CHAPTER 5

This band played at the Cow Palace and opened up at the Fillmore. With Danny Haro and Gus Rodriguez, 1964.

Music and sex—those were the two things that made the most sense to me when I was in school, growing up. That’s what I wanted to invest my time and spirit in. The guitar is shaped like a woman, with a neck you hold and a body you hug against yourself. You can touch your fingers up and down the strings, but you have to be delicate and know what you’re doing, especially if the guitar is electric.

If I had been a saxophone player, all day long I would have wanted to hear the sound of Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Dexter Gordon, Pharoah Sanders and Gato Barbieri. I’d need to hear a certain tone in order to dip myself in it. The saxophone has a very masculine sound.

The tone of the electric guitar is different—no two ways about it. It gets a feminine sound—unless someone’s playing like Wes Montgomery. To me, Wes had a fatherly sound, gentle and wise, like Nat King Cole’s voice. But when a guitar player wants to get sassy and nasty, he just has to copy the way women walk and talk by bending the notes on the electric guitar.

I believe my guitar sound is feminine—it has a melodic, female sound no matter how much bass I put into it. It’s the nature of who I am—my fingerprint. I’ve accepted that. I think it’s a powerful thing to express the wisdom of women as a woman herself would, with female overtones.

It started with my father teaching me how to get inside a note, to penetrate it so deeply that you can’t help but leave your fingerprints on it. You can tell it’s working if you are reaching your audience. If you don’t feel it, your audience won’t, either. With the violin I could do that when I was playing “Ave Maria” in church. I could tell people could feel the hug I put into a note. I mean, everybody needs a hug. I learned about legato and long notes and knowing when to use sustain and when to hit an endearing hug note. But with a guitar I felt I could go further. I mean, there are hugs and then there’s someone sticking a tongue in your ear. That’s what I wanted to be able to do—the guitar helped me get there.

Being back in San Francisco was rough for a while. I made good on my promise from the year before—I locked myself in my room and refused to eat. When I finally came out, my mom had had enough. She got out another twenty-dollar bill and said, “You can go back, but this time we won’t be coming to get you.” I took the money and walked up to Mission Street, but then I thought about it. Then I thought about it again. I gave the money back and said, “No. I’ll stay.” That’s the only time I felt like that. All the other times, the excitement of the music and learning was more important to me than an obligation to family. That’s the honest truth.

My dad tried to make me feel better. “Son, in this country you can have a good future. There are a lot of good musicians here.” I knew that. By then, all my heroes were American—B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters. I was dying to hear them and to meet them. But I would have to wait—first it was back to junior high. Man, I was not ready for that—not after a year on Avenida Revolución. I was still being held back in my grade, so by then I was almost sixteen, and I felt even older than the other kids.

It was good that I had my friends—Linda, Yvonne, Danny, and Gus—to hang with and play music with. They helped me keep it together, kept me wanting to stay in America. They accepted my being back like it was nothing special. “Okay—you disappeared last year, but now you’re back. No problem.”

But school? My mind was always somewhere else. The one thing I remember I liked to do was draw. Linda tells me she liked to sit next to me in class and watch while I drew big, complicated cartoons—action-hero stuff. I was really getting into comic books at the time. Then, not long after I returned—just a few weeks—I remember that Kennedy was shot and the whole world was in shock. Everything came to a stop. I knew then that this country was not what it seemed like in the movies, but I didn’t realize it could be so nasty and ugly. Back then I just accepted the news. But what a brutal thing to come back to in America.

We were then living in an apartment on 14th Street, in the middle of the Mission—the third place we lived in San Francisco. It was still a small place, but the apartment was bigger and better than the one on Juri Street, and the neighborhood was a step up and more mixed. Things were settling down there, but sometimes it could get tense fast, even with my brother Tony. On the one hand, I know he was extremely proud of me and would brag about me: “Oh, you have to see my brother. He’s going to come up here from Tijuana and show you. The shit these guys are playing—that ain’t nothing, man.” On the other hand, he was the one who put me in the car and wouldn’t let me stay in Tijuana. And when he would drink he could get mean and piss me off. Usually I would just take a deep breath and look at the floor, because he could really fight.

One time Tony and his buddies had been out drinking, and he came home, wanting to sleep, but my sisters and I were watching the end of some vampire movie. “Turn off the TV,” he said, and then he just turned it off. Laura got up and turned it back on. “Hey, it’s almost over. What’s your problem?” Tony went back to the TV, but being drunk, he knocked my sister down. I couldn’t stand for that. I punched him right in the eye and grabbed a chair to defend myself because I knew I would have to. The whole house stopped—my mother was just watching this go down. Tony kept looking at me, not doing anything, and I’m thinking I’m an idiot because we were sharing a bed at that time! What was I going to do, sleep on the very edge of the bed?

By the time he had a steak on his eye, we had all calmed down. But Tony wasn’t happy. “I understand what you did—you were protecting your sister. But don’t you ever hit me again, man.”

I didn’t even think of doing that, but just a few weeks later Tony came into our room with his buddies. They’d been drinking again. One of them—it was Lalo, actually—sat on the bed, right on top of my guitar—snap! Broke it right in two. It was the Melody Maker, but still I was mad and ready to fight again. Somehow they calmed me down.

That happened on a Friday. The next Monday when I got home from school, Tony had bought me a brand-new guitar and an amplifier. It was a beautiful white Gibson SG with a whammy bar. Gibson had only been making them since ’61. Man, I grabbed that guitar—started smelling it, touching it. I couldn’t believe it. That was the same kind of Gibson I played at Woodstock—an SG, but a later model and a different color.

Tony was my hero again. My eyes were tearing up. Then he said, “Hey, Carlos, I just made the down payment. You’re going to have to pay for the rest of it. I’ll take you to the place where I’m working so you can learn how to wash dishes and earn the money to pay it off.”

That’s how I began my career as a dishwasher at the Tic Tock Drive In. I worked at the one at 3rd and King, just down the block from our first place in San Francisco. There were five of those diners across the city—they were popular and stayed open late, and eventually a bunch of us ended up working at one or another of them—Tony, Irma, Jorge, and I. Some of us also worked shifts at La Cumbre, the taqueria on Valencia Street that Danny Haro’s family owned. My mom was working less—she was busy being a mom—and my dad had his regular gig at the Latin American Club. The rest of us who were still in school and old enough had our routines—wake up early, go make tortillas at La Cumbre, go to school, come home, eat, then go to work at Tic Tock.

Tic Tock was owned by white guys, and the funny thing is that mostly they treated us better than the owners of the Mexican restaurants we could have worked in, such as La Palma. And it was definitely better financially than pressing tortillas—that’s why Tony started working there.

Not that it was perfect. I remember one day when Julio, one of the managers, came into the kitchen. It was a Wednesday—banana boat day—which meant that huge numbers of people were down at the docks, right near the diner, unloading bananas for the whole city, and the place was packed. But somehow the driver who was supposed to deliver the doughnuts that morning did not show up. Again.

Julio walked up to me. “Carlos! Tell your brother they didn’t bring us doughnuts again and we need them for the coffee rush. Can he go and pick some up right away?” This is all in English. Tony doesn’t speak English that well, but he definitely understood. He didn’t blink. He kept washing dishes and answered in Spanish, telling me to tell Julio that he’d gone for the doughnuts two weeks ago as a favor, that it’s not required of him by his union, and that he never got reimbursed for the gasoline he used last time.

“What’d he say?” So I had to translate, and by this time all the other workers had stopped what they were doing and were watching us. “Really? Is he sure?” Then my brother said, “Dile que se vaya a la chingada,” and told me I had to translate it word for word.

“Yeah. He also says to go fuck yourself.”

I waited for something to happen, but nothing did. Tony taught me that day that it was important not just to be a good worker but also to know your value. Know your power, and have brutal integrity if necessary. There were three of us working there then—Tony, Irma, and I. If Julio had fired one of us, all three of us would have walked. Doughnuts or no doughnuts, the Santanas did a good job for them.

There were other lessons I learned at Tic Tock. There was a bad-looking pimp who would show up late at night, dressed in a pin-striped suit and panama hat. He always had the finest women with him, drove a Cadillac, the whole thing. When he walked in all the workers would stop and stare. He had a routine—first he’d sit his ladies down, make sure they had menus, then go put some money in the jukebox.

One night he came in and did his thing, and a redneck trucker walked in with his radio blaring a Giants game—“Here’s the windup, and the pitch…” Loud, loud, loud. The pimp went up to him and said politely, “Excuse me—I just put some songs on. I wonder if you can turn the radio down a little.” The guy looked at him and just turned it up louder.

We’re all stopped now. The whole diner is watching, thinking this is going to be a fight. The pimp—real smooth and quick—grabbed the radio, threw it hard onto the floor, then stomped on it with the heel of his shoe. It was all smashed to pieces. Then he reached into his pocket—we were expecting a gun or a knife—and pulled out a big wad of cash. He counted out one, two, three bills and put them in front of the trucker. “This covers it, man. I know you’re going to let me listen to my music now.” That guy’s face was red. He knew better than to say anything.

Tic Tock was where I first learned about American food—hamburgers, french fries, meat loaf, cold turkey sandwiches. My favorite was their breaded cutlet and mashed potatoes—I ate that all the time, and I still love it. When we’re touring these days and have a night off in Austria or Germany, everyone knows I’ll be ordering Wiener schnitzel, even if it’s not on the menu.

The most beautiful thing about Tic Tock was the jukebox. I put so much money in that thing just to make it bearable while washing those big pots and pans full of gravy and bleaching the floors with scalding water and Clorox. That jukebox helped me stay sane those first few years I worked there. It had Jackie Wilson, Chuck Jackson, Lou Rawls, Solomon Burke, the Drifters. Also those first Motown stars—Mary Wells, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye. It was different from Tijuana—more sophisticated and soulful. Some of it had that gospel feel, like Solomon Burke had. The Impressions singing “Say it’s all right… It’s all right… It’s all right, have a good time, ’cause it’s all right.”

Stan Getz and Cal Tjader were on that jukebox—my first real taste of jazz. There was also Latin music with Afro-Cuban rhythms—Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría. “Watermelon Man”!

San Francisco was like that jukebox. Actually, San Francisco was a jukebox. The Mission was full of nightclubs, and I had friends there who had stereos. And San Francisco in general had lots of clubs and radio stations playing a variety of styles. KSOL—“Kay-Soul”—was one of the city’s black stations. That’s where Sly Stone started as a DJ. “Hey, you groovy cats…” He had his own thing that early. I heard a wild jazz organ on KSOL late at night—someone named Chris Colombo doing “Summertime” and just killing it. KSOL introduced me to Wes Montgomery, Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, and Jimmy Smith. They played Vince Guaraldi a lot.

Tijuana was where I heard songs like “Stand by Me”—simple R & B tunes. In San Francisco I was suddenly hearing Johnny Mathis singing “Misty” and Lee Morgan playing “The Sidewinder”—a new level of hip. Basically, the city was a cornucopia of music—more than I had ever expected. I started hearing about clubs I would later try to sneak into—like the Jazz Workshop, all the way down Van Ness and over on Broadway, near the North Beach area. Just a few doors down was El Matador, where I would hear Cal Tjader and Vince Guaraldi for the first time and later Gábor Szabó. El Matador was where I heard the amazing Brazilian guitarist Bola Sete for the first and only time. He was a phenomenon—I regret that I never got a chance to spend time with him and really hang out. I started hearing about the Cow Palace, down in Daly City on Geneva Avenue, where all the big shows were.

I remember during that first year in San Francisco I heard about a show in San Jose that featured B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Ray Charles—my friends and I were like, “Oh, shit!” I never scrubbed plates and pots and pans as fast as I did that night. As soon as I got off work, we took off from the Tic Tock at full speed and got to the venue just in time to hear the last note and the applause that followed. “Oh… shit.”

The blues was still my thing—make no mistake. That apartment on Juri Street was where I hid in that little storage room in the dark, just my guitar and I, trying to figure out how B. B. got that tone or Otis hit that note. I was still doing that kind of thing in our new place. Jorge still tells me that he remembers I was always digging, digging, digging—working on my sound.

I also soon learned about the guitar stores around the city—seeing all the new guitars and equipment was essential to me. And of course I was still playing and hanging out with Danny and Gus. We had our little band that had no name. We had our little gigs, playing parties and dances. Listening to the new songs that were coming out and deciding which ones we liked and which ones we wanted to learn. Before I went back to Tijuana in ’62, I had avoided showing them anything. I didn’t want to be a teacher. But when I went back, I knew that if I wanted to play I had to swallow my pride and teach them repertoire. The good thing about it was that I could choose the songs, so I turned them away from surfer music and the Beatles. We learned James Brown and Etta James tunes together, and I taught them songs I knew from El Convoy, including “You Can Make It If You Try.”

It was all fun—this was when I really began to be a teenager and do teenager things. I remember Danny had a green Corvette. We’d drive down the peninsula to one of the A&Ws along the coast, get a root beer float and some hamburgers, listen to the greatest music on the car stereo, then go home and play in his basement. I also remember that his father didn’t like me for the longest time. He looked at me as if I were a bad influence on his son. I don’t think I was.

I started to notice the difference between what we were listening to and playing and what most other bands were listening to and playing. We did one gig at the Stonestown YMCA on the same bill as a group of white dudes who were playing strictly Beach Boys tunes. We came in there with Bo Diddley and Freddie King tunes, and no one knew anything about that. On the way over there I remember a song came on the radio—it was the first time I heard Stevie Wonder: “Fingertips, Part 1” and “Fingertips, Part 2.” Damn.

In 1963 and into ’64, I was getting to know everything going on in San Francisco—I was going up and down the streets, looking at the buildings and the bridge and that beautiful bay. At home I remember Jorge was just starting to mess around on guitar, and my sisters were still putting on their records, dancing to Motown and Latin tunes that were popular then—Celia Cruz, some guy named Tito Puente. For me, San Francisco was this amazing vortex of newness.

If it sounds like I’m avoiding talking about school, that’s because I was doing just that—avoiding it. It was tough because I had to switch back to English again, and when I didn’t understand every third or fourth word it was very frustrating. I was not the best student and didn’t like most of my courses, except for one English class in which there was a very beautiful teacher who would wear a short skirt and cross her legs. Suddenly I was more interested in her than I had been in any of the dancers in Tijuana. I’d be daydreaming, and my young body would be reacting as it’s supposed to, nature doing its thing, and one time she caught me.

“Carlos, I want you to come to the board and write this down.” I was like, “Um, no.” She insisted, and the whole class was watching. So I got up, trying to subtly shift things around. But it wasn’t working, and everybody was cracking up. What can I say? It was junior high.

My English was getting better all the time on its own. Everywhere I went—to school, the Tic Tock, band rehearsals, my friends’ houses—I always spoke English. When I was talking to Linda and Yvonne, they had no problem correcting me. We’d talk all the time on the phone, and we got closer and closer. I could talk to them about anything—school, music, girls. They’d tell me about their boyfriends. They’d call me up—“Hey, Santana, how you doing?” After a while, I even opened up to them about getting molested—outside of my family, they were the only people who knew about that for many years.

I would say it took me almost three years from the time I came back from Tijuana to really get my English together and to stop thinking in Spanish. To have the right words and pronunciation. To say “Jell-O” instead of “yellow.” The accent? Well, that got better over time, but it’s still there, part of my identity, just like a guitar sound. It’ll never go away completely.

You can see that fitting in was tough. In those first few years in San Francisco, I didn’t quite know whom I was supposed to hang out with. I didn’t fit with Mexicans or white people, and very early on I found out that when I was with black friends and would ask about B. B. or Freddie King, they were listening to something else—some newer style of dance music, not the blues. I learned to get rid of the notion I had when I came to America: that all black people knew each other.

Once the blues did work in my favor. I was on a city bus late one night, and though we had moved to the Mission District I still had to take a route through the rough part of town to get to the place where we rehearsed. I was carrying my black Melody Maker with me in a bag. It never had a case—I used to take it with me everywhere before Lalo sat on it. I got on the bus, and the driver looked at me and at the guitar. “Can you play that thing?”

“Yeah, I can play it,” I told him. I wasn’t being cocky or anything.

“What kind of music?”

“Jimmy Reed, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, John Lee Hooker.” We’re talking, and the bus isn’t moving.

“John Lee Hooker, huh? Well, you’re going to have to sit near me so I can watch you. I don’t want anyone messing with you.”

It was the first time someone had done something like that simply because I was a musician and because of the music I made. Without even hearing me play. That driver was one of the angels who stepped in at the right place and time—not just to watch over me but also to let me know I was on the right path. I still feel a lot of confidence when I remember that one little bus ride.

I was a musician, and that’s how I identified myself—not Mexican or American. I still do. That’s why I hung out mostly with musicians.

At James Lick, as at any school, there was pressure to belong to a group. They had two—the Shoes, who wore tight white pants or corduroys. They were the surfers. And there were the Barts, who were like the pachucos; they were mostly Mexican, with some blacks mixed in. People wanted to know which group I would choose—they expected me to be a Bart. I thought they both looked silly. One Latino guy said, “You don’t dress like us,” like I was a sellout or something. “You know why I don’t dress like you? I have a job. I make my own money and buy my own clothes. I don’t let my mama or any gang dress me up.” At that point I was working on my own style anyway, wearing the shiny black shoes and those tight, shiny trousers the Motown guys wore—the Levi’s would come later.

It was like the Jets and Sharks—whites and Latinos—in West Side Story. Tony took me to see the movie around a year after it came out, but never mind the gangs. Man, that was our story—about wanting to come to America and make it here. They were singing about washing machines, as I had promised my mom back in Mexico. I couldn’t believe it. That’s how I first came to know about Leonard Bernstein. That movie was nothing without the music. I don’t know if Mr. Bernstein knew just how many people he touched with that one film. It encapsulated the whole United States at the time—and for many years thereafter.

In 1999, when I was auditioning the songs for the album that became Supernatural, I first heard the words to Wyclef Jean’s song “Maria Maria”—“She reminds me of a West Side Story / growing up in Spanish Harlem / She’s livin’ her life just like a movie star.” I had asked for a song about healing and hope, but the stuff about West Side Story—that was all Wyclef. And Rob Thomas on his own came up with the line “my Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa” in the song “Smooth”—and I was thinking, “We’re definitely all on the same page here, brothers.” Who doesn’t know that movie?

After the difficulty I felt leaving Tijuana, what really kept me interested in San Francisco and not wanting to go back was my relationship with girls and music. When some of the girls at James Lick told me I reminded them of George Chakiris, who played Bernardo in West Side Story, I was like, “Really?” That was a handsome dude. Hmm. Okay, I was hooked.

Still, it was never a physical thing between me and Linda or Yvonne—we went to parties, and I’d watch them dance to “Harlem Shuffle,” or we’d go to drive-in movies. I was more comfortable with girls than I was with guys, but I was still really shy. I had no confidence when I got to be alone with a girl because I’ve never been a bullshitter or a hunter. One thing I know I didn’t get from my dad is the ability to hunt and charm women. That “Hey, baby” stuff was never my thing. To me, it just sounds corny, like picking up a guitar that’s out of tune. That’s just not my personality, even when I was with my first wife, Deborah, or Cindy or any of the other ladies. Some women I’ve loved may not want to own it, but they did the chasing.

I prefer to have a real conversation—that’s just me.

Before junior high was over I did muster up enough confidence to get together with this one girl—Dorian was her name. She lived alone with her mom, who worked during the day. That first part of ’64 I was always at her house.

I want to say that the sex was all a beautiful thing, but my memories of that time are mixed up with a gym teacher who had a crush on Dorian, and he knew I was getting with her. Every time I was in his class, he’d jump on me. “Santana, I know where you’re coming from. You need to run around the school block three times and then give me fifty push-ups.” It was weird—how did he know?

I think about those first times of intensity and ecstasy, and most of it happened while I was sneaking around and making sure I didn’t get caught. I know some people think that can make it more exciting—like all those soul songs that say it’s sweeter if you’re stealing it. But I think too much of sex is wrapped up in guilt and shame. It seems to me that it should always be celebrated as a healthy thing, talked about, and studied in school—especially in junior high, when people have the most questions.

Sex should be taught as creative and spiritual expression. The whole planet is about expression—a variety of expression. We need to know about this and make our own choices. Remember Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the surgeon general who got fired for coming out in favor of masturbation as a way of preventing AIDS—how could that be anything but healthy and positive? Unfortunately we’re not evolved enough yet to teach that point of view in schools. So much in this world would be better if we were taught that it’s important to find a partner with whom you can talk about sex and that this needs to be an important part of your life. Instead we’re left to figure these things out for ourselves—and hope we get it right.

Dorian was my girlfriend for a while—we used to go to dances together, but she’d get pissed because as soon as we got there, I’d let go of her hand and stand right in front of the band, checking out the guitarist and the rest of the guys. She would be asking me to dance, trying to get my attention, and I’d say, “No—it’s okay. Go ahead and dance with your friends. I’ve got to see what’s happening.” I was at rehearsals a lot, too. She got frustrated with me. She started to feel that I was only with her for my convenience and that I only wanted to be with her when her mom wasn’t home so I could do one thing.

Dorian left me for a quarterback. He’d play ball, as it were—she couldn’t rely on me. A few years later I saw the same thing happen to a bass player who came into the band just after Gus—Steve LaRosa. He had a lot of strings attached to this beautiful lady who wanted him to spend more time with her than he did with his music.

I saw it happen many times after that, too. It’s a horrible thing when anyone says to you, “Choose me or the music.” Please do not ask me to live according to your insecurities. That’s like asking me to stop breathing. For me, there was only one possible answer—“Bye.”

In September I moved on to the high school that James Lick was a feeder for—Mission High. Linda, Yvonne, Danny, and Gus were all there, too. Mission was a big change from James Lick. It was really, really mixed—blacks, Mexicans, kids from all over South and Central America, and Filipinos. Other high schools had more Chinese and Italians, but Mission was the hard-core center of San Francisco, so kids were coming from the Mission, Bayview, and Hunter’s Point, and it was probably one of the most diverse schools in the city. There was a lot of tension, mostly between blacks and whites. The hippies were just coming up at that time, and it wasn’t fun, because straight people would call them faggots for having long hair. Whites and blacks and Latinos would say that. If anyone was with a crowd of their own people—white, black, brown, or just straight—and someone came by alone who looked different, you knew the crowd was going to start picking on that person. That’s high school.

My circle of friends got larger. It was a bigger school, and they had dances that were bigger, too. I remember that year Freddie Stone—Sly’s brother—came over from Jefferson High and played for us with his band, Freddie and the Stone Souls. They put on a high-energy show, jumping over each other while playing their instruments. That was the first time I heard Greg Errico on drums.

The summer of 1964 was all about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and other groups from England. I noticed the girls really liked them. They were all over the radio. I could tell some of them were coming from the same place I was—they had been listening to the blues. Groups like the Animals and the Yardbirds were trying to learn that language, too. Later I would read about how they started: pulling themselves up, hitting the road, sleeping in vans, doing what they had to do—they were comrades in arms, as far as I’m concerned, for what they went through for their music. I’m talking about Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor, John Mayall, Peter Green—all of them.

The one album that knocked me out was by the Kinks. My mom was still holding on to the money I was earning, but she’d give me a little now and then. When she did I’d get the latest Spider-Man comic and an album or two. I remember getting Little Walter’s greatest hits and the Kinks’ first album, and then going, “Shit! This is different—what a heavy sound.” Those guys were about chords, not single notes. They were a big influence on me. Danny and others in our band liked the Yardbirds, and that was fine with me, too.

By then my band was one of the best bands at Mission at the time. Like a rhythm section for hire, the three of us would join up with other groups; then there would be different singers or guitarists or horn players in front. We were the guys to get. One time we played in the Dynamics, wearing suits and playing with two saxophone players—Andy Vargas and Richard Bean. Richard later got together with my brother Jorge and formed the Malibus, which then became Malo.

I was still working at Tic Tock while Danny was making tacos and Gus was cutting meat. We were gigging and keeping busy, playing pizzerias and birthday parties. We never did Mexican events, because most Mexicans didn’t want to hear our kind of American R & B music. “You guys are too loud,” they would say. They wanted to hear music from back home—mariachi, norteño. That was my dad’s territory.

I remember one time Danny’s or Gus’s parents asked us to play a party where they would have asked for songs like that, and I said no. I think Danny and Gus would’ve been okay doing those songs—they didn’t have the negative emotional attachment that I had because they didn’t grow up with the things I had to see. I just told them I don’t want to play baptisms and bar mitzvahs. I told them I didn’t know any of those songs, even though I did know them, and that was the end of that.

The school used to hold open auditions for their Friday night dance parties, and we would win again and again. One time a student who was from Samoa saw our audition and invited us to play at his birthday party. Everything was going great until we finished our second set and asked for our money so we could leave. He looked at us and said, “You guys ate too much food, man. I’m not going to pay you.” He was the one who invited us to help ourselves—we didn’t know there was a limit on how much we could eat! The other guys started to argue with him, but I just pulled away. I went back to the kitchen, where our equipment was, saw his birthday cake sitting there, and carefully took it apart and laid it in my guitar case. Then I got the other guys and said, “Come on—let’s just go.” Later I showed them what I’d done. We ate the cake and laughed. I thought it was better to get even than get angry.

We never really had a singer. We played lots of instrumentals, and Gus sang sometimes. I would help out on songs like the Righteous Brothers’ “Little Latin Lupe Lu,” “I Need Your Lovin’” by Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford, and “Do You Love Me” by the Contours. They were shuffles and boogies, mostly—more about the rhythm than about a lead vocal part.

I met Joyce Dunn at a jam in late ’64—she was a singer singer, with a real blues energy to her voice. She was from Oceanview, just ten minutes from the Mission, so we were able to get together and work out some songs, soul tunes like “Steal Away” and “Heat Wave.” It was definitely a new thing at the time—a black singer backed by Mexican Americans and a Mexican guitar player. Michael Carabello would tell me that the first time he ever saw me play was during the few weeks we played with Joyce. She was a lot of fun and later went on to work with musicians such as Boz Scaggs and record a few songs under her own name.

The first half of ’65 went by fast—suddenly my first year of high school was over, and it was summer. Many biographies that I’ve seen say I graduated from Mission that year, but I graduated with the class of ’67. With Danny and Gus and the horns, we were still playing the blues, or our version of the blues. But it seemed like the world only had room for British groups: the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, especially “Satisfaction,” were everywhere.

Sometime that summer we heard that KDIA, which was the soul station for San Francisco back then, was sponsoring a band contest at the Cow Palace—the prize would be an opportunity to play your song on the radio and open a show for the Turtles and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, who both had big radio hits. Hundreds of bands showed up, but it turned out that most of them were just covering songs by the Rolling Stones and the Who, and the station wanted originality. Most got eliminated in the first round, and we got more and more excited as the day went by. We also got nervous. Because we had so much time to hang around, Danny, Gus, and I got to drinking, and we fucked it all up! We made it to number three. It felt good—until we lost.

“Wooly Bully” was Sam the Sham’s hit song, and you couldn’t get away from it that summer. We learned that tune and must have played it a hundred times—everyone wanted to hear it. I remember my sister Laura asked us to play for her wedding that June in Pacifica, at a place called La Paloma. We had everyone up and dancing to “Wooly Bully.” I remember that because Tony’s new wife was very pregnant at the time, and if you say “Wooly Bully” like you’re speaking Spanish it sounds like you’re saying “big stomach.” Later I learned that Sam’s real name is Domingo Zamudio and that he is a Mexican American from Texas.

That summer I was also listening to B. B. King’s Live at the Regal. It was so valuable to guitarists like me, who hadn’t yet had the chance to see B. B. in concert—but on this album we could hear him dealing directly with his people, a black audience. It still makes me smile when he sings, “I got a sweet black angel / I love the way she spreads her wings,” and the ladies start screaming. What could be sexier than that?

My second year at Mission started in September, and not long afterward the first album by the Butterfield Blues Band came out. To my ears, it was the best example of a musician staying true to the real electric blues—the Chicago blues—and making it work with a rock-style beat. The rock influence was not too much; it was just right. A big reason for its success was Michael Bloomfield, who played the group’s lead guitar—soon he was my number two hero, just behind B. B. He was the first of the new generation of guitarists after Buddy, Albert, and Freddie.

Sometime during that fall, another singer came into the band—Al Burdett. He was from the Fillmore, on the other side of town. He sang the blues and didn’t stay with us for more than a few months, but he turned me on to the most important blues album of that year—Junior Wells’s Hoodoo Man Blues, featuring a great guitarist called Friendly Chap. Only that wasn’t his real name—it was Buddy Guy, and because he was under contract to another label at the time they called him that. Everybody heard that album—the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix. Buddy’s way of playing guitar on “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl” became the only way to play that song.

That fall, I met Michael Carabello for the first time. He was a friend of Yvonne’s and would have been at Mission High except that his baseball skills got him into San Francisco Polytechnic. He remained close with his friends in the Mission, where he lived. Carabello had gotten hooked on music when he played congas in these informal jam sessions at Aquatic Park, very close to North Beach, and had even sat in once with Vince Guaraldi. Carabello came by Yvonne’s basement, which was one of the places our band would jam. Later he told me he was blown away by what he heard. I liked him—he was hanging out more than playing at the start, but we had the same enthusiasm and intensity about music. He only had one conga when we met, but he had a nice feel when he played—and he was listening to a lot of new sounds as well as the blues.

Most important, Carabello took me to Aquatic Park. I don’t know if they still do it, but back then, in ’65 and ’66, they used to let this circle of conga players play. It would be maybe ten or twelve of them sitting around, playing with one or two flute players, the brothers drinking wine from leather flasks that they’d hang on their belts, smoking weed. The sound was intense when they got going.

Carabello and I had another mutual friend, Jimmy Martinez, who did something that totally turned my head around. Jimmy knew what he was doing, too, because one day he came up to me, laughing, and said, “I got an album here that’s basically going to kick your ass!”

“Yeah? Okay, bring it on.” What else was I going to say?

He was right. It was Chico Hamilton’s El Chico—the one featuring the Latin percussionists Willie Bobo and Victor Pantoja and a guitarist named Gábor Szabó. I liked the way it looked from the first time I saw it—Chico was dressed in a toreador cape, and some of the songs had Spanish titles, such as “Conquistadores” and “El Moors.” I knew Chico was a jazz drummer, but the album didn’t sound like any jazz I’d heard before. It had a lot of Latin in the music as well as a lot of other things, too—soul and lots of great grooves.

But it was Gábor’s guitar that hit me hard—I heard that and could feel my brain molecules starting to expand. His sound had a spiritual dimension to it, and it opened the gates to other dimensions for me. You could tell he listened to a lot of Indian music, because he put a drone part in the music. It was trance music—he could play the simplest melody but still go deep. He was the first guitarist who opened me up to the idea of playing past the theme, of telling a story that isn’t just a regurgitation of the head of a song or other people’s licks. Gábor took me away from B. B. King, John Lee Hooker, and Jimmy Reed—he was also the first jazz musician who started playing Beatles and Mamas and Papas songs and other ’60s rock and pop tunes—even before Wes Montgomery started doing “Goin’ Out of My Head.”

El Chico was like a road map telling me where I had to go next. I immediately went out and got Willie Bobo’s album Spanish Grease, and by the next year I would get Gábor Szabó’s Spellbinder—“Gypsy Queen” was on that one—and Bobo’s Uno-Dos-Tres, which had “Fried Neckbones and Some Home Fries.” Both those songs would help shape the Santana sound. At the same time, another friend turned me on to Thelonious Monk—his live version of “Blue Monk,” recorded in San Francisco, pushed me even further, made me rethink the blues and what could be done with it: “I know there’s a blues in here somewhere. It must be—it says blues.”

By the end of ’65, the influence of all these new musical ideas was starting to show in the band’s repertoire—and Carabello was in the band. We were still playing the blues, but we were expanding what we played, just as we were expanding what we listened to. We were playing “Jingo,” by the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji—that was a staple of those Aquatic Park jams. I was happy to be playing and making music. I did it whenever I could, wherever we could practice, and whenever we could get gigs. When I wasn’t playing I was rehearsing or jamming. When I wasn’t doing that I was thinking about it or dreaming about it. It really was all I wanted to do; there was nothing else. School? That was a place I went to on weekdays—and sometimes not even then.

In junior high I felt I didn’t fit in because I was trying to figure out who I was. At Mission I didn’t fit in because I knew who I was and the school didn’t have anything for me. I could have taken music lessons, but in those days it was either classical music or marching-band stuff—nothing that had anything to do with electric guitars or blues. A lot of the classes I was taking didn’t make much sense, either. In my second year at Mission High, I remember being given a test that included some historical stuff in it—and it was all about US history, which I had not had a chance to study yet. But it was supposed to be an aptitude test—not a history test.

I got angry and told the teacher I was not going to take the test. “Why not? What’s wrong with it?” the teacher asked.

“Look at these questions. I just came here from Mexico. I can see already that I don’t know these answers. This test is for white people. Where are the questions about Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata?” I wouldn’t cooperate because it felt like the test was designed to make me fail—why couldn’t I answer questions that were relevant to my world and my experience?

I’m not sure now how that all ended, but I do remember that I had to explain it to the principal, too. It just felt like high school and I were not meant to happen. It wasn’t all bad, though. I had one teacher who inspired me to really think.

Mr. Paul Knudsen was my art teacher, and he had a funny way of doing things. He’d get the whole class into funky overalls, line us up in front of paper that was covering the walls from floor to ceiling, and tell us to dip these long metal wires—like thick guitar strings—into the paint and slap them against the paper. Or he’d give us long bamboo poles with brushes tied to the very end, and we’d have to paint from across the room. He was talented—he could look at you and draw a portrait without glancing down at the paper, and it would be great.

One day Mr. Knudsen asked another student to take over the class while he took me into another room to talk. “I took the liberty of looking at your grades since you’ve been here in the United States, and they’re bad,” he said. “But I noticed that you got good marks at James Lick in art, and you’re pretty good in my class. I’ve also heard that you’re a pretty good musician. Tomorrow we’re going to the Academy of Art—I really want you to see what you’re up against if you’re thinking of getting into painting or drawing or sculpting.”

He looked me dead in the eye. “The reason I’m telling you this is because the world is getting too crowded—there is no room for fifty percent. You must be one hundred and fifty percent in whatever you do, whether it is art, music, or anything else. Okay?” I was a little scared—he was right up in my face. When a teacher singles you out and corners you like that, you either get defensive or you open up.

No one, not even my parents or friends, had spoken to me like that before. The field trip the next day was interesting. But being in a drawing class with a naked model didn’t matter. I was thinking about his words. Mr. Knudsen opened me up.

I wish I could say that my next two years at Mission got better. But I would show up in the morning and sign in, then spend more time with my friends and music than I did in the classroom. That was pretty much my routine. I wanted to be living life, not studying it. But what Mr. Knudsen told me was the most important lesson I took away from my first year of high school.

That’s when I really started thinking that no matter what I did, it would have to be the best I could do. I could not be another Lightnin’ Hopkins or Gábor Szabó or Michael Bloomfield. They were already in the world. They had their own sounds and integrity. I needed to get mine together. I would have to be Carlos Santana and do it so well that no one would mistake me for anyone else.

In 2010 I came back to Mission High with my wife, Cindy, to help celebrate the school’s academic achievements. I think I spent more time in the school that day than I did in my last two years there. I visited various classrooms and other parts of the school, and they held a big assembly for all the students. When I spoke to them, I said, “Turn off MTV. Get into real life. Participate.” I hit them with the same kind of message that Mr. Knudsen had given me.

“If you can remember only one thing today, remember this: you are significant, you are meaningful, and you matter. The best is not ahead. The best is right now. Enjoy it, don’t hurt anyone, and live with supreme integrity.”

Then with some of the students, we jammed on “Oye Como Va” and “Europa.” We were plugged in and playing guitar in the Mission High auditorium, something I hadn’t done in almost fifty years.