana, his wife, Deborah, and their three children. The other house, a little higher up the hill, he calls the church. “Here’s where I hang out with Jimi and Miles and whoever, and play and meditate,” he explains. The rest of the family likes to be in bed by ten, but Santana is a night person, so he’ll come up here until two or three in the morning. A card with the word Metatron spelled out in intricately painted picture letters lies on the floor next to the fireplace. Metatron is an angel. Santana has been in regular contact with him since 1994. Carlos will sit here facing the wall, the candles lit. He has a yellow legal pad at one side, ready for the communications that will come. “It’s kind of like a fax machine,” he says. The largest candle, whose half-molten remnants are placed centrally, is in a charred tin that bears the logo of its previous, less spiritual use: Mermaid Butter Cookies.

We take the armchairs in the middle of the room. On the table between us sit an empty Seven-Up can, a cigar and some peanuts. He pulls from his pocket a sheet of yellow paper on which he made notes last night, in preparation for this interview. “If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment,” he reads. “There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.” I can see that there are other things written on the paper, but he chooses not to say them aloud.

We talk of angels and the suchlike. There are few conversations with him that don’t lead to a discussion of angels, or of the spiritual radio through which music comes. Santana has been increasingly engaged by angels since the day in 1988 when he picked up a book on the subject at the Milwaukee airport. “It’s an enormous peace, the few times I have felt the presence in the room,” he says. “I feel lit up. I’m not Carlos anymore, I’m not bound to DNA anymore. It’s beyond sex, it’s beyond anything that this world could give you a buzz. It makes me feel like Jesus embraced me and I’m bathed in light.”

I am, by nature, probably more cynical than most, but all I can tell you is that when he talks about this stuff, it doesn’t seem kooky or unhinged or even that spacey. Likewise, in all the time I spend with Carlos Santana, I see no signs that he is unaware of life’s mundane realities. Rob Thomas – who sings “Smooth,” the Number One hit that has propelled Santana’s commercial rebirth – describes the experience of spending time with Santana accurately: “I don’t know any other way of saying it, but I always just felt a little bit better after being with Carlos.”

Nor does he proselytize. His attitude is: Now, in the wake of the success of his latest album, the 7 million-selling Supernatural, the world is interested in hearing him talk, and he is going to talk about the things he finds important. “What are you going to say?” he scoffs. “‘There’s no business like show business’?” Not in his case. “I don’t care, man, about what anybody thinks about my reality,” he says, “My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There’s an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o’clock in the morning, everything’s really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: Write this down. It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert.”

He tells me more about Metatron. “Metatron is the architect of physical life. Because of him, we can French-kiss, we can hug, we can get a hot dog, wiggle our toe.” He sees Metatron in his dreams and meditations. He looks a bit like Santa Claus – “white beard, and kind of this jolly fellow.” Metatron, who has been mentioned in mystical disciplines through the ages, also appears as the eye inside the triangle.

Santana credits Metatron with alerting him to the recent changes in his life. In the mid-Nineties, he met some people in a spiritual bookstore near his home, and they invited him to their afternoon meditations in Santa Cruz. The last time he was there, Metatron, delivered some important messages. “You will be inside the radio frequency,” Metatron told him, “for the purpose of connecting the molecules with the light.” Carlos Santana understood. He would make a new album and be on the radio again. And he would connect the molecules with the light: He would connect an audience with some of the spiritual information he now had. Metatron offered a further instruction: “Be patient, gracious and grateful,” Santana was told, and he resolved to do just that.

When he is here in his church and he is not meditating, often he is playing the guitar. Sometimes he’ll scrutinize records by his heroes – people such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Ray Vaughan. (Today, Miles Davis bootlegs are scattered over the floor.) “There’s so much to learn on each person alone,” he says. “You really study. How do you get this note to sound like a baby crying in the middle of a nuclear bomb? First you imitate, like a parakeet, then you enter in.” Whenever he finds something special onstage, it is not just a happy accident. “The fingers remember,” he says. “People say, ‘You hit a note last night’ . . . ” – and he throws a hand around the room – “It started here.”

And now, casually, he picks up a guitar, flicks on the amplifier. “Sometimes words get in the way,” he says. “But when you go . . . ” – he plays some beautiful high, fluid notes – “Palestinian, Hebrew or Aborigine or Mexican or Chinese, this speaks really clearly.”

He puts down the guitar and shows me round. There is a photo of his wife taken in the Seventies in Philadelphia, holding a guitar the wrong way. (Her father, Saunders King, he notes, was one of the blues-guitar pioneers, played with Billie Holiday and, he says, “was B.B. King‘s inspiration.”) There is a prized picture of John Coltrane looking stern, thoughtful and dignified. Davis and Coltrane bootlegs burned onto CDs. A shelf of books about jazz. Photographs of his parents from around the time Carlos was born. On the second floor, I point, impressed, to the Spider-Man pinball machine. “Yeah, that’s from the early Eighties,” he says, dismissively. “I didn’t have any kids, so I am like a kid myself.” Spider-Man was always his favorite comic as a teenager. He could relate to Peter Parker: “He had teenage problems, teenage doubts and insecurities.”

It is at that moment he rushes downstairs, without explanation, leaving me there. He has seen one of his daughters coming up the path with the cable guy.

Santana’s business affairs are run from offices in an industrial park a few minutes’ drive from his house. Today, as he walks into the reception area (where his last Rolling Stone cover story is framed – from 1976, nearly half his life ago), six or seven staff are waiting for him.

“We’re Number One!” they chant. “We’re Number One! We’re Num–”

He accepts their congratulations, though he also looks a little embarrassed by the attention. Their jubilation marks the return of Santana’s Supernatural album to Number One on the charts in the wake of the announcement of his eleven Grammy nominations – just one more triumph in a career renaissance that is becoming bigger than the original career.

In the rehearsal room out back, he puts down his Santana fanny pack and lights up some incense, an Indian brand he was introduced to in 1972 by Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s widow. He wears sneakers with no socks and a shirt printed with golden angels of various sizes playing guitars. The brim of his brown hat is folded up at the front. As we settle in, he mentions that he recently started working out twice a week with his wife. It makes him less cranky. “As soon as I saw the CD enter the chart,” he explains, “I knew the old energy I had wasn’t going to make it.”

On this earth, Carlos Santana principally credits two people for what has happened. First, his wife, Deborah. “Spiritually, emotionally, financially, she’s a guiding light,” he says. In 1994 she restructured his business life: “I’d probably be a hobo if it wasn’t for her.” Second is Arista Records president Clive Davis, who signed him when other record companies were letting it be known they felt he was simply too old; “I’m not into kissing anybody’s behind, it’s just, I need to honor these people who stuck their neck out over and over for me.”

He had not made a new studio album since Milagro in 1992. He had been holding back on recording, trying to get out of his contract. And it was hard. “I felt I had a masterpiece of joy in my belly,” he says, explaining that he felt pregnant with a new record, just as he imagines Marvin Gaye felt before making What’s Going On or Bob Marley did before Exodus. His wife thought Clive Davis was the man to help him. It was Davis who first signed the Santana band to Columbia Records in 1968. In his meditations, Santana would think of Davis: “I chanted for Mr. Clive Davis twenty-seven times each day. I’d picture him coming out of a car or a limousine, and a cab passing by, playing my music. So wherever he goes, I want him to be connected with my music.”

They met in a Los Angeles hotel. As Santana tells it, Davis got really close to his face and said, “What does Carlos Santana want to do?”

“I’d like to reconnect the molecules with the light,” Carlos told him. (“And he wasn’t fazed,” Santana recalls. “He could have said, ‘Uh-oh, here’s a far-out hippie . . . . Whatever.’”)

“How do you propose to do that?” Davis asked, and Carlos talked about how Miles Davis played pop tunes in his later years. About how two things about Santana never go out of style – the spiritual and the sensual. About how Clive Davis was the man who could find him songs. (There was nothing new about Santana thriving on this kind of input. Their early manager, the late promoter Bill Graham, persuaded them to record their first hit, a Willie Bobo salsa song called “Evil Ways.” “This will get you airplay,” he informed them, and he was right.)

Santana wanted to reclaim a younger audience. “I’m not at all into becoming a twilight-zone jukebox prisoner of the Sixties,” he says. Davis got working. “I blueprinted the architectural plan for the album,” Davis says. “And that was having half the album be vintage Santana, in the spirit of ‘Oye Como Va,’ which he wanted for himself, and the other half I proposed was those organic collaborations that would not be a compromise of his integrity but also be calculated to serve him at radio, in the spirit of what he had said. I would look for what turned out to be the list of Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean and Everlast and Dave Matthews, etc.”

Most of the guest stars came with their own compositions – the one true songwriting collaboration was with Dave Matthews. He and Santana went into the studio together to write and record; “Love of My Life” was one of the results (another song may turn up on the next Dave Matthews album). The song had a peculiar genesis. When his father died, two years ago, Carlos found he couldn’t listen to music. “I was numb,” he says. And though he hadn’t played the radio in years, one day, while picking his son up from school, he turned on the car stereo. The first sound he heard was the melody from Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.3. That was the music, somewhat disguised, he began playing to Matthews. “He gave me some lyrics, a couple of lines,” Matthews says, “and I didn’t know what to do. I think he wrote it about his father; I wrote it about my lover.”

Eric Clapton, a friend from the Seventies, actually sidestepped Santana’s invitation – “I was so wrapped up in my own world, trying to put together the treatment center in Antigua” – until he saw Santana performing with Lauryn Hill at last year’s Grammys. “I was, ‘What am I thinking?’ I quickly sent him a message, ‘I’m sorry I’ve been such a dick – is there still room for me?’” Clapton didn’t have a song, so they just jammed. “And he put together a song out of it,” Clapton says. “We started playing,” Santana remembers, “and it was literally two Apaches with some sage at the Grand Canyon calling out the spirits.” (“Ah, that’s hilarious,” says Clapton. “That’s Carlos.”)

One of the last songs to appear was one of the most crucial: “Smooth.” Santana’s A&R man at Arista, Pete Ganbarg, sent the backing track to Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20, looking for different lyrics and a different melody. “I had no intention of singing it at all,” Thomas says. He thought Santana could use a vocalist like George Michael, but Santana heard Thomas’ vocal on the demo and insisted he do it himself.

“When people hear ‘Smooth,’ it’s boogie,” Santana says. “It’s an invitation to have a good time. Like Little Richard used to say: It’s Friday night, I got a little bit of money, I did my homework, and it’s OK to rub closely with Sally or Sue; she gave me that look like it’s OK. I brushed my teeth, and I got deodorant. I got her going.

“It’s cool. Certain songs – ‘Smooth,’ ‘Oye Como Va,’ ‘Guantanamera,’ ‘La Bamba,’ the ‘Macarena,’ ‘Louie Louie’ – that’s what these songs are for.”

In his mind, Supernatural’s guest stars were not random pairings. Rob Thomas remembers what Carlos told him: “That the record was put together just so – through sound, it could change people’s molecular structure. And he sat me down and explained to me that that, as a musician, is what we do. You can play one note and change the way people feel. You don’t want to try to ever quote Carlos, because it never comes out as eloquent as it does when he said it, and it sounds hokey coming from me, of all people, I guess, but it gave me my new purpose on why I do what I do. It just put perspective on everything.”

We go out for lunch to a nice Italian restaurant in a local mall. Santana drives, playing a CD that fuses Miles Davis’ music with Gregorian chants and opera. Davis, whom Santana knew fairly well before his death and once, in 1986, played with (the musical highlight of his life, he says), sometimes visits him at night. On Santana’s fifty-second birthday, last July, Miles Davis visited for two hours. He was poking fun at a friend, cracking jokes. When Davis appears like this, he doesn’t acknowledge that he’s dead. “He just seems as cool as ever,” Santana says. He never doubts that it’s really Miles Davis, “I can smell him,” he explains. “Even on the other side there is smell. Like, when babies are born, there’s two smells – one is chicken soup, which is the flesh, and the other is lilacs, which is coming from the spiritual garden. The spirit has a lilac smell.”

A rationalist would say, I interject, that that’s your unconscious communing with your memory of a man you used to know. How do you know it’s not?

“Well, I know when I’m hungry,” he says. “I know when I’m cold. I know when I’m horny.” An answer that, like many of his answers on such topics, is smarter and more subtle than it might at first appear.

At lunch he talks about being invited to play for the pope two years ago. “When I read the letter,” he recalls, “the main thing that happened to me was . . . ” He shakes his head. “I’m a visionary guy, so I see visions, and I started seeing Zapata and Geronimo and Che Guevara and Pancho Villa and Miles Davis and all these revolutionary guys saying, ‘You’re not going to do this, are you?’ And I was like, ‘Hey, hey, back off, man. I just got this letter – let me finish reading it.’” But he knew they were right. He has also turned down President Clinton. “I’ve got nothing against Christianity per se,” he says. “I just have a problem playing for politicians and the pope.”

After lunch, driving to his house, Santana waits and waits at an intersection for a dawdling car to pass. “This century, thank you,” he mutters. He is only human.

José Santana, father of seven, was a mariachi violinist. “My father was a musician,” his middle child, Carlos, says. “And my first memory of him was watching him playing music and watching what it did to people – he was the darling of our town. I wanted that – that charisma that he had.” They lived in a small, remote Mexican town called Autlán de Navarro. There, the young Carlos liked to make paper boats and watch them sail down the street when it rained.

He remembers riding on the back of his father’s bicycle to church and to his father’s performances. “All of my sisters and brothers were special,” he says. “But for some reason, I know in my heart – I hope I don’t come out like I’m slighting my sisters and brothers for it – it’s just, I felt I was the apple of his eye. I felt like I could get away with more. I don’t know if it’s because I was lighter in skin, like my mom, or he knew I was going to be a musician. He was less tolerant with everyone else, but he would give me just a little bit more clutch not to grind the gears, you know. And I needed it.” His father was away a lot, playing music, and Carlos would miss him. He would imagine hugging him and remember the way he smelled: a combination of flesh and cologne, and a little bit of sweat. Sometimes he’d pick up his father’s belt and smell his distant father on that. (“It is true,” he now reflects. “Your dad becomes your first God.”) He loved his father’s stories. The best ones were about tigers, and when he told those his eyes would bulge and you could feel the tiger’s breath, and the suspense would build and build and build. “He knew how to create tension,” Carlos says. “It just reminds me of where I learned to build a guitar solo. Got to tell a story, man.”

There are other lessons, too, from the rhythms and tempos of childhood. He realized in the early Seventies that a certain kind of solo came from the sound of his mother scolding him. “‘Didn’t-I-tell-you-not-to-duh-duh-duh,’” he counts out. “‘And-I’m-going-to-spank-you!’ You can cuss or you can pray with the guitar.”

Before all of this, as a child Carlos had to find his instrument. He learned violin, but, he says, “I hated the way it smelled, the way it sounded and the way it looked – three strikes.” But the guitar and him, it was love.

The Santana family moved to Tijuana when Carlos was seven, because that was where the money was. “It was a shock,” he recalls, “to come to a border town.” His father sent the boys out selling Chiclets and spearmint gum on the street. They’d shine shoes. Later, Carlos would play Mexican folk songs for fifty cents a song. He knew that just across the border there was another world. He started learning English by watching TV through other people’s fences. His first phrase, borrowed from Roy Rogers, was “Stick ’em up.”

For a time he played music with his father. They always seemed to end up in the sleaziest parts of town. “No floor, just dirt,” he describes. “Tables black from cigarettes because they didn’t have no ashtrays. And a cop with his hat backward like rappers do, putting his hand on the prostitutes’ privates in front of me, sticking his hand right in her, and she can’t do anything because otherwise he’ll arrest her. My stomach just got really, really sick, man, at the smell, the whole thing.” One night, Carlos said he didn’t want to be there and he didn’t want to play that music. It was the first time he had talked back to his father. His father told him he was just like his mother and that he should go. He was fourteen.

He heard about a gig on Revolution Street, playing from four in the afternoon until six in the morning, one hour on, then one hour off, while the strippers stripped. Nine dollars a week, which seemed like a lot. “The first week,” he recalls, “you walk around with a hard-on the whole time, like a flagpole. After a while it wears off. It’s just watching an assembly job. After a while you learn the most sensual thing is innocence.” He worked there for two or three years, and gave the money to his mother.

We are driving around San Francisco, between Haight Ashbury and the sea, when I ask Carlos Santana about the Tijuana strip-joint years.

Had you had much practical experience at that point?

Yeah. You play spin the bottle and sneak in a couple of kisses here and there, and you smell somebody’s hair after they take a shower. If you’re asking me, “Was I a virgin?” no, I wasn’t a virgin no more by that time.

How old were you when you weren’t?

I don’t remember. I don’t remember because it’s a subject I don’t want to get into. It’s a whole other department store that I don’t want to . . . 

Fair enough. But by the time you were fourteen, you weren’t a virgin?

No, I wasn’t a virgin.

For your friends, that was normal?

I can’t speak for them. For me, I thought it was normal. My mom or my father, they were very naive, and so I was thrown into the streets in a certain way . . . . Let’s say my first encounter with sexuality was not a pleasant one or romantic or tender or wonderful. It was more like a shock kind of thing: gross, disgusting shock.

But that didn’t put you off?

No. Women never turned me off. I mean, the smell of men, it makes me sick. I’m not into men at all. That’s one thing I could never be in this lifetime is attracted to male bodies.

[Puzzled] Um . . . why do you mention that now? Were they attracted to you?

Who?

Men.

No. Never.

I just didn’t understand why you said that then.

Just, women have a different kind of alluring smell.

He drives on, up the hill, away from the sea.

In the early Sixties, the Santana family moved north to San Francisco. The teenage Carlos didn’t want to go. He was working in the strip joint, earning money in a grown-up world, and the notion of going to junior high school – of becoming a kid all over again – did not appeal: “I’m hanging around a bunch of older guys and prostitutes, eat when I want, sleep when I want . . . to hang out with a bunch of little kids talking about bullshit stuff? No way.”

The first time he came to America with his family, he sulked and was angry all the time. He wouldn’t eat. He was even angrier when he discovered that his mother had used the money he’d saved to pay for the immigration papers and for work on his sister’s molars. Even so, he knew there was still $300 left, and he asked her not to touch that: It was for his guitar. But when he eventually spotted a Stratocaster and asked for the money, she confessed: She’spent it on rent. They fell out for a long time after that. “Basically from my ignorance,” he says.

Eventually, after two weeks of his sulking, she gave him twenty dollars and told him he could go back to Tijuana. He got his old job back and was there another year before his mother and older brother came to get him. “They actually kidnapped me,” he say. “My brother grabbed me – my legs were dangling. Put me in a car.”

This time he stayed. Went to junior high. Learned English. But he was right in thinking he wouldn’t fit in easily. “The stuff they were talking about was silly-ass corny shit,” he says. “I’m hanging around a bunch of old guys talking about Ray Charles and blues, and they’re talking about playing hooky and stealing cars and doing some pimple Beach Boy stuff that didn’t make any sense to me.”

Driving round San Francisco, honoring my request to see the sights of his early years in America, he turns off Mission Street in the Mexican part of town and drives a couple of blocks. “This is the house,” he says, pointing. He slows down but never quite stops, as though he wants to make clear that he’s happy to show me his past but he has no intention of lingering there.

In that house, seven kids shared two bedrooms. That’s where he finally got a guitar, a Gibson Les Paul Junior, and where his brother Tony’s friend sat on it and broke it in two.

As we drive away, he tells me about the time when Tony came home from a party and needed to sleep before work the next morning. Carlos, his four sisters, his younger brother and his mother were watching a Dracula movie on TV. There were twenty minutes left when his brother turned the TV off. A scuffle broke out, and in the end Carlos hit his brother hard, hard enough to make his eye swell up. That night the brothers slept, as always, in the same bed, and Carlos lay right on the edge, trying not to breathe, waiting for retaliation.

But his brother did nothing. And when Carlos came home from school the next day, there was a new white Gibson Les Paul – the very guitar Carlos would play at Woodstock – and an amplifier. His brother Tony was sitting there, a steak over his eye. “I broke down, man,” Carlos remembers. Tony told him, “You gonna pay for it – I just paid the down payment.”

We pass Mission High School. “I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there,” he says. “I wasn’t much of a school guy.” In class, he’d think about playing with B.B. King and daydream of being onstage at the Fillmore. That was all he saw ahead of him. Already he had started heading over to Haight Ashbury with his guitar, where he’d find a harmonica player, put a hat down and get some money. A bit of Donovan. Cannonball Adderley’s “Work Song.” The Beatles‘ “And I Love Her.” “That romantic thing,” he says. “Next thing you know, we’d go and get some wine and pizza. That’s what gave me confidence that I could make a living with this.”

We drive by San Francisco General Hospital. Again, Santana slows but never stops. He points up to a window. “Right up there,” he says. “The top floor.”

He spent three months in that room. It was the spring of 1967. He was a nineteen-year-old Mexican guitar player whose group, the Santana Blues Band, was beginning to get going: As he remembers it the group had just opened for the Who, playing blues and its souped-up versions of songs like Mary Poppins‘ “Chim Chim Cheree,” and had been invited to do the same for Steve Miller and Howlin’ Wolf. Then . . . it all stopped. Perhaps for good. At school, he tested positive for tuberculosis.

In the hospital they treated him with penicillin, and after he developed an allergy, they shot all this streptomycin in his butt. “I couldn’t sit for about a month,” he recalls. He graduated while he was in the hospital. A tutor would visit him. Aside from that, he says, “there was nothing to do but do pottery and watch TV and just watch people die.”

Friends would visit and deliver inappropriate party favors. “To pass the time, they’d bring me a couple of joints and LSD,” Carlos says. “And I’m taking LSD like a dummy, watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Glenn Ford; the next thing I know, I’m inside the bed with my sheets over my head, going, ‘Oh, shit, why did I do this, man?’” But in a way this trip was also his salvation. It made him realize that this was no place for a young man with plans. “Everybody there was dying of tuberculosis and cancer,” he says. “I said, ‘Man, this is hell. I’ve got to get out of here.’” He called a friend and asked him to bring some clothes. They stopped the elevator between floors so that he could change, and he fled. Everyone was looking for him, a potential tuberculosis carrier on the loose: the police, the board of health, his mother. But they didn’t find him. He hid out at a friend’s house; he felt fine, he was free, and he had music to play.

Up the top of a rickety wooden ladder, Carlos Santana and I crawl into his church attic. This is where he keeps the T-shirts he wore onstage until recently: almost all brightly colored and almost all with a picture of at least one of his heroes on them. He has a couple of artists whom he keeps busy with commissions like this (they also do his album artwork). He picks out one T-shirt as an example. “I’ll be, ‘I want Jimi Hendrix with angels and flying saucers,’” he says.

Before we climb down, he shows me other prints he’s commissioned. He’d like to open a version of the Gap or Banana Republic called River of Colors. His own clothes are becoming a little quieter, though; for the Grammys, he’s considering black. “I’m kind of weaning myself out of the colors and dressing more straight now,” he says. “I’m fifty-two – for ten years I wore mostly these colors, and people used to say, ‘Oh, Santana always wears dead people on him.’” He shrugs. “They’re not dead. They’re more alive than most people you see on MTV today, you know.”

After he left home, Carlos barely saw his parents for two years, though they came to see him opening for Steppenwolf and the Staple Singers at the Fillmore. His mother told him that she felt so bad for the hippies, because they were so poor, they were sharing cigarettes. He didn’t explain.

He insists that he never wanted Santana in the band’s name; he was the guitarist, and his was simply the name that sounded best. Later – when they began incorporating Latin rhythms and chants before the release of their first album – they dropped the “Blues Band.” That first album, Santana, was an immediate hit, but it was after appearance low on the bill at Woodstock, and particularly the inclusion of “Soul Sacrifice” in the film and on the soundtrack, that it really exploded. Onstage, he was on psychedelics he’d taken in the mistaken belief that the band wouldn’t be on for hours. “When I see it on TV, it’s like another guy playing,” he says. “He was trying to get in there, dealing with the electric snake. Instead of a guitar neck, it was playing with an electric snake.”

He took a lot of psychedelics in those days: LSD, mescaline, peyote, ayahuasca. He considered these sacred sacraments at the time: “I felt it would make it more real and honest. It’s a spiritual thing, you know. Maybe my wife won’t be too fond of me sharing these stories because of our children; I don’t recommend it to anybody and everybody, yet for me I feel it did wonders. It made me aware of splendor and rapture.”

Ultimately he decided he’d seen enough. The last time he did anything like that was when he took some mushrooms on a tour day off at Niagara Falls in 1987. He says he can imagine doing it again when his children are grown up. Take something, go down to the beach. “Just to see if it has that innocence feeling,” he says.

In the early days, he didn’t enjoy success. “I would turn on the radio and Abraxas would be on every station, just about,” he says. “And I found myself more and more depressed, and I’d find myself crying. The band was deteriorating, and my friends who I grew up with were total strangers to me. We started sounding like crap. It became all those thing that happen to most bands. It was basically too much too soon: excess, big egos, myself included.”

One of your band members said back then that your head “got about as big as Humpty Dumpty.” Was that fair?

Yeah. Mine and everybody else’s. You’re going from a Mission District kid with nothing to having everything – you’re Number One, buy your mom a house. Too much drugs, everything to excess. You start feeling really lonely. And for me, it was the beginning of my journey.

What made it come to some kind of crisis for you?

Drugs. Certain people in the band were into heroin and cocaine, and I used to have cold sweats, nightmares, and I would wake up screaming: The place would be packed, 60,000 people, and the band is in no condition to play because so-and-so are fucked up; Bill Graham is screaming at me, “You’re nothing, you’re unprofessional, you’re a piece of shit.” That was my recurring nightmare.

It never actually happened?

No. But it was happening every other night in my dreams.

By 1973, he had decided that the band with his name was also his band, and he took over. Though he has worked with some original members since that time (none currently), there has been bad feeling over the years about his coup, and the parallel implication that it was him all along. “I don’t want to short-change the original guys in the band,” he says. “For a long time I felt, in their minds, that I was riding on a wave that they started. But it’s been thirty years, so hopefully this time they will be appeased that I still want to honor their contribution to the band and how we grew up together.”

By 1973 he had changed in other ways, too.

As we leave the church, I notice a guitar strap neatly laid out in a cabinet. On it, spelled out in large letters, is the word Devadip. That was the name Carlos Santana took from 1972 to 1981, when he was a disciple of an Eastern guru called Sri Chinmoy.

He had met Deborah in early 1972, at a Tower of Power concert at the San Rafael Civic Center. The friend he was with noticed the way Carlos looked at Deborah across the room. “I feel sorry for your ass,” the friend told him. “It’s all over for you, man. That’s the one.”

She was twenty-two. From her side of the room, she just noticed “this skinny guy standing there with long hair and his guitar”; she had to ask who he was. But she felt the connection too. He knew for sure the first time she came to his house. “She smelled like something I wanted to wake up next to the rest of my life,” he says. “This is a person who is very soft outside, very feminine, very sweet, but inside tougher than steel. It’s crazy, man, because the same thing I used to run away from home, because my mom’s strong character, that’s the first thing that I found. I need a woman who’s got that General Patton four-star conviction.”

“Carlos is a person who comes from his heart all the time, so when I met him he was tremendously soft,” she recalls. “He’s gotten a lot more assertive over the years.”

By the time Santana met her, he was already looking for some spiritual guidance. He had been fasting and praying, and, inspired by the example of John Coltrane, he had started to read about Eastern mysticism and philosophy. Then, when he met guitarist John McLaughlin, McLaughlin had a photo of Sri Chinmoy, and the guru seemed to have an enormous peace about him. The thing that really got Carlos was one of Chinmoy’s statements: “When the power of love replaces the love of power.” That made plenty of sense to him.

Chinmoy gave him the name Devadip, which means “the eye, the lamp of the light of God.” Deborah, who had joined with him, became Urmila. They signed up to a stern regimen. “Cut your hair, no drugs, total vegetarian,” he summarizes. “It was like a West Point approach to spirituality. Five o’clock in the morning mediating, every day.” Long-distance running was an enthusiasm of Chinmoy’s, and Deborah ran marathons. She also ran a devotional vegetarian resturant in San Francisco. “We used to do ridiculous things,” she says. “There was always this competition in how much we could do to prove our devotion – who could sleep the least and still function, because you were working so hard, how many miles could you run. I once ran a forty-seven-mile race. It wasn’t enough just to run a marathon.”

Carlos avoided most of the roadwork: “I was, ‘This shit is not for me – I don’t care how enlightening it is.’” Instead, he would play Chinmoy’s songs at meditations and performances that, to his increasing frustration, were often announced as though they were Santana performances.

The few interviews Carlos gave in those years are crammed with reverence toward Chinmoy. “Guru has graduated from the many Harvards of consciousness and sits at the seat of God. I’m still in kindergarten,” said Carlos. Likewise: “Without a guru I serve only my own vanity, but with him I can be of service to you and everybody. I am the strings, but he is the musician.”

Eventually, says Carlos, “everything about him turned into vinegar – what used to be honey turned into vinegar.” One turning point was when he heard Chinmoy pontificate meanly about Billie Jean King because she’d talked of a lesbian relationship. “And a part of me was, ‘What the fuck is all this – this guy’s supposed to be spiritual after all these years; mind your own spiritual business and leave her alone.’” Carlos emphasizes that he took much that was good from these years with Chinmoy – “It was a good learning experience about spirituality” – but the end was awkward.

“He was pretty vindictive for a while,” Santana says. “He told all my friends not to call me ever again, because I was to drown in the dark sea of ignorance for leaving him.”

It was not too long afterward that he and Deborah had their first child. “I look upon the time when we left as such a sweet time as a couple,” Deborah says. “I remember ordering my first chicken sandwich in Spain. It was so delicious.” Now, she took the spiritual lead, going to a church in Santa Cruz. “I became a born-again Christian to appease her, so to speak,” Santana says. She did not subsequently follow him in the way of the angles, but she doesn’t doubt his faith: “It blesses him. He’s had some wonderful spiritual experiences that he’s shared with me that I know are real.”

“She has her own feet on the ground,” he says. “I’m the space cadet, you know. She gets uncomfortable sometimes. She doesn’t want people to think I’ve lost it, I’m out of my gourd.”

His wife has laid down some firm family rules. Since their third child, Angelica, was born ten years ago, she has insisted that time working is followed by sacrosanct time off, in which he takes a full role in family life. “When he comes home,” Deborah says, “and I don’t want to hear about Carlos Santana.’ I want him to hear about the children, I want him to take over some of the responsibility. I’ll warn him: ‘Remember, when you come home, you are a father. There is recycling to be done, you’re going to be driving the car pool.’ Because that’s my reality.”

In the Santana boardroom, Carlos looks at some new Jimi Hendrix live CDs sent to him by Hendrix’s family and studies a letter from Bryant Gumbel, inviting him to a charity golf tournament. He has a contretemps of sorts with some of his staff when he complains that he has no time off before his imminent promotional trip to Europe. He has told me, “This is a new dimension for me. I’ve been pretty much lowkey, invisible. This is new territory for me, so I’m taking deep breaths.” Now he asks those around him for his schedule to be cleared. “It’s a little too much,” he tells them. “I’m flattered, but I need to see my mother.”

He has come into the office to film a public-service announcement encouraging people to become teachers. Afterward he chats with the makeup artist, telling her why he had to move away from the Mission District after he became successful: “People were knocking on my door at three in the morning – ‘Won’t you do a benefit for me?’ And it just became really hard to exist.” But that first year out of town was tough. “You’re used to hearing people stealing tires,” he explains, “and all you hear is crickets.”

This is the day of our drive around San Francisco: the house in the Mission District, the school, the hospital. We never get to the site of the recently demolished Tic Tocs, a restaurant where he worked from 1963 to 1967. “The Grateful Dead pulled over in limousines to get some hamburgers,” he says. “And I’m in my apron, washing dishes and busing tables, and I said, ‘I’m going to do that.’ Something in me just said, ‘If they can do this, I can do this.’” There and then, he walked out of the job for good.

In Haight Ashbury he shops unsuccessfully for a new hat, and we eat at a Cuban restaurant. Then we drive back to San Rafael, back to the rehearsal room for more incense and conversation.

“A lot of the credit goes to the women,” he says. “I don’t mind giving the credit to my mom and my wife and Lauryn Hill and my sisters and my daughters, because women are really supremely important for musicians. We all learn from how they walk, how they talk. It’s not politically correct today, but in the old days, in the Sixties, if somebody was an incredible musician, you’d say, ‘He’s a bitch,’ and if he was an incredible musician but he has a lot of class and style, then you’d say, ‘Oh, he’s a lady.’”

He moves on to the link between angels and devils. One of his more recent realizations has been that you need both: “The energy of devils and angels is the same energy; it’s how you use it. It’s fuel. There is a saying: If you scare all your devils away, the angels will go away with them. You know, the halo and the horns are the same things. I mean, it’s OK to be spiritually horny – that’s what creative genius is really about. Geniuses don’t have time to think how it’s going to be received. Real bona fide geniuses of this century – Miles Davis, Picasso – they don’t have time to think whether people like it or not, is it morally right, will God like it? If you think, it’s like poking a hole in an egg before it hatches.”

Have you sometimes thought too much in your career?

Yeah, it goes in and out. That has been my whole journey – to learn to get a lobotomy.

So is “Supernatural” an album made on the lobotomy principle?

Yes. My instructions before I started this CD were: Be patient, gracious and grateful. My instructions from Metatron. There’s an invisible radio that Jimi Hendrix and Coltrane tuned in to, and when you go there you start channeling this other music.

He tells me that one of his motivations has been the river of colors you see during the Olympic closing ceremonies, something that first hit him in 1976. “I thought, ‘If we can make music to make people feel like that most of the time, then, as Miles Davis would say, “Then you’re a motherfucker.” You’re great.’”

So, if I’m summarizing you accurately, what you need to be is a bitch motherfucker lady with a lobotomy?

Yeah. In the physical sense, yeah, Don’t think so much before you play. Just let it flow . . . . That’s the best kind of music, when you go beyond gravity and time and thinking. Not many mortals do it. I am just trying to get there. Every night I’m trying to get there, man.

Around the same time as his spiritual awakening and his takeover of the band, the music Carlos Santana wanted to make changed. Albums like 1972’s Caravanserai were largely instrumental and ditched the good-time Latin rock for more intense, jazz-infused explorations. Sales dwindled. “You know, I’m fifty-two years old, I’ve gone through all the valleys,” he now says. “Caravanserai, John McLaughlin, Alice Coltrane . . . I made a lot of so-called carreer suicides.” The way he says this, you know that the records and collaborations he mentions are ones of which he is proud. But there were other moves that weren’t so successful on any level. In the Eighties, like many artists of his generation, he made some uninspired records that tried to engage with the production values of the time. It was a difficult period. “In the middle of the Eighties, I was very much thinking like a victim,” he says. “I was angry, bitter, disillusioned.” His enthusiasm was also sapped by the deaths of Miles Davis, Bill Graham and Stevie Ray Vaughan. “For a while I felt lost in a creative way,” he says.

By the mid-Nineties, he had other problems. “My wife said, ‘I’m really worried and concerned, because you only have anger and more anger,’” he explains. “‘I think you need to see a therapist to see what’s going on with you, if you want to stay married with me.’”

“Carlos has had a very interesting life, and he’s always had a secret life . . . . Well, he did until ’95,” says Deborah. “And it was, ‘You go take care of all of your issues once and for all, or you’re on your own.’” She remembers that “he was pretty upset – he didn’t want me to leave.”

The first time I ask him about this therapy, he tells me that the therapist asked him why he felt the world woke up every morning just to fuck with him. And when he thought about how absurd and self-obsessed that was, a weight lifted off him. “This album is the fruit of it,” he says. “I have more of a balance now with the divine and the human, and I can dance with all of it now. That’s probably why Supernatural is so powerful, because now it’s not in conflict.”

I would not have mentioned his therapy again, except that it comes up tangentially when we are discussing his time in Tijuana. I had asked him about something he once said: that in Tijuana he learned how to play guitar so that women’s nipples would go hard.

“That’s a real thing,” he says. “I used to play the violin in church, and playing the music a certain way, people just fold their hands and go wherever they go; when you work in a strip joint, you play music in a certain way, and it’s like watching a black panther when it’s in heat. I used to be really uncomfortable with the sensual thing, because I wanted to be always on the side of the angels. I’m trying now, very graciously, to balance and validate angels and devils with the same reverence, because they both work for God, I happen to believe. It’s OK for your nipples to be hard and for you to be foaming at the mouth and you’re really aroused and, OK, what do you do with this energy? Do you defile a woman or make her feel heavenly with it? I’m not afraid anymore of those perimeters.”

When did you stop being afraid?

’95. In ’95 I understood more, because of therapy that I had, on what happened to me in my childhood with the sensual thing. It allowed me to put things in a place where I made peace with my past. And I don’t blame anyone or anything, or life or devils or child molestation . . . . I don’t blame anything for what happened to me anymore. I don’t have that anger, that bitterness, for what happened to me. I’m able to just say, “Look, to live in the moment now and not to be carrying a cadaver with all the stink and everything is definitely more . . . glorious.”

Had you ever done therapy before 1995?

No.

Was it a surprise to you?

It was a surprise to me what I heard myself saying, and how that person . . . if there was cancer, she took about eighty percent of it out. Ten percent I’m working with still. And I have no doubt that the reason Supernatural is what it is is it’s a manifestation of what had happened to me. If I hadn’t seen her, I don’t think I would have been able to be in a position to make an album like this.

What did she think was blocking you, or troubling you?

Guilt. Shame. Judgment. Fear.

And where did she think those things were coming from?

There was a combination of Catholic upbringing and child molestation.

Neighter of us says anything for a moment. I’m not quite sure if he is saying what I think he is saying. Afterward, listening back, I realize how much his frustration at nearly, but not quite, saying something has been prowling through our conversations. “And those are two really powerful, cancerous things,” he adds.

Even now, I could just move on and it might float away, unspecified. But, of course, I’ll ask.

What do you mean by child molestation?

I was molested. At a very young age. I was seduced by toys, and I was seduced by being brought to America with all kinds of gifts and stuff. And, being a child, I blocked that other part, because there was the other goodies of somebody taking you to Sears and Roebuck.

Carlos Santana takes a breath. “Because I’m so deep off into it, I can’t turn back what I’m saying, but nobody even knows about this stuff. It’s never come out.”

He tells me about it. For about two years, from 1957 to 1959, when he was between ten and twelve years old, Carlos Santana was brought over the border “almost every other day” by this American guy from Burlington, Vermont, who dressed like a cowboy. He’d buy Carlos presents – food, clothes, toys – and abuse him. It ended only when Carlos fell in love with a girl. The man got jealous when he caught Carlos looking at her through a window, and he slapped him. “And I woke up,” Carlos remembers. “I looked at him for the first time for who he was: a very sick person.” The last time he saw that man, a couple of years later, he was with another young guy.

“You want to get angry with yourself for not knowing better,” he says. “The mind has a very insidious way of making you feel guilty: You’re the guilty party, shame on you, you’re the one who brought this on yourself.”

For years he put what had happened out of his head. “All the times I was angry with the orginal band or with my wife, till ’95, it was all of that,” he says. “I have learned to convert all this energy now into something productive and creative. At the time, I’m sure I made hell for the orginal guys in the band, and the first ladies I was with, because I didn’t have a way to express it and crystallize it and heal it. It’s just fuel now. You use it to do something creative with.”

At this point, Carlos Santana seems as surprised as I am – I by the fact of what he has just shared, he by the fact that he has shared it. He begins to ask questions, and it is hard to judge how rhetorical they are. “What’s the point of me going here with this?” he asks. “Do I want a sense of closure? A sense of redemption?” I interject occasionally, but mostly he just talks. “A part of me says,” he continues, “there’s a lot of people out there who have this kind of pain and anguish, and if you show your face and say, ‘I am healed. I can be healed.’ Whether you are a woman or man who has been raped or molested, you don’t have to ruin the rest of your life and ruin your family’s life by blaming yourself, feeling dirty, ashamed. Burn all those things, man. Put all those things in a letter, burn it, take the ashes, plant some roses and put the ashes on it, and watch it grow. And let it go . . . . If it can happen to me, and God has blessed me a hundred times, I hope that he will bless you a thousand times. It has given me a chance to grow roses without the thorns.”

How would you describe the change in yourself? More calm? More confident? More whole?

Everything that you just said. But now I am comfortable in my own skin. When I first met Dave Matthews, I was so attracted to him, even though I’m not gay, because he is so comfortable in his own skin. I was never comfortable in my own skin. I was always crawling out of my skin. Now I am more content with Carlos, and I am more proud of Santana . . . . Supernatural is putting me in a situation where I’m a voice now: “What are you saying, Carlos? What are you saying besides being a groovy pop star?” I never see myself in these terms anyway. I’m saying that I am a multidimensional spirit, and I am not what happened to me.

That night, after our conversation, he stays up late, scared and worried, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. “I haven’t felt like this since high school, when you have to meet the bully,” he will tell me. The next morning, though it is supposed to be his day off, he sends a message saying he needs to talk. He wants reassurance about how I will write about what he has told me; I wonder whether he is really asking me whether I think he should have shared it at all.

“I am not looking for pity, and I am not looking for sensationalism. I’m looking for: My triumph is your triumph,” he says. “I feel God wants me to pay him back. He has given me so much, and to pay back is to heal.”

We are talking in the archive room at the Santana offices, where I am spending the day doing research. He finds a photograph he wants me to see. It is a photograph of a young boy in a Tijuana school, smiling sweetly at the camera, holding open his science textbook. “This is the guy I want to honor,” he says. “Because this is all before that happened. This is that guy. That is Carlos before all that went down.”

What do you think when you look at that?

Sometimes it makes me sad, because I want to go back to feeling all the purity and innocence. So somebody throws black ink at you? You’re still pure. There’s a part of you that can never be a corrupt.

We speak again the next week, in London. “I’d no idea I’d start telling this,” he reiterates. “I can only pray that me coming out with this, people who have gone the road that I have taken, it will be invitation for them to heal and be whole. It’s the healing process so that other people – molesters and victims – can read it and go, ‘Damn, I don’t have to be this anymore.’ On a spiritual term, connecting the molecules with the light. On a physical meat-and-potatoes reality, rescuing people from the valley of false perception. My job is done – I don’t need to win one award, because my victory is won.”

For me,” says Carlos Santana insistently, “if there is a theme to this, it is a masterpiece of joy. Carlos created through all of these journeys and trials and tribulation, guilt-shame-pain-horror-whatever, he created a masterpiece of joy.” That is how he sees his story.

“Metatron wants something from me, and I know exactly what it is,” he says. “When you’re soldering, you need this silver thing.” He means the solder itself, which melts and joins one object to another. “That’s what I am,” he says. “The people who listen to the music are connected to a higher form of themselves. That’s why I get a lot of joy from this CD, because it’s a personal invitation from me to people: Remember your divinity.”

It’s tempting to step back a little more. To speculate on the possible links between traumatic childhood experiences and a lifetime searching for spiritual fulfillment, a passion for healing the world’s evil ways. To wonder if the angels really hover, and what it would mean for all of this if you simply couldn’t believe they did. But this is Carlos Santana’s story – his own strange masterpiece of joy – and I believe he presents it his way without cheating, connivance or duplicity. There are times to speak, and there are times to listen.

On the afternoon when Metatron announced to Carlos Santana much of what would subsequently happen to him, there was another message. He was looking at the light of a candle, and the candle got really big. He was meditating with a group of people, and the group went into this beautiful hall with many rooms where an old Asian man came up to Carlos Santana. He had a question.

“What is it that you’re looking for with so much intensity?” the old Asian man asked him.

It was a good question.

“I’m looking for the perfect melody,” Carlos told him.

Everything went quiet.

“Child,” the old man said, “don’t you know that you are that already?”

As he tells me this, Carlos Santana smiles at me, solidly patient, firmly gracious and determinedly grateful. “And I know it sounds really crazy to a lot of people, but it’s OK, because I’m not afraid of what people think . . . . My reality is my reality. I’m not going to deny it. I’m not going to deny it all. I stand in front of people. Behold my reality.”

Carlos Santana: Light Of The Supreme – Carlos Santana’s Devadip Trilogy

From allaboutjazz.com

To the casual music fan in 1971 Carlos Santana appeared as if he was on top of the world. His band’s appearance at Woodstock two short years earlier, plus their cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Black Magic Woman” had catapulted him to stardom. Yet, behind the scenes, his band was splintering. Different musical and personal objectives, plus the increased usage of hard drugs by some band members were getting in the way. By the end of the year, bassist David Brown, percussionist Michael Carabello, and organist Greg Rollie had departed.

Santana had always been marketed by their record company as a radio-friendly singles band, but in reality their leader was an incessant musical explorer. At the same time his band was in disarray, he was getting deeper into more esoteric and non-mainstream music, specifically the jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Wayne Shorter, as well as music from other countries. Against the advice of Columbia Records president Clive Davis and manager Bill Graham, he and Santana drummer Michael Shrieve, along with a cast of new musicians including the not-yet-fully-departed Rollie on some tracks, recorded the decidedly uncommercial Caravanserai(Columbia, 1972) (which Graham at the time, playing on the title, said should have been called “Career Suicide”).

It was the launching album for an extended period of exploration, musical and spiritual, which included collaborations with guitarist John McLaughlin and the widow of John Coltrane, harpist Alice Coltrane. The Coltane team-up would be the first in a loose trilogy where Carlos Santana was credited as “Devadip,” a Sanskrit word for “the light and lantern of the supreme,” or “the lamp, light and eye of God.” Why Devadip? Santana had been introduced by McLaughlin to the teachings of Sri Chinmoy and he and his wife Deborah became disciples of the Indian guru, who bestowed the name on him. Chinmoy’s teachings advocated meditation and abstinence from drugs and alcohol. As well, he felt that creating music was a way of expressing thankfulness to the Divine, a philosophy which resonated particularly strongly with Santana.

The music on the three Devadip albums was made primarily with jazz musicians and released under the name “Devadip Carlos Santana,” to clearly signify that these works were separate from the Santana band. It varies widely from the first, issued in 1974, to the last, which came out in 1980. What ties the three together is an adherence to a jazz aesthetic and sound, as well as a lack of concern for commercial acceptance. These works are some of the purist expressions of the guitarist’s musical vision, works he refers to in his autobiography, The Universal Tone, as “his most personal.”

In the summer of ’74 Columbia issued a Santana Greatest Hits album and the high sales gave him a little leeway to continue the less commercial direction the band had taken. Concurrently, Illuminations came about when Alice Coltrane asked to add arrangements to a collection of new, more spiritual compositions Santana had been putting together in the down time after the Caravanserai tour. Living in Queens, NY at the time at Chinmoy’s meditation center, he was attempting to re-evaluate where he was in his professional life and bring it more in line with the new direction his personal life had taken. Coltrane, though not a follower of Chinmoy, was on a similar path and had taken the name Turiya (short for Turiyasangitananda, translated as “the highest song of God”) hence her credit as “Turiya Alice Coltrane” on the album.

Illuminations is quite a bold album, marking an abrupt departure from rock tropes and Latin rhythms and including a string orchestra on some tracks. The majority of the music was co-written with organist Tom Coster, who also played in the Santana band for much of 70’s, with an additional track (“Bliss: the Eternal Now”) credited solely to Alice Coltrane. The songs are the most overtly devotional sounding in Santana’s career, always seeming to aim for mystic heights. At times bordering on New Age, it’s much too adventurous to be pigeonholed as such and just when it seems to get too syrupy or cosmic, it veers into free jazz, as on “Angel of Sunlight.” That track is the centerpiece of the album, at close to 15 minutes in length, and features a second half akin to some of Pharoah Sanders’ atonal excursions. Coltrane puts her harp aside and coaxes unearthly sounds from a Wurlitzer as Santana’s guitar and Jack DeJohnette’s drums, Dave Holland’s bass, and the saxophone of Jules Broussard swirl around chaotically.

The album is all about drama and grandiosity, from the opening short monologue by Chinmoy, to the string orchestra, to the overblown cover art. One thing that remains from Santana’s earlier works is his signature guitar sound, emphasising long sustained notes and soulful string bends. That wasn’t enough to save the album in the eyes of the public, however, and it created further distance between the musician and those wanting another “Black Magic Woman” or “Oye Como Va.”

A five year gap ensued until the next Devadip album. It was not a gap of silence, by any means, with several new configurations of the Santana group and stabs at regaining commercial acceptance with songs such as “Dance Sister Dance” and a cover of The Zombies’ “She’s Not There.” Through this time he remained a student of Chinmoy and after the band’s Inner Secrets (Columbia, 1978), there was the rapid succession of what would be the last two Devadip albums, in 1979 and 1980.

With the first of the two, Oneness: Silver Dreams—Golden Reality, Carlos Santana’s name didn’t appear on the cover at all, with just the word Devadip appearing above the title. Even though this was essentially his first solo record, it marked the work as a definite remove from any “Santana sound,” perhaps to avoid the inevitable comparisons which had plagued Illuminations. Ironically, though, Oneness is much more accessible than Illuminations and more likely to appeal to fans of the band. Gone are the lengthy and often meandering tracks of the first Devadip album, and Santana explores many avenues of expression, including live songs, acoustic songs, R&B, rock, and muscular fusion influenced by Weather Report’s Mysterious Traveller. As such, the album doesn’t work well as a unified statement, but does have a bit of something for everyone within its grooves, including three songs with vocals. One of these, a psychedelic soul ballad, “Silver Dreams and Golden Smiles,” is sung by Santana’s then father-in-law, musician Saunders King.

Two other highlights include “Transformation Day,” based on classical composer Alan Hovhaness’ “Mysterious Mountain,” and “Song for Devadip” (written by fellow Chinmoy follower drummer Narada Michael Walden), which closes the album with a joyful, breezy showcase for some of Santana’s most melodic playing.

The Swing of Delight is the most straightforward and “non-mystical” of the three Devadip albums. A clean-cut Santana (as pictured on the back cover) ventures through nine jazz fusion tracks, with detours into the percussion-heavy Latin excursion “La Llave” and an unlikely but affecting cover of “Love Theme from Spartacus” from the 1960 film.

Originally a double album, Swing hangs together remarkably well and still sounds fresh today. This is in no small part due to the exemplary accompanying musicians -essentially Miles Davis’ late 60’s backing band -including Herbie Hancock (keyboards), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums), and Wayne Shorter (saxophone). Shorter’s playing, along with that of Premik Russell Tubbs, positions Swing as one of the few albums where we hear Santana in such a sax-heavy setting. Though a painting by Chinmoy adorns the album cover of The Swing of Delight, and a handful of songs on the album are credited to him, by the next year Santana had become disillusioned with the guru and some of his teachings and left his circle, thereby making Swing the last to be credited to Devadip.

Unfortunately, all three of the albums are now relative obscurities in Santana’s discography, despite being some of his most interesting works. When originally released, they barely appeared on the general public’s radar, and critical reviews varied considerably. For example, notoriously cranky critic Robert Christgau hated them, whereas jazz publications like Downbeat were more charitable.

What can’t be argued is that the Devadip albums touch on a myriad of moods and styles, and are important steps in the evolution of Carlos Santana the artist. They show him in a light where he was less concerned with selling records and pleasing record companies, and guided solely by his muse.

Carlos Santana Oneness: Silver Dreams Golden Reality (1979)

From jazzmusicarchives.com

Well it was about five years since Carlos had had time for another solo adventure away from his group, and I can assure you that the album was definitely worth the wait. With an extended cast of musicians, this album would provide some of the grandeur that had become a bit lost with the group’s latest releases. This full-blown JR/F album is simply yet another highlight in a decade that was obviously very kind to Carlos. As the title indicates, there appear to have two distinct

Sonically speaking, if you can imagine Caravanserai or Borboletta with the Amigos timbre, you may have an idea of what this album sounds like. Most of the short tracks segue so naturally into one another that by the time you notice a full stop, you are already on track 7 and had such a good time that it appears all too short. But the album is hardly flawless: there are some completely out-of-place tracks such as that precise seventh track, the sub-title track, Silver Dreams. The following track, a triumphant Victory is much less intrusive, but astonishes by the recording level and the first side of the album finishes on the inhabitual (for Santana) piano-solo guru’s Song

The second side start on the orgasmic real title track, which will bring shivers down your spine and its awesome majestic ambiances. Du grand art, Monsieur!! The next funky sung jazz-rock does not stand much a chance (although it is quite worthy) after such an excellent track, but still manages to catch your attention. Golden Dawn is another one of those sublime instrumentals that only Carlos can write. The album is nearing its end with the self-explanatory Morning Sun, then Carlos’ wife reciting a short Chinmoy text and a very blistering track dedicated to himself and I can tell you that rarely has such well deserved tooting his own horn has been justified.

An awesome album very close to his bests such as Illuminations, LDS and Caravanserain or Borboletta, this album is warmly recommended. If it was not for one small glitch (the unlucky seven), this album would be yet another five stars album.

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.” 

Carlos Santana Reflects On 50 Years Of Making Music And His New Africa Speaks (2019)

From stereogum.com June 2019

Carlos Santana has a lot to celebrate in 2019. It’s the 50th anniversary of his band’s self-titled debut album, which was released on August 30, 1969. Two weeks before that, the band gave a legendary performance at the Woodstock festival in upstate New York. They’d been a popular live act in San Francisco, but their explosive Woodstock set blew them up into a national act. 2019 is also the 20th anniversary of Santana’s most commercially successful album (and one of the most popular albums of all time), 1999’s Supernatural, which we’ll talk about next week. It would be easy for him to settle into a retro groove, playing the hits while Boomers are still willing to pay for super deluxe ticket packages.

Instead, he’s releasing one of the most surprising albums of his career. Africa Speaks, out 6/7, features his current live band — rhythm guitarist Tommy Anthony, keyboardist David Mathews, bassist Benny Reitveld, percussionist Karl Perazzo, and drummer Cindy Blackman Santana — and two very special guests. The primary vocalist is Buika, a Spanish singer whose hoarse, crying style combines flamenco, soul, and African music, while British singer Laura Mvula backs her up on several tracks. Buika sings mostly in Spanish, with one or two songs in English and one in the Nigerian language of Yoruba. The album was recorded with Rick Rubin in a rush of inspiration; the band cranked out almost 50 songs in 10 days.

The music on Africa Speaks is raw and powerful, and makes absolutely no concessions to radio (the first single, “Los Invisibles,” was the song in Yoruba). The intricate Latin-funk fusion of his mid-’70s albums has been replaced by churning hard rock that’s recorded hot and mixed tightly, the instruments packed so closely together that it almost sounds like it’s in mono at certain points. Cindy Blackman Santana’s high-impact drumming drives the whole thing, combined with Perazzo’s percussion and Reitveld’s deep bass lines, and Mathews’ organ and synths, create a swirling sound that’s steeped in the blues, but deeply infused with an African rock sound that could have come straight out of 1970s Nigeria. And Santana himself is playing some of the dirtiest guitar of his career, unleashing one snarling outburst after another.

I talked to Santana by phone from his home in Las Vegas (he’s currently in the middle of a multi-year residency at the Mandalay Bay casino, which he’ll be interrupting for a summer US tour) about Africa Speaks, his 1970s fusion work — including Illuminations, a 1974 collaboration with Alice Coltrane, and the Japanese live album Lotus, which was released that same year — and more.

STEREOGUM: The first single from Africa Speaks is “Los Invisibles,” which is sung in Yoruba. That’s a pretty ballsy move. What made you decide to do that?

SANTANA: I’ve been wanting to do this since we recorded the first album, with [Babatunde Olatunji’s] “Jingo.” I’ve been playing African music since I can remember, even when I was living in Tijuana. When I lived in Tijuana, I learned about musica tropical — at that time there was no salsa, it was just music from the Caribbean — and every time I heard, whether it was Ben E. King or Jackie Wilson or anybody, especially blues musicians, I always felt that it was African music. It’s American-African, because the root and the template and the resonance, it comes from Yoruba. Everything goes to Yoruba — danzon, mambo, cha-cha-cha, cumbia, anything you can think of that has rhythm or a beat, from Brazil to everywhere, it really comes from Africa. So I wanted to do an album that was purely African music, and it wasn’t until we found Cindy Blackman Santana, my wife, to play drums on it, and then this band and Buika and Laura Mvula and Rick Rubin… I had to wait for the grand design to inwardly put all the pieces together, and now we did it.

STEREOGUM: Your guitar sound on this album is really dirty — you almost sound like Billy Gibbons at times. Are you using different gear, a new pedal, anything like that?

SANTANA: I basically used a wah-wah a lot, and I played through a Strat a lot, a street-mutt Frankenstein kind of Strat that I found in this store in Chicago. Yes, my guitar sounds like claws and teeth, and at first it concerned me, because I didn’t know if people were going to be put off, because it’s so trebly and piercing, but then I said, you know what? This is OK. It goes with the congas, it goes with Buika’s voice — leave it. I overdubbed maybe 10 percent, the rest happened when it happened.

STEREOGUM: Where did the idea to make a whole album with Buika come from?

SANTANA: I first got the idea from the Virgin Megastore in Paris. I was on the road, on tour with Mr. Wayne Shorter, and I would just raid all the African CDs. So I got the idea way back then to only honor this music like that, but it took a while. Buika, I discovered her at like three o’clock in the morning [and] as soon as I heard her voice, I woke up my wife, “Cindy, you gotta listen to this.” So we took her CD, put it in the car, we drove to Napa to spend the weekend, and the more I heard Buika, the more I knew I had to create with her. So when we were doing this thing, 49 songs with Rick [Rubin], he said, “You know, on Supernatural you had a bunch of guests — who do you want on this one?” I said, “I only want two women, Buika and Laura Mvula.”

STEREOGUM: So they flew in and worked with you live in the room?

SANTANA: Truth to tell, the first five days, we recorded all the songs and then we — the band, myself, and Cindy — we went to Australia and New Zealand, and Buika came into Shangri-La, Rick Rubin’s studio. When she heard the music, she held my hand way later and said, “Maestro, when I heard the music I heard everything I needed to do — the melodies, the lyrics, and everything. I have never done anything like this in my life. This music made me do it.” So I wasn’t in the room when she recorded all these things, but it just became so symbiotic. And then we came back and recorded some more songs, and she came back and did it again, and the third time we actually shook hands and looked eye to eye and I thanked her. With Laura Mvula, she came in and recorded, but I have yet to meet her or even shake hands with her. With Buika, it goes to show you that the spirit knows no distance. When you hear Buika’s voice and Laura’s voice and my voice, it’s all there, even though we didn’t do it at the same time.

STEREOGUM: Do you like singing? Because I know a lot of other guitar players, like Hendrix didn’t like his singing voice, and Robin Trower used to have someone else sing, and Robert Fripp has never sung…

SANTANA: I think once in a while, I like the sound of my voice because it has, like, an innocence, because you don’t know — that’s what innocence is, not knowing and being vulnerable. But many times I trust other singers to interpret what I’m trying to say better.

STEREOGUM: Did you and Buika collaborate on the lyrics, or did you leave it up to her?

SANTANA: I left it all up to Buika for the most part, and every second of every song — every melody, everything that she did, surprised me. I want to talk about something up ahead that I want to do. Here in Las Vegas where I live, they have conventions for everything, electronics, this and that, but there’s not one for shamans. I want to have a shaman convention, and I want to utilize this music, because this music, especially the last song [“Candomble Cumbele”] — this whole album is about ritual, divine ritual, whether it’s the Pope, or Christmas Eve, or the blood of Christ sacrificed for the sins of the world, that’s called voodoo, it’s a sacrifice, just like in Haiti and Africa. So to me this album, Africa Speaks, when people say, “If Africa Speaks, what is it saying to you, Carlos?” I say, “Africa is saying to me, bring hope and courage to the listener and give them encouragement.” Bring hope and courage to the listener. That’s what ritual is. Because you have the ritual of connecting your iPhone to the laptop, and when you do it you meet up. Ritual is when you meet up to absoluteness, the beyond, the non-tangible tangible. And for me this album, more than Abraxas or anything I’ve ever done, is true to the ritual of allowing your heart to be part of that flow. This was a flow that Rick and I and Buika and Cindy … it was outside of what we could think, and we just became instruments for this particular statement.

STEREOGUM: Your music has always had that quality. I mean, Lotus begins like a ritual, with gongs and keyboards — it’s not like a typical rock concert where you flip the switch and come out blazing.

SANTANA: Yeah, ’73 was part of that… what some friends of mine call “career suicide.” I’ve been accused of committing career suicide six or seven times, but for me it’s about learning. I want to stay that seven-year-old child that’s thirsty for adventure, and sometimes it’s gonna go to radio and sometimes it’s not. But the main thing is to be true to what your heart wants to do.

STEREOGUM: The expanded version of Lotus, from 2017, is amazing. Was that a project you initiated, or did Sony Japan tell you they had extra material in the vault?

SANTANA: It was all of the above. We thought they were gonna release all of it. I just feel really grateful, again — I learned so much from Doug Rauch and Michael Shrieve, Tom Costa, Richard Kermode, especially Armando Peraza, Chepito [Areas], and Leon Thomas. I mean, I have never heard anybody sing “Black Magic Woman” like Leon Thomas. That’s like a whole other level of maturity. I love Leon Thomas, man.

STEREOGUM: What are your memories of making the Illuminations album in 1974, and working with Alice Coltrane? Did you spend time at her spiritual center?

SANTANA: Yes, I spent a whole week at her house and we would wake up at 2:30 in the morning and meditate, and she would play the harp and then the piano and the Wurlitzer organ. I learned so much by being around her, especially the way she was writing for this symphonic thing. For me, that album — thanks for mentioning it — being around Alice Coltrane and Jack DeJohnette and Dave Holland and Armando Peraza, it made me feel like I was in the minor leagues with Abraxas, and now I’m in the big leagues because I’m with these musicians who I felt were equipped to swim in the Pacific Ocean. I’ve said this before: There’s the Pacific Ocean, there’s a big lake, there’s a swimming pool, and then there’s a bathtub. And I was moving between the bathtub and the swimming pool until I started hanging around with them, and I was like, “Wow. How do they do this work? How do they articulate with such facility and incredible skill?” So being around Alice Coltrane and John McLaughlin, and then of course Wayne [Shorter] and Herbie [Hancock], it really opened me up to improvisation in a whole different way than I’d ever known.

STEREOGUM: Your wife’s drumming on this album is fantastic. She does everything: rock, funk, jazz, blues, Latin rhythms — does she challenge you in different ways than your previous drummers did?

SANTANA: Yes, she does. Her mentors were Art Blakey and Tony Williams and Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones. When she played with Lenny Kravitz, I got the chance to see her and realized the power that she had just playing backbeats, because that band is not required to play with the complexity of jazz or African music so much. It was basically rock steady. Which is beautiful. I will always have deep gratitude to Lenny Kravitz for hiring Cindy, because that’s how I connected with her, and she challenges me because I ask her, “Where’s this? Where’s that?” I still approach music like I don’t know, because to be truthful a lot of times I don’t know about odd times, sevens or nines or fifteens or whatever. So she immediately tells me where the center of it is, and I ask her for counsel all the time about this or about that. The main heroes are Karl Perrazzo, Cindy, Tommy [Anthony], Benny Reitveld — they all played with Miles Davis or Prince or Sheila E., you know, so they got an education before they came to me and were able to deal with the frequency of a multitude of people.

STEREOGUM: You played with Tony Williams [on 1980’s The Swing Of Delight], and he’s one of her biggest heroes. Do the two of you ever head out into that Lifetime zone when you’re playing together?

SANTANA: Yes, we’ve started to do that more and more. Lately, I’ve been listening to one guitar player only — can you believe it? Sonny Sharrock. I cannot get enough of Sonny Sharrock. Oh my God, this guy, I wish he was here so we could tour together. I miss him terribly. Sonny Sharrock was right in between Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix.

STEREOGUM: When you’re playing, do you ever get so far out that you forget how you got there? And is there a phrase you can play that will pull you back in, or that tells the rest of the band, Hey, come get me?

SANTANA: Yes, it happens many, many times. I learned this from the hippies — you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, and sometimes it’s okay not to know anything, or everything. But I do trust the musicians in the band; they know how to look at me to say, “Play a melody.” When you play a melody, you bring it all back to ground zero, the heart center. There’s nothing like playing a melody, whether you’re Coltrane or Miles or whoever. Cause when you play a melody… you can get really far out and play a bunch of notes and this and that, but unless you play a melody, it’s just gibberish after a while. I listen to Billie Holiday, I listen to Marvin Gaye, because I need to be reminded that a melody brings it all back to the heart center. And that’s where it needs to be.

STEREOGUM: But you’re still adventurous that way onstage, even this far into your career?

SANTANA: Absolutely. It’s imperative to leave a space in the set where you go into the unknown, where nobody knows where I’m gonna go, including myself. We go that way and it could be something that Miles would do, or Weather Report would do, or nobody would do. Again, it’s a blessing to have the courage and the willingness to let the spirit play itself through you.

Carlos Santana Blues For Salvador (1987)

From progarchives.com

Review by Guillermo

 In mid 1989, I recorded in a videocassette from a T.V. videos programme the promotional video of the song called “Bella”. The videoclip, done in black and white, shows a very sensual young woman dancing to the song, alone and with his boyfriend, in the sand and in a room too. Carlos Santana appears briefly playing the guitar, also in the beach, and he and keyboard player Chester Thompson also appear playing the song in the studio. It is one of the best promotional videos I have seen, very well done. Of course, I also liked the song a lot, and all this led me to buy the “Blues for Salvador” album in the next year.

I don`t undestand why this album was released as a solo album from Carlos Santana, because it really is a mixture of apparently solo tracks with some alternate versions of songs previously released in some albums by the band called Santana. Anyway, it is a very good album, IMO.

The album starts with “Bailando / Aquatic Park”. The first part of this song is an instrumental piece full of percussion instruments plus Carlos`lead guitar. The second part has a singer, whose voice sounds more like from a Black singer. The song as a whole is very good.

The next song is the beautiful “Bella”. Keyboard player Chester Thompson (not to be confused with Genesis`tour drummer also called Chester Thompson) plays very good keyboard atmospheres, while Carlos plays a vey good guitar solo, playing melodies, with his guitar sounding very influenced by Jazz guitar styles. In fact, in the cover notes, Carlos explains that in this piece of music, dedicated to his daughter Stella, “is also an expression of my respect and admiration for these musicians:Wes Montgomery, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, T. Bone Walker and John McLaughlin”. The song is similar in parts to “Europa” and others by Santana, but the keyboards and the percussion instruments created very good musical atmospheres to support Carlos`very good guitar playing.

“I`m Gone” is a very `80s piece of pop music in style, with electronic drums and very good keyboards.

I think that the next song called “Trane” was dedicated to John Coltrane. It has Tony Williams playing energetic drums. Again, it also has very good playing by Carlos and Chester.

“Deeper, Dig Deeper”, a song also included in Santana`s “Freedom” album, also appears in this album in an alternate version. It is an instrumental piece of music with programmed drum machine, keyboards and Carlos playing a guitar solo.

“Mingus” is a brief instrumental pice of music, dedicated to Charlie Mingus, played with keyboards and guitar.

“Now That You Know” is an instrumental piece of music recorded live during Santana`s 1985 tour. It is really a Rock song improvised on stage, with Indian atmospheres created by the keyboards. It really shines how good is the band playing in concert.

“Hannibal”, in a different version from the one which appeared in Santana`s “Zebop” album, is a very good song, with some Brazilian music influences and a bit of Jazz-Rock jammimg at the end o fthe song. Carlos played acoustic and electric guitars. The song also has some lyrics maybe sung in Portuguese (I`m not sure of the language).

The album closes with a very good Blues instrumental song, called “Blues for Salvador”, played by Chester and Carlos. If I remember well, this song won a Grammy for the best instrumental performance on an album.

In conclusion, this is a very good album. The songs were mostly composed by Carlos and Chester, and again, I can`t understand why this album wasn`t released as part of the Santana band`s discography instead of being released as a solo album.

Carlos Santana/Mahavishnu John McLaughlin Love Devotion Surrender (1973)

From progrography.com

Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin had been moving in the same circles for several years, musically (both played with Buddy Miles) and spiritually (both followed the teaching of Sri Chinmoy), so the decision to record an album together wasn’t completely out of the blue. The decision to devote their combined forces to interpretations of the music of John Coltrane (“A Love Supreme,” “Naima”) and Pharoah Sanders (“Let Us Into The House of the Lord”), however, was unexpected. 

Love Devotion Surrender has earned its share of admirers over the years, and there’s no arguing that some of this material (e.g., “The Life Devine”) is stunning. Whether it’s also guilty of being esoteric and an excuse for endless guitar solos, well, yes, probably that too, but listening to two of the world’s greatest fusion guitarists play off one another is likely better than whatever you already had planned for the next forty minutes.

The album starts with Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” that swaps the opening horns with a stunning flourish of electric guitars before settling into the song’s familiar groove, anchored by Doug Rauch and punctuated by the confident organ work of Larry Young (currently a member of Tony Williams Lifetime). Much guitar fireworks ensue, with Santana in the left channel and McLaughlin on the right (I can’t speak to where they ended up on the quadrophonic mix). The lovely “Naima” (from Giant Steps) becomes a beautiful acoustic guitar duet, which will surprise no one who tuned in for McLaughlin’s last album, My Goal’s Beyond. The original “The Life Divine” is the real payoff for fusion fans: a McLaughlin original that gives the ad hoc band (an amalgam of Santana and Mahavishnu Orchestra) a chance to flex their muscles.

Side two is comprised mostly of the pair’s fifteen-minute version of “Let Us Into The House of the Lord,” popularized by Sanders but credited as an original arrangement by McLaughlin and Santana. The guitar solos from Santana and McLaughlin are breathtaking, though I’m not really sure how they reconcile the album’s theme of love, devotion and surrender with what on the surface seems like an electric-guitar ego trip. Maybe they should have called it Love, Devotion and Shut Up And Play Yer Guitar. The closing “Meditation” is a short acoustic number with Santana on acoustic guitar and McLaughlin on acoustic piano. It’s a soothing way to end a turbulent album, with both guitarists stepping away from their established personas for a moment.

Like I said, some people really enjoy this album, and the decision by MFSL to add this to their growing library of remasters suggests that better minds than mine have already beknighted it. I can tell you, for what it’s worth, that LDS isn’t an album I return to often, and I wonder if the large figures of Santana, McLaughlin and Coltrane might cast shadows that hide the flaws of such an enterprise (that is, transporting the music of John Coltrane into the realm of electric guitar fusion). Then again, I’m probably just a Grammarly upgrade away from being rendered completely irrelevant anyway, so never mind me and listen to what the machines tell you.

Carlos Santana Oneness: Silver Dreams Golden Reality (1979)

From amazon.com

Two things are hard to believe. One, that I’ve been a Santana fan for over 4 years and I’m just now learning about a solo album he released in late 1979 called Oneness: Silver Dreams Golden Reality, and two, that such a fantastic album came at the point in Santana’s career where he was beginning to place more emphasis on generic soul/pop and less on innovation concerning his latin rhythms and distinctive guitar solos. The timing of this release is bizarre to say the least.

It’s good though! The title song is the longest track here. Over 6 minutes long, and it’s a guitar jam. Not only that, but it strongly resembles that of “Flame Sky” from his Welcome album where he teamed with John McLaughlin. Unfortunately it doesn’t contain *nearly* the same level of intensity as that one did, but it’s still a highly memorable guitar jam. Worth hearing? Absolutely. He does a really good guitar trick around the 4 1/2 minute mark worth noting. “Life Is Just a Passing Parade” resembles another Welcome track with the funky intro before quickly turning into a soulful vocal melody-driven track with a wonderful keyboard and guitar jam at the end. This is actually another highlight because the funky rhythm and the instrumental variety is quite refreshing.

I’m not sure if “Song for Devadip” is considered a guitar jam or a guitar melody. This is because it basically consists of a melodic guitar solo looping for a few minutes. You can almost dance to it! “Silver Dreams and Golden Smiles” is a little on the cheesy side thanks to the lush vocal melody, and I believe I even detect an orchestration in the background. Eh, it’s alright but it’s almost hilarious the way it’s sung! It sounds like one of those traditional Christmas songs you’d be exposed to on Christmas Eve when all the radio stations switch over to 24 straight hours of Christmas music. Obviously it’s not a Christmas song, but the vocal melody is so corny you have no choice but to let out a little laugh. Like I said though, I can’t quite hate it.

“Transformation Day/Victory” begins with a really cool intro that I believe is a synthesizer before immediately switching into a boogie jam focusing around piano and Santana’s guitar work. Not quite as breathtaking as the intro but hey, it’s pretty good nonetheless. Actually on repeated listens, I notice the guitar and piano are actually alternating back and forth. It’s pretty unique and puts a radically new spin on the boogie rock formula. This song is really awesome after all. “Light Versus Darkness” is an onimous intro before the explosive arrival of “Jim Jeannie”, which consists of sparse drum fills and then an explosive guitar and synth jam not really any different from something the Mahavishnu Orchestra would have done from their Birds of Fire album. It’s highly enjoyable.

“Free as the Morning Sun” is another soulful ballad with richly performed latin piano work and delicate synths appearing in the background. This song is like a fitting farewell to the Santana of the 70’s as he walks into the sunset… and enters the dreaded pop years of the 80’s, haha. Well I like *some* of his 80’s work. “Winning” is an incredible pop song. Anyway, to continue the review, “Cry of the Wilderness” is a melodic guitar instrumental similar to “Song for Devalip”. A really good one too. It reminds me of… something I can’t quite figure out. “Guru’s Song” is a quiet, harmless and melodic guitar/piano instrumental that is *incredibly* beautiful if you ask me.

Overall, fans of Welcome and Borboletta absolutely must own this album. Why it slipped under the radar and has remained that way even to this very day doesn’t make sense to me. Oh well. You can fix that problem by listening to it.

Carlos Santana & John McLaighlin Love Devotion Surrender (1973)

From musicdirect.com

Two guitar giants. A collective band comprised of virtuosic instrumentalists. One shared goal. And one tremendous album, commonly referred to as the equivalent of aural nirvana. Still the only meeting of Santana and John McLaughlin, Love Devotion Surrender more than lives up to the promise offered by its principal creators as it’s a spiritual journey based in divine faith, religious toleration, and the forward-thinking philosophy that music can take us closer to the truth. These enlightening concepts are reflected in the playing of Santana and McLaughlin, who repeatedly hit a higher plane on this stunning 1973 set.

Re-mastered from the original analog master tapes, Love Devotion Surrender benefits from Mobile Fidelity’s meticulous engineering, with the windows on the finite give-and-take passages, sustained notes, and acoustic textures thrown open on hybrid SACD with palpable transparency and exquisite detail. Brimming with atmospheric textures, three-dimensional spaciousness, and sterling microdynamics, this version follows on the heels of Mobile Fidelity’s definitive, critically acclaimed editions of Santana, Abraxas, and Caravanserai.

Having each become a follower of Indian guru Sri Chinmoy, Santana and McLaughlin began playing together in 1972, with each legend currently in the midst of personal and creative transition. Santana was moving away from rock-based songs in favor of exploratory jazz-rock fusion. McLaughlin had already achieved fame with the Mahavishnu Orchestra, on the brink of collapse due to disagreements within the band. On Love Devotion Surrender, the duo pools its interest in spirituality and transcendence into expressively gorgeous art steeped in improvisational lines, ecstatic chords, and sensitive organ accompaniment courtesy of the record’s best-kept secret, Larry Young.

In addition to the search for sacred soulfulness, the common denominator throughout is John Coltrane, who engaged in similar pursuits during the 1960s. Two of the five compositions are interpretations of Coltrane standards while the lynchpin, a nearly 16-minute investigation into the traditional “Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord,” seamlessly integrates melodic structure, jazz phrasing, gospel mysticism, and tonal shaping into one of the most hopeful and uplifting pieces of music you’ll ever hear.

Laden with delicate acoustic touches and gentle piano touches as well as powerful staccato bursts and fast-paced bongo percussion, Love Devotion Surrender contains a highly dynamic mix of tempos, textures, and contrasts that have never shone like they do on Mobile Fidelity’s numbered, limited-edition hybrid SACD. This audiophile edition brings the performers’ spirituality to the fore with extraordinary realism, while the pinpoint imaging—Santana primarily on the left, McLaughlin on the right—allows each musicians’ contributions to soar. If you’re a fan of the guitar, jazz, or music that literally elevates you to an ethereal place, this is a must.

Carlos Santana & John McLaughlin Love Devotion Surrender (1973)

From tinymixtapes.com

Once upon a time, Carlos Santana was a guitarist with lofty thoughts in his mind. Loftier than playing soulless licks over Michelle Branch and Rob Thomas hits, anyway. In 1972, under the tutelage of Shri Chinmoy, he teamed with John McLaughlin, guitarist and leader of the fusion pioneers Mahavishnu Orchestra, to put together an album celebrating the themes of Chinmoy’s teachings. Their intent was to create a work of art that dedicated itself to God and man, and love and dedication to both.

Love Surrender Devotion is the resulting work. The album finds the two with a seasoned group of their buddies: Khalid Yasin (Larry Young) on organ, James “Mingo” Lewis and Armando Peraza on percussion, Doug Pauch on bass and Billy Cobham, Don Alias and Jan Hammer on the drum kit.

The album opens with a raucous take on Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme”, which sets the template for everything that follows. McLaughlin supplies his usual speed-demon technique, sweeping furiously across the fretboard with plenty of overdrive, while Santana opts for more elongated arcs, often bending and stretching notes in a restrained, yearning fashion. Another Coltrane reading follows, and “Naima” finds the two guitarists hushed and reverent, employing acoustic guitar and fingerpicking. It’s the first (and last) time the album relaxes before the end, and it’s over before you realize it.

McLaughlin’s composition “The Life Divine” closes side one, and from its first, stuttered drum beat, one can hear the template for everything The Mars Volta are still trying to pull off. The bass guitar pulses in sync with the galloping drums, while Santana and McLaughlin hold absolutely nothing back. Over prayerful vocal incantations, the two play tug of war with each other, occasionally allowing their parts to dissipate to mere feedback before roaring back to life. It’s brilliant and terrifying, the kind of statement you might expect from Pharaoh Sanders or Sonny Sharrock, not the guy who played “Oya Como Va.”

“Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord” also echoes Sanders, who would later go on to try his own hand at the song. It features touches of the Latin rock sound that Santana was employing to great success with his own group. Here Young’s organ playing gets as far out as either of the guitarists, pushing the song into near atonal territory, while McLaughlin and Santana plow through aggressive runs, mimicking with their guitars the qualities Coltrane and Davis exhibited on their instruments. While the MC5 talked about the same thing, and helped invent punk rock in their attempt, their approach lacked the spirituality Santana and McLaughlin are dealing with here. I want to call it destructive, but that’s just not the right term. Passionate, frightening, fierce; all fall short of describing just how on fire these two guitarists sound.

Another McLaughlin composition, “Meditation” closes the album (it’s funny that this is listed as a Santana album, considering he didn’t actually write any tunes for it), allowing the peacefulness of “Naima” to return. Santana contributes graceful flamenco runs over McLaughlin’s subtle piano, and the two bring the album to a mellow close.

If Santana had kept up this sort of sonic freakiness up, you might hear his name tossed around more by esteemed noisemakers like Thurston Moore. And while McLaughlin is well regarded in jazz circles, allowing soulful collaborators like Santana to help balance his often overwhelming approach would certainly have endured him to the rock world at large. Rarely would their following work reach the heights of this album. McLaughlin would continue to hone his chops, and Santana’s work would spiral into the depths of commercial pop. Regardless of record sales, I find it hard to believe that Carlos is still “reaching” while he’s playing over that Nickelback dude’s jam. I guess he must have surrendered to someone or something other than God.