CHAPTER 4

Avenida Revolución, Tijuana, looking north toward the US border, 1964.

As soon as you left Tijuana and crossed the border, you would see humongous color billboards on which happy, smiling faces were selling houses and cars. Then you could drive to nice, clean supermarkets that had freezers, and everything was sparkling—no flies or funky smells, as there were back in Mexico. My mom and I used to talk about how good it would be to live in America. For her and the rest of my family, it was about a better way of life, like the one those billboards advertised. But what eventually made me want to go north was the sound of black America—blues and R & B. I wanted to be closer to that, marinate my spirit in that music.

When we finally moved north, my family and I discovered that in the middle of all this affluence there were these intense pockets of conflict. Between rich and poor, between black, white, and brown. You had to watch out when you went two blocks in this or that direction, because there were ignorant, angry people living there who didn’t like your kind, the way you talked, or the way you dressed. It can start in high school, but it really shouldn’t even make it to that point.

I love being in the United States because it gives me a chance to say what I want to say. I realize in many places in the world that’s not possible. The reason I speak my mind is because I see what’s wrong and what can be better in this country. I think life is hard enough, and most people don’t get that much unless they fight for it or get lucky or are born lucky. That’s the true picture of America—not the idea of foreigners coming in and taking away this and that from Americans. My family moved here for a better life, because America is the land of opportunity—which means not only the opportunity to make something of yourself but also the opportunity to give back. I would never take anything from America that I wouldn’t want to put back a hundred times. The majority of foreigners who come to this country, I believe, are like that.

I think the main problem is that people are afraid that other people will take away what is their fair share. You know that line of Billie Holiday’s—“You can help yourself / But don’t take too much”? That song, “God Bless the Child,” should be up there with the national anthem and sung just as often. Those two songs next to each other would be perfect—the dream of America and the truth of America.

You want to talk about taking more than a fair share? Look at America and the world today. No country has ever been richer or more powerful than America is now. That’s a fact. No country gives away more than America does, and at the same time no country demands more from the rest of the world. What Rome was in the time of Jesus, America is today. As it says in the Bible, render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. America takes what it wants, and it says that this is the right thing to do, without looking at the consequences.

My father was the advance scout for the family—he was the first to check out San Francisco around 1960, playing for a few months, then coming back. By the following year, he found steady work at the Latin American Club in the city’s Mission District—not connected to the Club Latino Americano in Tijuana. With the help of the club’s owner, Tony Mares, he put together one of San Francisco’s first serious mariachi bands, recruiting from the Bay Area and Tijuana if necessary. Like they had done in Mexico, my dad’s group played weddings and other important functions and got real busy. The Mexican community in San Francisco was growing fast at that point. He got tight with Tony and his wife, and they eventually became our sponsors, helping us come to America.

My mom’s decision to move was a gradual thing, with lots of steps involved in preparation—my sister Irma remembers my father getting us English lessons from a private instructor in Tijuana. My mom went to San Francisco at one point to babysit the Mares’s children for a few months and to help take care of their house—to be their Chepa, in other words.

I’m sure that’s when my mom made up her mind. San Francisco can get in your veins, because it’s beautiful in a way that San Diego and Los Angeles are not. She saw Golden Gate Park and got to visit other places in the city. To my mom, Los Angeles looked like Tijuana, only more crowded. San Francisco had the bridge and the bay and the hills. It had neighborhoods next door to each other with international people and flavors—Chinatown, Japantown, the Italian section. In some ways it was the world, not just America.

Tony was next to start crossing the border, around 1961. He went from being a mechanic in Mexico to working on a farm in California. He told me it was the hardest work he’d ever done in his life—up at dawn, bending over for the whole day until he collapsed every night from exhaustion, doing it again the next day, and sending what little money he got to Mom.

My mom and dad had a plan for the whole family, and in 1962 they started to put it into action—there was no stopping them. They saved up as much money as they could, and my dad started to work on finding a place for us in San Francisco. My mom told us what was happening, and my sisters complained—they were teenagers, young adults. Some had boyfriends by then. For me, it was like I had already joined the circus. I had already checked out of the family stuff—doing chores and going to school and being a normal kid. I was out every night, playing the blues and watching women take off their clothes.

My mom’s attitude was, you can come with me to San Francisco or stay, but I’m going. Except for me, no one would choose to stay. The pull of the family was strong—stronger than any of the boyfriends were.

Meanwhile my mom started to work on the immigration papers to get us to the United States. She found a blind woman in Tijuana who had a typewriter and set up shop in the plaza near the Our Lady of Guadalupe cathedral. She had done the same thing for many Mexican families, so she had the routine down—being blind didn’t matter. “What’s your father’s name?… Mother’s name?… How many children?… Sponsor?” I remember it was my money from El Convoy that went directly to that woman to get the forms done.

My mother signed the documents and delivered them to the American government office. First my dad and Jorge went up north in the middle of the summer in 1962, staying in a small room above the Latin American Club. Jorge told me that one day Mr. Mares came to the door and told him he had to come downstairs and clean the place. He’d sweep and wax the floors, and at night he’d cry himself to sleep listening to our dad’s violin and not knowing where his family was. He was just ten at the time! Around the end of spring, Tony joined them, then Laura and Irma came up from Tijuana, and finally my mom came with Leticia and Maria—closing down our last house in Mexico, on Calle Quinta, and everyone together in that little flat above the nightclub in San Francisco.

I held out till the end of summer, playing at El Convoy. I stayed at a place close to downtown with a cousin of my mom’s. I gave them money for food and for washing my clothes, and I wasn’t really there that much. It was basically just room and board, and I didn’t want to go anywhere. I liked what I had in Tijuana—the music, the gig, playing blues and R & B, getting it together on guitar.

Then my mom came back from San Francisco with Tony to get me, and that was that—no argument or discussion. I had to go. As before, my birthday marked a major move in my life. I had just turned fifteen, and there I was in a car, crossing the border into San Diego, then making the long, straight drive up I-5 to San Francisco. The trip was much shorter than the one from Autlán—it was only a ten-hour drive back then, one long day. The roads in the United States were so much better than they were in Mexico, too—smooth and fast. I remember eating ketchup and Ritz crackers so we had enough gas money to make it.

There was not much in San Francisco in 1962 to change the fact that I wasn’t happy. Not at first, anyway. I went from working as a full-time musician on the street to being a full-time student in the local junior high school—James Lick Junior High on Noe Street. Plus they held me back a year because I didn’t speak English well enough, so I was in classes with thirteen-and fourteen-year-olds. I had been hanging around with dudes who were in their twenties and thirties, playing songs like “Stormy Monday Blues.” Suddenly it was back to kiddie shit, and the music of the day was Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys, all this surf music, and I didn’t even swim.

As we had in Tijuana, we started moving from one place to another almost immediately. We went from living above the club where my dad was playing to a funky little apartment on 3rd Street and Bryant in what was essentially the black ghetto, next to the American Can Company—an area they call China Basin.

We all had it tough at the start—lots and lots of tears. When the ’62 school year started, suddenly all us kids had to learn how to get to school, how to make new friends, and we had to do it all in English. My dad sat down with each of us, gave us just enough money for the bus, and explained the bus routes. “I’m only telling you once—you take this number bus and get off at that street, and take this other bus and change to this other bus.” We were all scared and confused. Irma and Leticia got totally lost on their first day. Jorge and Maria only had to go down the block, since they were in elementary school—but they got teased for being Mexican. They didn’t understand: the last time they were in school, everyone was Mexican! Jorge, who had never really seen a black kid’s hair before, made the mistake of touching one boy’s head. Man, he paid for that mistake again and again.

It didn’t help that there was a language and culture gap between us and our neighbors and that there was a new set of street rules to learn. If three or four guys surrounded me on the way to school and wanted my lunch money, I emptied my pockets.

On my first day at James Lick, my pockets were empty anyway, because my mom and I didn’t know that you had to bring money to buy a lunch or that you had to bring food. Come lunchtime, everybody went to the cafeteria. I wasn’t going to ask anyone for food, so I went outside to watch people playing basketball or whatever they were doing. So there I was again—hungry, angry, upset.

A little later, just before we went back to classes, this guy Bruce came strolling by with his two flunkies. They knew I was new, and they started in on me with that “What are you looking at?” stuff. I didn’t need to know English all that well to know what to do. “You want to meet after school?” I said, “Sí, por qué? Let’s do this now!” His friend was saying, “Go ahead, Bruce, kick his ass,” like they’re trying to build up the energy or something, and I’m thinking, “What the hell is it with this waiting?”

So I just grabbed him and threw him against the lockers—bam! I yelled at him, “Man, I’m going to kick your ass, then I’m going to kick his ass.” Everybody stepped back, going, “Whoa.” Then the teachers came out and separated us, and we went back to class. But right away my reputation was, “That crazy Mexican—don’t mess with him.” Being grumpy and hungry and angry about being there—that all helped.

We had sized each other up, and the next day Bruce came over and we started talking, and we got to music and he said, “You play?” I told him I played the blues on guitar, and he told me he was into doo-wop. “Oh? What’s that?”

“You know, shoo-be-doo kind of music, like ‘In the Still of the Night.’”

I went over to his house to listen to some records, and we became friends. Music got me through all kinds of circumstances.

There were some other good things that happened in those first days in junior high. On the day I stood up to the bully, a girl came up to me and said, “Hi. You’re new here, right? Are you still going to fight Bruce?” Her name was Linda Houston. The boys and girls had different places for recess, and she had heard that this was going to happen. “He’s the biggest bully in school, you know.” So she was warning me a little. A few days before, I had met another girl in the morning assembly—Yvonne Christian—and she turned out to be Linda’s best friend. “So what’s your name?” she asked. I told her.

“Car Antenna?”

“No—Carlos Santana.”

“Oh.”

Linda and Yvonne were around thirteen years old when I met them, and I was fifteen, and that’s a big difference at that age. They were two of the angels who stepped into my life at just the right time to guide me when I needed help. We would become friends for life—not so much in junior high, but in high school we became very tight, and they ended up helping me get more confident with my English and to feel more comfortable in a strange new place.

We’re close friends to this day—it’s amazing how things work out. Their friendship and loyalty has meant more to me than I can really explain without getting sentimental and sloppy. Even when we don’t speak for a few years, when we get back together it’s like we just hung up the phone an hour ago. Linda’s now married to my old friend Michael Carabello, the original conga player in Santana, and Yvonne doesn’t know it, but a while ago I wrote a song with her in mind that I still have to finish—“Confidential Friend.” Now I guess I’ll have to.

It was during these two months in ’62 that I also met two Mexican American guys who lived in the Mission District and were into some good music. One was Sergio Rodriguez, who played bass—we called him Gus. He worked in his father’s grocery store cutting meat in the butcher section. The other was Danny Haro, who played drums. Tony had found a job in Danny’s family’s tortilla factory and became good friends with Danny’s cousin Lalo—Danny’s father also owned a restaurant and some other businesses. Tony had been bragging about my guitar playing and introduced me to Danny. I remember going to the Haros’ house—his family had money, so he had a nice drum kit and records by musicians like the Royals, Little Willie John—the baddest black music. I’d say, “Hey, Danny, can I borrow your records?”

“Sure, just don’t scratch ’em.” Most of his friends were black, too. He even conked his hair.

But man, they were playing some corny-ass songs, like Elvis Presley music. They also had a lead guitarist who was pretty good, but he was no match for me. We got together a few times to jam, and they were freaking out because I knew all these songs and I could play chords and a lot of lead. I’ll be honest—I resisted showing them anything, mainly because I resented having to play on their level. I think we did two gigs together, but it didn’t feel anything like the gigs I was used to playing on Avenida Revolución.

I couldn’t get over being away from Tijuana—what was I doing in this school with these little teenagers when I could be making music, staying up late, and dealing with real life? It was a confusing time, but there was a lot of energy around, too. I won’t forget those few weeks in October when the New York Yankees beat the San Francisco Giants in the World Series at Candlestick Park, just a few blocks away from where we were living. It was one of the longest-running World Series in history because of all the rain. Then we moved to Juri Street, right near the Mission District—it was bigger than the place on 3rd and had a small storage room that I’d hide in and practice guitar.

I had already started to study various guitar styles when I was in Tijuana. I wanted to cop the feel of Otis Rush, the feel of John Lee Hooker. Later I realized how blessed I was to find out early about three people—Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and John Lee Hooker. They were the foundation of my blues education. I had a few blues records, and so did my friends, and we’d listen to them over and over. I marinated myself in that sound. How did he get that sustain? How did he hammer and get that sustain? What about that vibrato? My father played violin with vibrato, but I picked my vibrato up from B. B. and Otis Rush, and I’m still trying to get it right.

That storage room on Juri Street was the only quiet place in our house—I’d go and work on the guitar in the dark. No distraction to my ears or eyes. I’d figure out a riff and try to match the tone. I’d try it seven times in a row—nope, can’t get it. It was dark in there, so you learned to trust your fingers. Eight, nine, ten—that’s not it. Damn.

Figuring out different blues styles was like taking inventory of 777 groups of bees around the world and tasting the honey that each one made. This one is more creamy; this one’s a little darker. What about this golden one? I had a taste for funky, raunchy guitar styles like the ones I heard on the records of Elmore James and Muddy Waters. I learned they call it gutbucket, or cut and shoot. John Lee Hooker was the king of that cut-and-shoot style. How come cut and shoot? Because in the places where they played that music, if they didn’t like what you played, that’s what happened to you. Some people didn’t want to hear any sophisticated blues: “Don’t put no fancy, freaking chords in there, man. Give me the shit.”

I learned there are guitarists who never bend a string—like Freddie Green, who played with Count Basie, and his comping was un-freaking-believable. Later I learned about Wes Montgomery and Grant Green, and then Kenny Burrell. Those three for me would come to represent a kind of class and funky intelligence. People who don’t bend strings can move faster. To me, the players who did bend strings claimed a different place in my heart because they had access to immediate emotion that went beyond superlatives. They shaped notes like the people who shape glass—they do it with fire.

I kept at it, learning songs like “Let the Good Times Roll”—the way B. B. King did it—“I’m Blue,” by Ike Turner and the Ikettes, and “Something’s Got a Hold on Me,” by Etta James. I’d get frustrated. I would stop, go out and walk around, look at people in the park, come back to that little room, and try again. Stop, take another walk, go back. I knew that I couldn’t be 100 percent like them even if I wanted to, because I was not who they were. But I wanted to know what it was they were accessing. I got the idea that it wasn’t just the guitar technique or which guitar or amp they used. I started to think it was who they were, what they were thinking of when they played. Whoever it was—B. B., Buddy, Freddie—something happened in that person’s life that hadn’t happened to me. That’s what made it their sound alone.

Charlie Parker said, “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” I began to live my life, and my own sound began to come out of that closet and out of my guitar. It took a while—lots of gigs in Tijuana and in San Francisco. Lots of life experiences—growing up, leaving home, and coming back. Then, ultimately, leaving home for good.

When you take your time and listen to the real blues guys, you discover that each one has his own sound and you can recognize them by things they do, all while realizing that they don’t repeat themselves. When you really dig into a blues it’s like riding a horse bareback in the night under full moonlight. The horse takes off, and he doesn’t throw you off. You go up and down and flow with the rhythm of the ride, go through all these changes, and never repeat yourself.

Too many guitarists never get past a limited vocabulary, and I can tell you that learning the blues never stops. Every time I play “Black Magic Woman” I’m thinking of Otis Rush, and at the same time my own sound is still developing. To my ears, just before he died Stevie Ray amalgamated all his influences—Albert King, Albert Collins, Lightnin’ Hopkins—to the point where he finally sounded like Stevie Ray. It took him a while. He had to get there, because he had supreme dedication. He lived the blues life.

Two months into that first school year in the United States, I really got into it with my mom. It came down to this: I had been giving my mom all the money I had been making at El Convoy long before the family split for San Francisco. That’s a year and half, nine dollars a week. It was a lot of money—she kept it all hidden away in a shopping bag. I knew a lot of it had to go to the family, most of it, but I also was planning on using some of the money to buy a new guitar for myself. I would remind her of that again and again. I told her, “Mom, you can have all the money, but save me a little bit so that when I see a guitar I want, I can get it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.”

We had a deal, I thought.

A few days after the World Series ended, I saw a Stratocaster that I actually liked, and I asked my mom for the money. There was a record store on Market Street that had a few guitars in the back. I saw it, and I knew that was the one! I had to have it.

For the longest time I had been playing this black Gibson Melody Maker that I had bought used for just thirty-five dollars. It had no case, and it was having trouble staying in tune. It was a good instrument, but it was what you would call a starter guitar.

My mom told me she had spent all the money. But she didn’t just tell me, she snapped at me—like, how could I even ask? No sense of graciousness and definitely no apology. Just, “We needed to eat and I needed to pay the rent and I spent the money.” I mean, at least present it to me in a way that was civil. She didn’t have the diplomacy, and I didn’t have the wisdom that I now have, so we both just got pissed off.

That’s when I said, “Forget it. You broke a promise to me. I’m going back.” I was pissed and I said stuff that teenagers say and that I regret to this day, like, “I don’t even want to see you—I don’t want to live here, I don’t want to eat your food, even if you force me to. I’m going to make life miserable here.”

What could she do—argue? She knew I was serious. So she just raised the ante. She opened the door.

“Okay, you can go. Your father’s friends are leaving tomorrow for Tijuana for a two-week break. Here’s twenty dollars. Go with them.” My dad was silent about it at the time—his feeling was that I was old enough to make my own decisions. I was making money and able to support myself.

So I took the twenty dollars, packed my stuff, and left with those friends of my dad. It’s like I couldn’t get out of there fast enough—I was still so angry. Did I have a place to stay? Did I have a gig lined up? Did the guys at El Convoy know I was coming back? No, no, and no.

We drove all the way to Tijuana and pulled into town in the middle of the evening. It was dark, and everyone was dressed up as demons and skeletons. It was Halloween time back in the United States—in Mexico it was the middle of Day of the Dead celebrations. I had gotten out of the car and was standing there in the middle of downtown Tijuana. It was spooky and weird, and that’s when it hit me. For the first time in my life, I was alone, without a safety net. No going home to Mama. It was just me, and I was feeling it—I was scared.

Part of me noticed how small everything looked after being in San Francisco for just two months. Tijuana’s tallest building was only six or seven stories high, and it seemed like a shack.

I did something I never expected I’d do on my own—I went to church. I went straight to Our Lady of Guadalupe, the big cathedral downtown. I walked in at seven at night, went all the way to the front of the altar, kneeled down, and said, “The last time I was here, it was a few years ago with my brother Tony. We walked on our knees from the front door all the way to the altar because he was having some serious toothaches and needed to get his teeth fixed. I did some penance that time, but I didn’t ask you for anything then, so I figure you owe me one.”

I kept looking up at her. “What I’m going to ask for now is that I want you to help my mom and dad and my sisters and brothers be safe where they are. And help me get a job tonight. That’s all I want.”

I did not go to the priest or anyone else. I went straight to the Virgin—that’s something I believe in to this day, that the relationship with one’s highest power should be a direct one. There are times when we all need a spiritual hug, when we need to feel comfort from fear and be reminded of the oneness we share with all that is around us. I also learned about the power of prayer from my mom, and that prayer is not a one-way thing. What I was looking for was a conversation.

It was not the first or last time I would speak with the Virgin. In 2003 I was on tour, and the day we played Mexico City there was a press conference. They asked me what I had been up to while being back home in Mexico. I told them, “Yesterday I was in Autlán, where I was born, and I went to the chapel where I used to go with my mom when I was a baby. I kneeled down before this big picture of the Virgin of Guadalupe and said thank you, again. Then I heard this voice that said, ‘I’m really proud of you.’”

There was a long pause. “Wait a minute: the Virgin of Guadalupe talked to you?” they asked. I think they were as surprised that I had gone into a church as they were that I had heard back from the Virgin. I answered their question with one of my own. “What kind of relationship do you have with God if you only talk and God don’t talk back?”

On that night I went straight from the church to El Convoy. It was the middle of the week, and they were busy as usual. Everyone was there—the bouncers, the strippers, the musicians. Man, they were surprised. Once I had crossed the border, that was it. Good-bye, Carlos. They looked at me as if I were a ghost. “Man, what are you doing here?” The manager came down to talk to me. “You can’t be here. Your mom told us you were going with her to San Francisco. You need your parents’ permission because you’re underage.”

This is the part of the story that’s really tricky. I had a letter with me, which I gave to the club manager. It came from my mom, and it said that I could return to El Convoy and play there. But my mom swore till the day she died that she never wrote that letter! In fact she’d get pissed if I brought up the subject, and I can’t remember how I got it or who gave it to me! But I do remember pulling it out of my pocket and giving it to the manager, and I remember the manager opening it up and reading it. “Okay,” he said and shrugged his shoulders. “Welcome back.” Then he told the other guitarist to go home. “Go ahead—get up there,” he said to me.

My luck didn’t stop there. I played all through that night, but I still needed a place to stay. The drummer was a guy we called Tarzan. His aunt owned a motel, and he was staying in an extra room there—with only a mattress on the floor, a shower, and a toilet.

I moved in, and after a while we got a small black-and-white TV. I remember sitting there after a long night of playing at El Convoy, fermenting my brain on anything we could find on TV. We would watch and watch, and in a single three-hour stretch we might see Mahalia Jackson singing, Liberace playing piano, Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, and then You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx.

I remember that TV to this day because it helped my English get better—I especially liked Rawhide, with Clint Eastwood. Soon my English was perfect—that is, perfect if I was going to go on a cattle drive. I can’t tell you how weird it felt in 2011 when I was inducted into the California Hall of Fame along with a bunch of other people—including the Beach Boys, Amy Tan, Magic Johnson, and Buzz Aldrin. Guess who came out to induct me? Rowdy Yates himself—Clint Eastwood! He said some nice things about me and shook my hand.

I was the last one inducted, and I thanked them for the honor. Then with Clint and Governor Jerry Brown standing near me, I told them what I thought about California’s governors when I was growing up. My exact words were, “I grew up here in California when Brown and Reagan were here, not necessarily being nice to the campesinos. Not necessarily being in harmony with Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez. I don’t approve of creating airports and libraries for Ronald Reagan and people like that—because they were not nice.”

Nobody said anything—you could hear the food falling off the forks of all the rich people sitting there. Jerry was not happy about my talking about his father, Pat, that way. Knowing Clint’s politics, I don’t think he would have wanted to hang with me that night.

Huerta and Chavez were the union organizers who led the Mexican migrant workers—people like my brother Tony. They formed the United Farm Workers and fought for their rights in the 1960s and got no support from Pat Brown or from Reagan. In the ’70s Jerry Brown supported Chavez and Huerta, so the UFW helped him get elected. Jerry Brown was back as governor, but he had recently vetoed an important UFW bill—just as Schwarzenegger had done four times before!

In 1962, when I was playing in Tijuana on my own, Tony was breaking his back in Stockton—exploited and underpaid. Almost fifty years later, I was standing in Sacramento, just an hour north of those fields, getting an award for being a great Californian. But the struggle was still going on. That’s why I said “Sí se puede” that night, which technically means “Yes, I can”—and basically means “We shall overcome.” Huerta came up with that, and Chavez used to say it all the time. I had to say something.

The Day of the Dead in 1962 was the first night of a long year on my own playing blues and R & B at El Convoy. By then the club had bought its own Stratocaster, so I could play that, and I had my Melody Maker. They were still calling me El Apache. I could tell I was getting better on the guitar night by night.

I learned many things during my year alone in Tijuana—songs, solos, chord changes. I learned what I had to do to stay in tune, because I don’t want to have to worry about that when I’m playing. I learned how to pull and stretch the strings before I put them on the guitar—one, two, three, four, five, six times. Then tune them, then do it again, for three or four rounds. You have to bend them until there’s nothing to bend anymore. You have to tell them who’s boss.

I started to learn about phrasing, mainly from singers. Even today, as much as I love T-Bone or Charlie or Wes or Jimi, it’s singers more than other guitar players that I like to hang with. If I want to practice or just get reacquainted with my instrument, I think it’s best to hang with a singer. I don’t sing, but I will put on music by Michael Jackson and I’ll be right there with his phrasing, like a guided missile—I’ll do the same thing with Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin. Or Dionne Warwick’s first records—my God. So many great guitarists play a lot of chords and have great rhythm chops, and I can do that. But instead of worrying about chords or harmony, I’ll just try matching Dionne’s vocal lines, note for note.

I began to really learn about soloing and respecting the song and the melody. I think too many guitar players forget that and get stuck in the guitar itself, playing lots of notes—“noodling,” I call it. It’s like they’re playing too fast to pay attention. Some people thrive on that, but sooner or later the bird’s got to land in the mist and you got to play the melody. Imagine if the song was a woman—what would she say? Did you forget me? Are you mad at me?

I still hear what Miles Davis used to say about musicians who play too much: “You know, the less you play the more you get paid for each note.”

A few months after I got there, Tarzan and I got kicked out of the motel room, and I moved back to our old neighborhood to live with a friend of my mother’s who didn’t mind me coming home in the mornings. My mom had left some furniture there, so that helped pay for me to stay with the woman. I got used to the rhythm of late nights again, sleeping through most of the day, visiting the beaches, and reading hot-rod magazines and MAD when I wasn’t playing.

I knew it was not healthy living. It’s not that I was smoking weed or taking anything hard. I was just having so much fun that life became a big, fast blur. But I was drinking a lot, and it started catching up to me quickly. Once, I found myself waking up in the street in the morning, still drunk and seeing some lady taking her child to church. She pointed at me and told her kid, “See? If you don’t listen to me you’re going to wind up like him.” I could hear my mom’s voice telling me that I was definitely not on the same page as she was—that I needed to come home or I would be lost.

In my mind I wasn’t just playing the blues—I was living the blues. Even then I had the same notion: the blues is not a hobby, and it’s not a profession. The best way to say it is: the blues is a deep commitment to a way of life. There were a few other bands with that kind of commitment—but only a few. I saw the Butterfield Blues Band with Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop in ’67—they had that Chicago sound down. In ’69, I saw Peter Green with the original Fleetwood Mac, the white British dudes who zeroed in on two things—B. B. King and Elmore James—and they played the shit out of that music. They had the sound of B. B.’s Live at the Regal album down almost as good as B. B. did! They lived the blues. They weren’t wearing it like a suit. That’s all they wanted to do; that’s all they did, and they did it so well. I couldn’t believe they were white. Same thing with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. They had that Louisiana sound and those Texas shuffles down.

I think the most idiotic question anyone can ask is whether white people can play the blues. If you need to know, go listen to Stevie Ray Vaughan at his peak. Playing the blues is not about what part of town you come from or what country. No one race owns it. Some people might think they do, but they don’t. I can hear blues in the music of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan. Flamenco players have got the blues. The Moors singing to Allah have got the blues. The Hebrew people in their prayers have got the blues. The blues is like chicken soup—it wasn’t invented in America, and we don’t own the recipe.

By the summer of 1963, I was getting older, almost sixteen. Things were changing on Avenida Revolución. Gene Ross disappeared—I didn’t see him again after I got back, didn’t even hear about him until he got killed. Javier Bátiz left Tijuana for the big city and the big time—for him, that meant Mexico City. During this time I think my family had been trying to reach me for a while, wanting me to come back to San Francisco. I don’t remember my mom sending any letters, but maybe she did and I didn’t see them. Or maybe I chose not to remember.

I did not want to go back. Years later my mom told me, “When you were in Tijuana I would get so worried. I used to tell your dad, ‘We have to go get Carlos,’ but he would just roll over to the other side of the bed and say, ‘Nah—let him grow balls and become a man. You can’t hide him with your skirt all the time.’” My dad was probably like most men at that time.

My mom persisted. Later I learned that when Tony was fired from one of the jobs he had, it gave her the perfect excuse to come down to Tijuana with him to find me—but I got word that they were coming and hid from them. They went back, but they returned a few weeks later, in late August, when I was playing at El Convoy. This time I had to face them.

Everyone remembers what happened a different way. Tony told me that he drove down with my mom and a friend. They went to El Convoy and asked the bouncer whether I was inside. “You mean El Apache? Yeah—he’s passed out over there. Get him out of here; he’s going to die.” He meant that the nightclub lifestyle was going to be the end of me. So they carried me to the car and drove me home.

My dad remembered my being a little more awake and resistant. He told a newspaper in 1971 that he came down with my mom, Tony, and someone else, found me at El Convoy, and they used all their powers of family persuasion to get me to go home. “We did not force him… we convinced him by crying.”

The way I remember it was that my mom, Tony, and his friend Lalo suddenly were there, and I fought going back till the end. My mom knew what she had to do when she came to El Convoy. She told Tony to stand by the back door while she came in through the front. I was in the middle of a set, but as soon as I saw her standing there—pow! I was off like a firecracker, out the back door, where Tony was waiting. He grabbed me and lifted me off my feet while they were still moving. They basically kidnapped me—snatched my ass, put me in the car, and brought me back to San Francisco.

The one thing we all agree on is that I was silent all the way back in the car—just fuming. We also agree that all I had with me was my Melody Maker and amplifier—nothing else.

But really, what else did I need?