CHAPTER 6

The Santana Blues Band, first time at the Fillmore, 1967. (L to R) Danny Haro, me, Gus Rodriguez, and Michael Carabello.

You know how you’ll be in a theater watching a movie so amazing that you don’t want it to end? How sometimes you have to pull your eyes away from the screen and focus on the seats in front of you or the popcorn on the floor just to remind yourself that it’s a movie?

That was what the ’60s were like in San Francisco. During those days it was a drag to have to sleep. So much was happening that I wanted to stay awake all the time. I didn’t want to miss anything. Everyone was feeling that way. For me, the ’60s created a thrust of compassion and grace that everybody was feeling at the same time. The decade propelled us out of the orbit we’d been in for generations and generations. If you believe in gravity and you drop something a hundred times, a hundred times it’s going to fall. But if you believe in grace as strongly as you believe in gravity, then a hundred out of a hundred times you’re going to get a miracle. I loved the ’60s because it made me believe in the law of grace.

When I talk about the ’60s I’m talking about the second half, really—from ’66 on. That’s when San Francisco became the epicenter of multidimensional consciousness—it was the place where you could dive into all this multiplicity. It wasn’t just music or clothes or politics or drugs or sex or colors—it was everything together. And everything changed—the way people were walking and talking and what they wanted to talk about. Instead of the world dragging its feet to catch up with the way people were thinking and feeling, a whole new generation was in sync. It was like that song by the Chambers Brothers—“Time Has Come Today.”

That Chambers Brothers album, The Time Has Come, was released later, in ’67, but to me it was a perfect snapshot of what was going on in ’66. On the cover the band wore striped bell-bottoms and brightly colored shirts. They had Afros and were a multiracial band. The title song was more than eleven minutes long—it was becoming increasingly common for songs at that time to be extended past the usual three or four minutes. Songs were starting to resemble jams and grooves—the music I was getting into. “Time Has Come Today” was soulful, and it was filled with the flavors of rock—feedback, lots of echo, heavy guitar, and a hip lyric. It fit the time: “My soul has been psychedelicized!”

Never mind the hair or the drugs or the beads. That wasn’t what made someone a hippie. A hippie was a rainbow warrior, a reincarnated American Indian. You know who was the original hippie? Jesus—the ultimate multidimensional, multicolor, nothing-but-love hippie. He never said, “It’s my way or the highway.” A hippie was not someone stuck in one perception.

I was the only one in my family you could really call a hippie. I let my hair grow long and smoked weed. Later I would leave home and live in a communal kind of situation in a house on a hill. I wanted to play my music—not other people’s songs, no matter how popular they were. Many times my parents looked at me as if I were crazy.

You know what I miss most from the ’60s? It was the idea of emphasizing individuality. The ’60s were important because it was a time when you were allowed to carry your own bumper sticker. The more different you were, the more people respected you.

I miss that. Nowadays friends pull me aside before I speak, or sometimes afterward. They warn me, “People are going to think you’re a hippie.”

“Thank you,” I say.

I was getting to know the San Francisco bands the way I got to know the scene in Tijuana—by knowing musicians and finding out where the gigs were. There were bands that came from electric blues—Chicago and Texas styles. There were electric bands that came from acoustic styles—bluegrass and folk. There were bands that were into Paul Revere and the Raiders, and wore old-style costumes or military uniforms. There were R & B bands influenced by Motown and James Brown that wore sharp suits and skinny trousers.

At the start of 1966, we didn’t cross paths too much with these groups. Many came from different parts of the Bay Area. I started to hear about the Grateful Dead, who came out of Palo Alto. There was the Jefferson Airplane—they helped start a new club called the Matrix in the Fillmore area. Later that year some members left and formed Moby Grape, and they got big fast. There were groups like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Carabello turned me on to a group called Sly & the Stoners, which had members from all over—San Francisco, Daly City, and Oakland. They later became Sly & the Family Stone, of course.

I want to say that we were all like one big family, but there were times when other musicians, especially those from the other side of town, looked at us like we were stray dogs who wanted to steal their bones. Even when we were headliners, that’s the truth. We were in alliance with Sly and bands from Oakland, and we—well, we were from the Mission. There was a racist element to it, but we were so young I think it was just a matter of competition and insecurities. It took a while for all of us to grow up and drop our guards. I will say from the start that some bands stood out because they were really, really cool. Jerry Garcia was very gracious and embracing. The guys in Quicksilver and Janis Joplin—always supportive.

The common denominator for all these bands was a guy from New York City who had been in San Francisco about as long as I had—Bill Graham. In ’66 he started producing shows that put all of us to work. We started to meet each other at Bill’s place, and never mind putting us all on equal footing—he put us in the stratosphere.

If anyone ever makes a movie about Bill Graham—and someone should—it would have to be called Bigger Than Life, because that’s exactly how he was. I saw him at the very beginning in San Francisco, just when he was starting, and I watched him become a legend around the world. He could do anything and would do everything. He was a promoter and event producer. He managed bands and ran record companies. He put together international tours and did things at the Fillmore with the same focus and intensity as he would do them in huge stadiums around the world. By the time of his death, he was the Cecil B. DeMille of rock, directing a cast of thousands. But he could also be a gaffer or a grip. “What the fuck is this?” he would scream at his people if he noticed something out of place. If no one was around, he’d move it himself or pick up the offending piece of trash. Then he’d go for the clipboard he always had with him, make a note, and move on to the next thing that needed fixing.

I have much to say about Bill because he was so important in my life and had such a huge effect on my career. If I had to bring it down to just one thing I would say this: he respected the music and the people who made it. He was the first promoter I knew who fed the bands—and he didn’t feed them just sandwiches, either. It might have been before or after the show, but he would always have catering ready for all the bands. Believe me, back then some of us really needed to be fed. He created a standard that put musicians first. He made sure the toilets were clean—backstage, too.

I remember seeing him at the Fillmore at the end of a show. Everyone was gone from the place except a few stragglers. He was doing one last round, closing doors, turning off lights. First one there, last to leave.

Bill was passionate about music, and he could be profane. I have never heard someone use the word schmuck as many times as Bill did. I didn’t even know it was a word until I met him. Nothing intimidated him. To him, confrontation was foreplay. He would stand on the street in New York City and yell at taxis for passing him by with the same energy and language that he would use to negotiate multimillion-dollar deals for the biggest acts and largest venues in the world.

Bill did not look for trouble—he looked for what was wrong or could be better. His thing was what was fair and right. I saw him argue at top volume with armed guards in Moscow who could not understand a word he was saying. In 1977 in Verona, Italy, I was surprised in a hotel lobby by a TV interviewer who wanted to know how I could be so spiritual when the concert tickets were so expensive. Bill stepped right in front of me and told me not to answer that question, then turned to the interviewer and said, “Ask the Italian promoter”—who was standing just a few feet away. Bill continued, “We had a contract saying what the ticket prices should be, but he added all these expenses and jacked up the price.” That guy ran for cover like a rat when you turn on the lights.

That same night, Bill jumped off the stage in the middle of our set to stop a riot. I’m not exaggerating. You could feel the excitement all around, this huge energy. We started our set with “Jingo,” and the crowd started pushing to the stage. For security, there was a line of policemen with machine guns right in front of the stage, which created a kind of DMZ that kept the audience yards away from the band—they still do that at many rock concerts.

The crowd was excited and running to get closer. It wanted to feel the music and boogie. Bill saw what was about to happen, and he hustled out right between us and got down in front of the guards, screaming at them to make room, to pull to the side, to let the crowd come down. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea. He defused the situation all by himself and stayed there for most of the show, policing the police.

His real name was Wolfgang Grajonca. It was a good thing he decided to call himself Bill Graham. He was a Jew from Eastern Europe who had escaped World War II and grown up in New York City. He spent a lot of time in Spanish Harlem, going to hear Tito Puente and other Latin groups, dancing salsa. He was a great ballroom dancer. He loved jazz, and when you look at the shows he used to do in the ’60s, you can see that he brought together all those passions in one place and turned on a whole generation with his good taste—Charles Lloyd, John Handy, Bola Sete, Gábor Szabó, and of course Miles Davis.

Bill trained as a waiter up in the Catskills, and around ’63 he moved to San Francisco for a straight job before he started working with the San Francisco Mime Troupe. He ran their shows and put together benefits with local bands to raise money. That’s how he got started, and he learned very fast about hippie culture from Chet Helms and other people—the light shows, the posters, the kind of music that hippies wanted to hear.

Bill still dressed like a square—he never was one of us in that way. He never let his hair grow long; he never wore beads or the full hippie attire. What he did was bring a businessman’s sense to consciousness-revolution culture when it was just getting started, and he did it in a way that preserved that culture’s spirit and intention.

In February of that year, Bill started booking nights on a regular basis at the Fillmore Auditorium, as it was then called, on Geary Street, not far from the Mission. They weren’t just concerts—not like any I had been to—and they weren’t club gigs, either. Each was a really special event that showcased two or three acts on the same night. Very soon after he started, he was putting together different styles of music on the same bill—rock, blues, jazz, even Brazilian. Then he started bringing in national groups like the Butterfield Blues Band, and local groups would open for them. Then he brought in British groups like the Who and Cream and Fleetwood Mac.

All the bands would play for five nights, Wednesday through Sunday—two sets a night. Usually a matinee on Sunday. The sound system was great, and there were special light shows going on behind the bands. The posters looked like glowing paintings—bright colors and weird letters. They were on lampposts all over town. You had to stop and check them out closely to figure out what they were saying. It was mysterious and fun.

Before I got to play for him, Bill’s concerts became my high school and college studies all rolled into one. I studied everything he put on at the Fillmore Auditorium and then the Carousel Ballroom—which he called the Fillmore West. You want to talk about a diploma? The Fillmore was where I really got my higher education. You can take that any way you want.

The Fillmore was like a sanctuary. At the time, things were feeling a bit desperate and very divided—Vietnam was starting to happen. I knew some people were getting drafted, and boom—they were gone. There was all that racial tension and rioting in black neighborhoods. At the Fillmore I could escape from all that. At the shows, there would be hippies and brothers and Mexicans. People were doing what they wanted—smoking, tripping. It was like a big, safe party.

I had no choice but to pay attention, man. How could I ignore it? I was in the middle of it. It started with the hippies in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood around 1965 or ’66. The Haight was just a dozen blocks from where I lived in the Mission, just past Buena Vista Park. Hippies’ hair was long, and their style of clothes was a different kind of hip. They were wearing things and colors that suddenly made turtlenecks and tight trousers and anything that was Italian seem old. I knew about weed from Tijuana, but in San Francisco people were smoking it openly. And they were taking a new drug called LSD. It was legal then. I mean, it wasn’t illegal—not yet.

In the ’60s, the worst thing you could call a person was not the n word or some other ethnic name. The worst thing you could call a person was square. Woo—that was a horrible thing to say to somebody, and it made me think of that guy in the Dylan song who walks into a room and tries hard to understand—“Ballad of a Thin Man.” The opposite of being a square was smoking pot and doing LSD.

Another big change: suddenly there was this thing called a love-in, and the movie Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner became passé. There were these young white chicks hanging with whomever they wanted—black guys, brown guys, older dudes, and younger ones, too, like me. Later, once I left home, it was on—with hippie chicks, groupies, whatever you want to call them. It was beautiful to discover that flow—the kind of connection that happens when a girl wants to share herself with you because she loves the way you play. Oh, man. That started in junior high school, but it was as much self-deception as self-discovery. How many times do you want to make it in the back of a VW van before you say, “Come on, let’s go hang out and talk”? Well, honestly, I wasn’t counting, either.

You could see office guys saying, “I want some of that,” loosening their ties and hanging out, smoking weed. The next thing you know they’re not square anymore, and they’re not going back to the office.

I think people tend to idolize certain places and times. My attitude then was that I actually didn’t care to be accepted, man. I didn’t want to fit into a clique—to be a hippie or a freak or this or that. I’ve always been anti-clique. For me, the music was it. The Fillmore was a place where the music was it, and you could be a hippie or not, and you could hear new music. The ’60s were really about experimenting with music. I didn’t like folk or bluegrass, but after a while I started realizing there was something even in the trippiest jams that came out of bluegrass playing.

I got together with my friends and went to as many of those shows at the Fillmore as I could afford or sneak into. In addition to Carabello, who was my age, I was hanging out with people who were a little older than I was. Sometimes I’d be a little short and ask for a dollar or two from the people in line so I could get in. One time I tried to sneak in with Carabello, but I got caught—he ran one way, and I went the other.

That’s how Bill and I first met! He looked at me and shook his head, because everyone was trying to get in for free. We knew he was the guy we had to convince. Once in a while, if I got him off by himself, I’d say, “Bill, you didn’t let me in on Wednesday or yesterday, but I have to see these guys at least once. I don’t have money, but if I had it I’d give it to you.” He’d look at me with his hand on his hip and not say anything. Then he’d jerk his head toward the door, and I knew I was in.

I don’t know if Bill remembered me from the days before I did concerts for him. Only later did I see that everything he did helped me understand the value of music—that concerts cost money and that musicians and everyone else who helps make them happen should get paid. He had this thing that started at the Fillmore. He’d go up to the mike and introduce the band, always in the same way: “Ladies and gentlemen, from my heart—Santana!”

That knocked me out every time. Then Bill would come up to us after the show and say, “You owe me money.”

“What? Why?”

“Every time I introduce you, you owe me five dollars.”

We’d just crack up. “Okay, man. Here you go.” But he was serious. He’d stand there and count it. It was a great lesson. Anyone who does something of value should get paid.

Bill wasn’t the only one in town who was doing happenings like the ones at the Fillmore. Chet Helms was a promoter who was producing the same kinds of concerts. Sometimes Bill and Chet worked together; sometimes Chet did his own concerts at the Avalon Ballroom, on Sutter. Those shows were easier to get into, a lot looser. Later I learned the way Chet paid bands was also kind of loose. A few times we played at the Avalon we got a big brick of weed. Then it’d be our job to sell it and get money for food and rent! To me, Bill Graham was 50 percent Dick Clark, 50 percent hippie. Chet Helms—he was hippie, hippie, hippie.

I spent most of ’66 catching what shows I could, still working at the Tic Tock, still playing gigs with Michael, Danny, and Gus, and still going to school—and when I say “going,” I mean getting marked as present, then going off and doing my thing.

We still didn’t have a name for the band, and I was still listening to new blues records and albums that pushed the blues further. John Mayall came out with the album The Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton. It was the first album that showed me that British players were checking out many of the same people I was—Otis Rush, Little Walter, and Freddie King—so I started paying attention to them, too.

The Butterfield Blues Band came out with their second album, East-West. It had Delta blues, like Robert Johnson, and Chicago electric blues, too, as the first album did. You could hear that the band had been listening to jazz as well—they did tunes like Cannonball Adderley’s “Work Song,” in which the harmonica played the same line the trumpet and saxophone played on the original. The title track was a groove that stayed mostly on one chord and had an Indian flavor with a four-beat bass pattern. I could hear the connections that were going on in the music. The song had a vibe like the Chico Hamilton and Gábor Szabó stuff I was getting into, but it was more in the electric blues pocket and was purely instrumental—the electric guitar was up-front and center stage. I could also hear how other guitarists were working it together with electric blues—I knew Bloomfield’s solos on that album note for note.

I wasn’t the only one listening to that album—you could tell many brains were being expanded by the same music. People were opening themselves and digging deeper into the music. East-West was a model for a lot of Bay Area bands. They could hear that the vocabulary of Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan was not that far from the vocabulary of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. The mind is a creature of labeling and encapsulating and filing things into categories. But this was music that was begging the soul to tell the mind to shut the hell up, turn up the volume, and not worry about what to call anything.

We had been exclusively a blues band at the beginning, but in ’66 we started doing “Work Song” and “East-West” in our shows, adding them to the older R & B numbers we did, such as Ray Charles’s “Mary Ann.” We were still jamming for ourselves and a few friends more than we were playing gigs. We’d get together in friends’ basements or play outside in the Presidio or in the Panhandle, near Golden Gate Park—anywhere we could make music without getting chased away by the cops or getting yelled at because of the noise.

Then we ran into Chet Helms, who told us he had heard us playing in the Presidio. “Yeah, I used to hear you guys in the park—you’re good. Why don’t you try out for the guy who auditions bands in the afternoons at the Avalon?” We went over there, and the guy running the auditions was a low-level folk musician with one of the jug bands in the Bay Area. He stopped us in the middle of our first tune. I think it was “Jingo.”

“No, no. This won’t do. You guys are in the wrong place. We don’t want that kind of music here.”

The guy wasn’t even listening to our music—he was judging it against some idea of what he thought should be played at the Avalon. I called him out. “Hey, man—you play kazoo or washboard or whatever. You call that an instrument? You call yourself a musician? What the fuck do you know about music?” I was ready to get into it with him. My guys had to hold me back. That was the end of that audition.

It didn’t matter. By the summer of ’66 the band was getting better, and I was getting a reputation. At one of our outdoor jams in the Panhandle I was taking a solo. I opened my eyes and recognized Jerry Garcia and Michael Bloomfield in the audience—they were checking me out, nudging each other with their elbows, and smiling about something. Another time I ran into some guys who told me they lived in Daly City. They were looking for a guitar player and had heard about me. Would I come over and play with them? Sure, man.

But when I got to their place I said, “What kind of music do you guys play?” I should have asked before they picked me up. “The Who.”

“Really? Drive me back. I thought you guys liked the blues.”

Another band wanted me to join up with them, and their thing was the 13th Floor Elevators—psychedelic stuff. “No; sorry. I can’t. I don’t like that music, man.”

I was still a teenager, doing the teenager thing. I was confident in my taste in music, and I could be cocky about my playing. The first time I ever spoke with Michael Bloomfield, I acted like a punk. It was at the Fillmore after one of the Butterfield shows, and he was standing around with a few people adoring him, and I walked right through the circle and said, “One of these days you’re going to know who I am, and I’m going to cut you!”

There was silence; everybody just stepped back. Michael looked at me and smiled and without a pause said, “I want you to—I encourage you to. That’s how this music keeps going.” Later on I found out that Michael was a very sweet guy, and I wondered what monster came out of me back then to make me say that. Definitely some of it was the same insecurity other young musicians were feeling at the time, but I felt I had to apologize to Michael again and again, especially when he picked me to play on his live album with Al Kooper. I kept saying, “I’m still so embarrassed. I must have been fucked up.” He always came back with a positive reply that was typical of his attitude: “Man, I respect you for speaking your mind. It’s okay. I still want you to cut me!”

It’s probably true that I was fucked up—by that time I was starting to party. At one of those outdoors gigs playing at the Presidio, I had met two guys—Stan Marcum and Ron Estrada. They were two beatnik dudes, a bit older than we were, and they always hung out at North Beach. They just really dug our music. Stan was a barber, and Ron worked as a bail bondsman, and we all got friendly. They had a house together near 18th and Castro, where I would hang out, and they would play music all the time. They introduced me to Bob Dylan’s songs, showed me how to listen to the Beatles, and what LSD was. And later they became Santana’s first managers.

Stan and Ron were fans, but they were also trying to help me out with my music. What did they know about management or getting the right musicians together? Well, we were in tune with each other, and that’s what mattered. We would be talking, and one of them would have an idea, and they’d tell it to me—like they thought I should join another band that was going around at the time. The band’s name was Mocker Manor, and they needed a guitar player. I told them I didn’t know—what kind of music did they do? Did they play the blues? What does the band’s name mean? They couldn’t tell me.

The name came from something Ringo Starr said in the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night. So we went to hear them and they were wearing mod sort of clothes and their music was going toward a Grateful Dead thing. They had a bassist who was really good, but they were playing a blues that sounded like early Rolling Stones. I gave it a try and wanted it to work. But every time we practiced a tune we’d get it down one way, then they’d go smoke a joint and forget everything we had just done. They’d look at me with that “Would you just relax?” expression. “Relax? We’re wasting time. Why don’t we learn the song once and just get it right?”

Stan and Ron gave me this look like, “Lighten up!” They decided to try to fix me. They all went out for lunch and left me behind with a big fat joint—like half the length of a drumstick. My assignment was to sit there, listen to some music, and light it up. I remember I put on the Yardbirds album that has “For Your Love” on it. I started smoking it, and it smelled good—not like the skunk you get today that leaves you with a headache. After a few minutes I could feel everything becoming… softer. Colors seemed brighter, and all the parts of the music were clearer. I know some people don’t necessarily feel it the first time they smoke. I definitely did.

I immediately saw what I was doing—being a dictator with the band, going against the grain of the music. I realized I needed to accept and embrace a different approach from the one I thought was working. I was on the wrong side of that mind-set. Not everything needed to be thought out and over-rehearsed.

I didn’t stay long with Mocker Manor, and Stan and Ron agreed with me. “You’re right. This band is not going anywhere.” But I did start lighting up. Getting high on weed is not like dropping acid or taking peyote or doing cocaine—or shooting heroin, which I did twice before I stopped.

People who smoke don’t necessarily want to do cocaine and heroin and crack. Marijuana still carries this incorrect negative stigma that goes back to the 1930s, and parents still call it the devil’s weed to scare their kids so they don’t get lost.

But we hippies had a saying: “You can’t find yourself till you lose yourself.” You have to let go of everything that you’ve been taught and find a way of being happy with your own existence and bless all your imperfections. It’s a way of seeing your own ego, pulling all the levers and controlling your behavior, like some Wizard of Oz behind a screen. But you can see the feet sticking out from under the curtain and say, “The jig is up. I’m no longer emotionally invested in allowing you to have power over me.”

I noticed when I started smoking weed that some people use it to escape and some people use it to find themselves. I also noticed that drugs of any kind didn’t necessarily make someone hip or deep. Cocaine can amplify your personality, but as Bill Cosby said, “What if you’re an asshole to begin with?” Grass and peyote, those are medicines from Mother Earth. Crack and heroin and meth, those are laboratory drugs, man-made—they can imprison you, turn you into a serious habit monster.

I’m not promoting anything but the freedom to be real and have self-perception. Weed gave me an aerial view—it opened up my senses to multidimensional multiplicity. In ’66, I started smoking a lot. It was easy to get and wasn’t that expensive. I could smoke and function on the street and play music. But it was illegal, so I found ways of stashing it on myself and hiding it at home.

My sisters still laugh when they remember the night I came home and was scratching my head and two joints dropped out of my long hair onto the floor! I don’t know if my mom didn’t see them or just didn’t want to see them. Maria scooped them up and gave them to a friend of hers who got high. Another time I left some weed in the hem of the white curtains at home. My mom, the clean freak, washed them, and they came out with a green stain along the bottom. She had no idea how that happened.

That was a sign I needed to eject myself from living at home. I couldn’t be listening to my music and smoking weed and coming home early in the morning with the family around. Another sign was that Tony had already left home by then to start his family, and so had Laura. I was nineteen at the end of that summer, but I stayed in my mom’s house for another year, still going to Mission High in the morning but then going off and doing my thing. And hanging out with Stan and Ron at their place until six in the morning. Meanwhile they were turning me on to more new music. We were listening to the Beatles and a whole lot of Bob Dylan.

Most of the time I was focused on playing with Danny and Gus, trying new things, and meeting other musicians and jamming. I didn’t know what I was looking for. It’s like when you go shopping for a present and you don’t know what you want to get, but you know it when you find it. But I did know what I didn’t like and what I did not want to play. I knew we weren’t going to be part of the San Francisco sound. We called that Hippieland, and we really tried to avoid it. We were listening to some really great music then—Hendrix, the Doors, the Beatles—but there wasn’t much in San Francisco that could stand up to that. Too much of it felt kind of phony almost as soon as it got popular. The whole country was going, “Yeah, baby; groovy and peace!” Sammy Davis Jr. was in a Nehru jacket and beads. Too many people were jumping on that wagon just for the ride. We had our own direction in music.

Stan, Ron, and I went to as many shows at the Fillmore Auditorium as we could that year. I was still not 100 percent sure of my English and was speaking with a thick accent. But in Stan I had someone who could speak for me when I got to the door with no money. He had no experience as a manager, but he knew how to talk to people. Nothing stopped him—he was bold, and that was a side to him I really loved. One time Charles Lloyd was playing the Fillmore, and we were there just looking up in awe at him and his band—Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Ron McClure. Stan felt he had to say something, so just before they went on he went up to Charles and said something like, “Charles Lloyd, play it one damn time for the world, man!” He just smiled and did exactly that—played his ass off. Back then I could never have done that—those guys scared me!

One Sunday afternoon in October, Stan did his thing and spoke up for me, and after that everything started to change.

The Butterfield Blues Band was on a bill with Jefferson Airplane and Big Mama Thornton. She’s the blues singer who first sang “Hound Dog” before Elvis had the hit and “Ball and Chain” before Janis did it. We had to be there. That Sunday they were doing a matinee, and Stan and I got there early and saw that Paul Butterfield was not going to be playing that night. He was totally out of it—tripping on acid, wandering around in his bare feet, watching the wall like it was a TV. He hadn’t slept all night.

Onstage they were getting a jam together. Michael was directing things and playing organ because their keyboard player, Mark Naftalin, hadn’t showed up. Jerry Garcia and some of the guys from Jefferson Airplane, including Jorma Kaukonen, were going to play. Stan and I could see Michael’s guitar onstage and noticed that no one was playing it. Stan decided to take charge and see what he could make happen. He went up to Bill. “Hey, man, is it all right if my Mexican friend over there plays a little guitar with those guys?” Bill shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not in charge of that. Go ask Bloomfield.”

Bloomfield looked at Stan and said, “Where is he?” Stan pointed to me. To this day I have no idea if Michael recognized me from that time I had challenged him. It didn’t matter. His answer had the same vibe I felt that first time. “Come on, man. Grab my guitar—plug it in.”

I got up onstage. They started into a blues—what else? “Good morning, little schoolgirl. / Can I come home with you?” Garcia played a solo, then they turned to me. I closed my eyes and hit it… bam.

We finished the tune, and I was smiling. It had felt good to be on that stage, to play with musicians who had it together and kept a good beat. Afterward people came up to me—“What’s your name? You have a band?” I told them who I was, that I was part of a group, and that we didn’t have a name. Then Bill came up to me. “Here’s my phone number—call me. I have a couple of dates open.”

That was it—we were going to play the Fillmore, and we’d be on those posters! Now we really needed a band name.

I did not know how important one blues solo could be—and it’s not just that Bill Graham invited me to play for him. Around a week later I was washing dishes at the Tic Tock when one of the waiters came into the kitchen and said, “Hey, Carlos, someone wants to talk to you.”

A young guy I’d never seen before put his head through the opening to the kitchen. “You’re Santana?” He was looking at me, up to my elbows in soap. “Man, I heard you the other day with Bloomfield. That was some great playing. Listen, I live in Palo Alto. I sing and play guitar with some guys, and we need a guitar player. We’re going to jam tonight. I got my car outside. I think you’ll really enjoy the band.”

Tom Fraser was a singer and guitarist who had been looking to put together a band and was at the Fillmore Auditorium that afternoon. I was open to anything. “Okay. Let me finish up here—I’ll go.” Next thing I know we’re in Mountain View—the other side of Palo Alto—which is like the ghetto. Out in some old farmhouse in the fields near the shoreline. They had instruments set up, including a Hammond organ. That impressed me right away. I was already obsessed with the jazz guys playing Hammond organ—Jimmy Smith, Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff. That’s when I first heard George Benson, playing in McGriff’s band. Later he became Miles’s first guitarist.

Danny, Gus, and I had found our first keyboard player earlier that year and had been working with him for around two months. He looked like that Where’s Waldo? guy—we called him Weirdo. He played a Farfisa, and I liked it because we could get that Question Mark and the Mysterians, “96 Tears” kind of sound—and also do songs by Sam the Sham and Sir Douglas Quintet.

Out at the farmhouse I started plugging in, and the organ player came over and we started talking. His name was Gregg Rolie. I remember thinking, “I know this guy.” I had seen Gregg before, before the Fillmore opened, at the Longshoreman’s Hall in Fisherman’s Wharf. It was bigger than a club but not as big as the Fillmore, which hadn’t opened yet. Gregg played there with a band called William Penn and His Pals. They would dress like Paul Revere and the Raiders and similar groups—in uniforms with floppy sleeves and tricorn hats, like the kind we’d see on Shindig! on TV. I remember Danny, Gus, and I were laughing at that—it never felt like anything more than a novelty, a first-kiss kind of thing. That all came and went really quickly.

I had a joint with me, and Gregg was drinking a beer, and we started talking. We clicked even before we started playing. It turned out he was a big jazz-organ fan, too, and we were both listening to the same kind of black music.

We jammed on “Comin’ Home Baby,” a tune Herbie Mann had a hit with that I knew from the radio. It was one of those groove kind of things, not complicated, that came out around the time “The Sidewinder” and other jazz tunes were starting to infiltrate mainstream radio—what we now call crossover. Gregg was listening to that music, too, and he could hang with a groove. Then we played “As the Years Go Passing By” by Albert King—a blues guitar piece, really. But Gregg knew the words to that and liked to sing it. I could tell he was a good singer, and we needed one in the band.

The noise we were making must have woken up some neighbors. Then came the cops with their sirens going, like we were breaking into a bank. They found us with our instruments, the air smelling of dope. One of them was ready to just throw the cuffs on us and haul us away. The other one started asking questions, telling his partner to relax.

“Whose house is this?”

We pointed at Tom.

“What’s the name of your band?”

“We’re not really a band.”

“Well, you sound pretty good.”

“Uh, thanks.”

“Listen, you guys are playing a little loud. I know it’s not that late. Can you bring it down anyway and put that other stuff away?”

“Okay.”

Meeting a polite cop like that was like a blessing at the start of the partnership that became Santana. Here was another angel interceding when we needed it. He gave us a thumbs-up and looked the other way when he could have taken us all in, which the other cop was itching to do.

And he was right: we did sound good.

Playing with a good keyboard player is like having a nice, soft bed to lie down on, with a big pillow. That was Gregg. Gregg and I started talking and hanging around, and we found we had more things in common than Jimmy Smith. Later I told Danny and Gus about the guys I’d just played with, but when we met, Danny and Gus immediately didn’t like them. They remembered William Penn and His Pals, too. “We don’t want to hang around with them; they’re squares.” I couldn’t argue—they did look like suburban kids from Palo Alto. Carabello said, “We’re going to have to dress these guys better.”

I liked Gregg and Tom, but Danny and Gus were pissed because they felt I turned my back on them. I’ve been accused of many things many times, but this was the first time I was made to feel I was turning my back on Mexicans. It didn’t matter—all I could see was what the band needed, and these guys from Palo Alto had it.

Gregg liked us. I think that part of what endeared us to him is that we were really, really strange—Carabello and I were always kind of going at it and being crazy, but we had a camaraderie. He felt it was good for him to be immersed in the music that was playing around the Mission District. To us he was rich, but he was actually just middle-class Palo Alto. He cracked up when he found out we thought that he was rich, but where he grew up was very different from the Mission, that’s for sure.

For the next few months, we were a band. Gregg was our new lead singer, and we started adding songs he liked to sing. I give him credit for bringing the band back to other-side-of-the-tracks music, like Les McCann, Eddie Harris, and Ramsey Lewis stuff. Tom was a good rhythm guitarist, and he was into the blues, but even though he was the guy who’d brought me out, something did not work with us in the end. There was a side of him that wanted to do songs by Buffalo Springfield and the Grass Roots—rock with a hillbilly thing in it. We had to tell him, “No; we don’t care for that music,” and so we let him go after a few months. But Tom gets the credit for being the catalyst that brought Gregg and me together for the first time.

Rock groups were starting to show the same influences I had been hearing on those Gábor Szabó and Charles Lloyd albums—Eastern flavors and groove rhythms and strange scales that sounded Indian. It all became part of that psychedelic sound in rock. The year before, the Byrds had that song “Eight Miles High,” which had a middle part filled with those ideas on guitar, and the Beatles and the Stones had used sitar on songs—it was all in the air.

Then all of a sudden, that January, the Doors came out with their first album, and it had a heavier sound and lots of jazz feel, and guitarist Robby Krieger was mixing the blues with that same kind of drone that Gábor had. They were taking the basic blues—like Willie Dixon’s “Back Door Man” and other songs—and turning it into an entire movie, not just a story but a big, dark novel. You could tell they were dropping acid and listening to jazz—John Coltrane and Miles Davis—and Ravi Shankar. You could hear it in tunes like “Light My Fire” and “The End.” You could tell because the melodies and rhythms were not clunky anymore, like elephants or buffaloes trying to dance. Parts of the music were very delicate, like the group was working in satin and silk, and it moved smoothly, like a ballerina.

The Doors started what I call shaman music, or LSD music. Music that casts a spell and transports the listener to a place beyond time and gravity, beyond problems. The words are for real, not empty boxes. It invites the masses to move up to a multidimensional level. As Jimi Hendrix said, “I didn’t mean to take up all your sweet time / I’ll give it right back one of these days.” He was saying, “I’ll borrow your mind for right now—you’ll get it back when I’m finished.”

A shaman knows how to get out of the way and let the spirits use him—to be a conduit. The best music of John Coltrane? He didn’t play it; it played him.

Around the same time, the new John Mayall record, A Hard Road, came out. Peter Green had taken over for Clapton, and his notes were like B. B.’s, but he already had his own phrasing—legato. He was just letting the notes hang. His sound grabbed me in a headlock and wouldn’t let me go. And his tone! On one track called “The Supernatural”—not to be confused with my album Supernatural—Green’s guitar sound was on the edge of feedback. That track left its mark on me. I think it was the first instrumental blues that showed me that the guitar could really be the lead voice, that sometimes a singer is not necessary. And I loved that tone.

Back then I was still learning about all this music—John Mayall, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors. I didn’t know how really special all that music would become. I didn’t yet have the superlatives or the language to talk about these musical orgasms. What I knew then was physical orgasm. You can’t be in control when you’re having an orgasm. That’s what it is—letting go of control. When you have an orgasm musically, you surrender to the music. Normally, only a very few musicians on the planet can make that happen, but in the ’60s it seemed like there were many. We were busy searching for that surrender, scuffling gigs at other places—like the Rock Garden, on Mission near Geneva. It was one of the first real rock clubs in the Mission. There weren’t that many places we could choose to play in unless we could say we were a professional band. I never considered Santana professional until after our first album came out. Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaría, Wes Montgomery, and Miles Davis—they were professional.

The bad news happened at the end of February. I went to school one morning, and everybody was getting tested for TB. What’s that? Tuberculosis. Uh, okay—what’s that? Everyone got a little shot in the arm, and if your body reacted a certain way, then you had TB, and that was serious. I thought, “No problem”—I wasn’t feeling bad, and I wasn’t coughing, unless I was smoking weed. Suddenly the test came back positive. Next thing I know they were treating me like a pincushion, shooting me full of penicillin and streptomycin. Then they took me off to San Francisco General, putting me in quarantine for who knows how long, in a bed surrounded by sick people, and I wasn’t even feeling tired. To this day I think it happened because of the water in Tijuana and my year there on my own.

My parents didn’t protest or anything. When they heard what happened, they trusted the authorities to do what was best, which meant that within days I was just so bored. I was there for more than three months! They would run test after test, shoot me with medicine, take X-rays of my lungs, then show me the spots. Then they’d tell me I was doing well, but still I had to stay. What kept me there was not the idea that I needed to get better: I stayed because the doctors convinced me that if I were outside I might infect other people, and I didn’t want to do that.

I knew I had to go through with it—take the medication and let my lungs rest. I watched a lot of TV—I remember after being there a month, I was watching when the 1967 Grammy Awards show came on, with Liberace and Sammy Davis Jr.—all this corny stuff. Suddenly Wes Montgomery was playing. That was the first time I saw him play, and it made an impression. I started listening to his music—“Goin’ Out of My Head,” “Windy,” “Sunny”—another jazz guy doing the pop songs of the ’60s. He had such a different guitar sound, that deep kind of voice that made me feel like someone was touching my head, saying, “Aw, everything’s going to be all right,” and I believed it.

Some people came by to see me, including Stan and Ron, my dad, and my sister Irma. Carabello brought me some books to read, including a Time-Life science book called The Mind that I remember liking. He also brought me a reel-to-reel tape deck with headphones so I could listen to my favorite albums on tape, like Gábor Szabó’s. A few weeks later I had gone through all that. I complained that I was going crazy, so Carabello said, “Well, I got a couple of joints and some LSD.” Like an idiot, I took the acid later that night, right there in the hospital.

I could look around me and see older people who were lifelong smokers and had lung problems, and their skin was all yellow and their fingers were orange from all the cigarettes they smoked. It felt like everybody was dying to the left and right, and there I was, tripping in the middle of all that. A movie came on TV—The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, with Glenn Ford, about the Nazis in World War II. I got so deeply into that movie I was thinking, “Whoa: I’ve got to get back under the covers and close the curtains.”

The next day Ron came over, and I was still hiding. “Hey, man, how you doing?” I said, “Man, I need to get the hell out of here, and you guys are going to help me out. Come back this afternoon, bring me some clothes, and I’ll get rid of this freaking hospital robe they got me in. We’ll get in the elevator, stop between floors, I’ll change, and we’ll leave.” So that’s what we did—I did my Clark Kent thing and got out. I heard they were looking for me for a couple of weeks, because by law I wasn’t supposed to leave. They didn’t find me, because I didn’t go back home. I left the hospital and moved in with Stan and Ron, and that was the beginning of another long break from my family, which put even more distance between my mom and me.

Two good things came out of that stay in the hospital… well, three things. First I got healthy, and I never had a trace of TB again.

The second thing was that while I was in the hospital the people at Mission High knew where to find me—I wasn’t going anywhere. They told me I could work with a tutor while I was in the hospital. If I did the work and got passing grades they’d let me graduate. So they sent this guy over in the mornings, we would talk, and he’d leave me some books to read for the next day, mostly on American history. He would come back, and I’d take some tests. A lot of the testing took the form of his asking me questions and my explaining what I got from the reading.

I liked the tutor. He knew my situation—that I had been held back because of my English and that I was nineteen and still in high school. One day he looked at me in my hospital robe and said, “Out of something bad came good, because you’re not in a uniform carrying a gun. Those people would have really made it hard for you—you probably would be in Vietnam now.” I hadn’t even thought about that, but he was right. By all rights I was old enough to be inducted. But because I was still enrolled at Mission High, the draft couldn’t get me—yet.

Staying out of the war was the third good thing that came out of getting sick. Around a year later I got the notice to report to the induction center in Oakland. I remember that place—all these young guys lining up and sitting down, filling in forms, and taking tests and sweating. You could smell the fear in there. One brother I saw had his arms crossed. His eyes were yellow from meningitis or something. He was refusing to even pick up the pen. He looked at the man and said, “Hey, man, I ain’t doin’ nothing. I don’t have a beef with the Vietcong. You, honky, you’re the one that’s fucking with me in the streets. You give me a gun, I’m going to shoot your ass.” I was thinking, “Whoa, he’s not going into the army—maybe some other place, but not the army.”

Then a guy in uniform came up to me and said, “What’s your story? Why aren’t you doing the test?” I gave him a letter from the doctor. By then I had been back to the hospital and submitted to a few more tests. After that the doctors decided I could just take some medicine at home. This is how ignorant the guy was: he opened the letter, read it, and went, “Tuberculosis, huh? Where did you catch it—Thirteenth and Market?” He made it out to be some kind of sexual disease and was insulting my neighborhood. I was thinking, “I’m supposed to follow you?” Shit. That’s when I knew I had to keep as far away from military service as I could if the army was putting people like this in charge. I had friends at Mission High who did go over to Vietnam and never came back. I was lucky—I walked out of there, and that was that.

To this day I appreciate that the guys at Mission gave me that one last chance to graduate. I read the books and answered the tutor’s questions just well enough to graduate that June. I was allowed to go to the ceremony at the Civic Center as a courtesy, but for me it really wasn’t a big deal. I saw all the other families there with their kids and girls carrying flowers and stuff. I didn’t have the cap or gown, and my family didn’t come. No one made a fuss about it, and that was okay with me. What I remember most from that last day of school was a bunch of us students sitting in the park near Mission, smoking a joint and talking about our plans. One kid was saying, “I’m going to help my dad at the warehouse.” Another guy said, “I’m going to join the marines. What are you going to do, Santana?”

I said, “I’m going to be on stage, playing with B. B. King and Buddy Guy and people like that.” People just started laughing like squirrels. “Hey, man, you’ve been smoking too much of this.”

What? I didn’t say I wanted to be B. B. or even be a star like him. I just wanted to be next to him and be able to play with him. I didn’t know how far I could get, but that was my goal. I had the feeling that the hand of destiny was touching me again, as it had the first time I heard an electric guitar playing the blues. My expectations of what I was destined to do transcended everything I experienced in my time at Mission High.

I just looked at them. “Well, you asked me.”

It wasn’t such a big dream. We already had a gig at the Fillmore Auditorium—the same place where all the blues legends were starting to play in the Bay Area. My band had to wait for two months to play a show for Bill Graham while I got over the TB, and then Bill booked us to open for the Who and the Loading Zone—a Friday and Saturday night in the middle of June. We had no idea how big the Who were going to get, and the Loading Zone was a local group. What mattered most to us was that we were finally going to get to play the most important venue in San Francisco. Our name wasn’t even on the poster, but at least we had a name.

It was Carabello who came up with the idea. Playing the blues was the thing we were most proud of, and the word blues was in the names of some our favorite groups—the Butterfield Blues Band, the Bluesbreakers. He went through our last names—Haro Blues Band, Rodriguez Blues Band, Carabello Blues Band. He thought my last name had the most ring to it. Santana Blues Band became our name for the next year and a half. It wasn’t that I was suddenly the leader. We were a leaderless band—not because we sat down one day and decided that, but because that’s how it was.

We were already mixing other music in with the blues. We rehearsed and got our set together—“Chim Chim Cheree,” “Jingo,” “As the Years Go Passing By,” “Work Song.” Our set was short compared to what we would be doing in a few years—just thirty or forty minutes.

The first night was great. It went by very fast—and not only because I had started taking uppers at the time. I was so nervous and wired that I broke three strings that night. I didn’t have any more strings with me, and we were in the middle of the set, so I looked around and grabbed the only guitar I could see—a beat-up Strat that was Pete Townshend’s! I saw Keith Moon looking at me, and he smiled when he saw my situation. “Pete won’t mind—go ahead.” He was very encouraging. Bill Graham was, too. He liked what he heard, and he said we should open for some more shows that were coming up.

Saturday night was terrible. We got to the Fillmore late, really late. Both Danny’s and Gus’s parents kept them late at work, and they were my ride. Man, I was so angry. But not nearly as pissed as Bill Graham was when we got to the Fillmore. He was standing at the top of the steps—the old Fillmore had a staircase that you had to haul your equipment up to get to the auditorium. His arms were folded, and he looked as big and mean as Mr. Clean, the Jolly Green Giant, and Yul Brynner in The King and I. He saw us trying to get our equipment up the stairs as fast as possible, and he started yelling. “Don’t even bother. You will never fuckin’ work for me again.” He started cursing us, our ancestors, and the children we didn’t have yet. He started using words I’d never heard before but would get to know because of him.

I was thinking, “Oh, shit, man. We really fucked up.” We had—and just like that, we were banned from any Bill Graham concerts for a long time. He didn’t even want us coming in to check out other bands, but that couldn’t keep me away. I remember going home after seeing Jimi Hendrix perform at the Fillmore that summer, shaking my head and telling myself that what I just heard and saw was real. I still have never felt like I did the first time I heard him.

When Eric Clapton and Cream came to town in August and played the Fillmore, I had to sneak in to see them, too. I had to—I had no choice. I still knew how to do that through the fire escape. I wanted to see if their live show would match the sound on their records, which was so different from the Chicago blues bands that they were coming from. Bigger and more bombastic.

It did. Cream looked big in their platform shoes, and they sounded bigger. Clapton had that double stack of Marshalls behind him, Jack Bruce sounded like a freight train, and Ginger Baker looked like some kind of weird creature with his red hair, playing those double bass drums. On tunes like “Spoonful” and “Hey Lawdy Mama,” it wasn’t just electric blues or blues-rock anymore. They were hitting with the energy of Buddy Rich—which made sense when I found out that Ginger and Jack had experience playing jazz. Catching those first Cream shows was like someone who had only experienced black-and-white TV seeing a CinemaScope movie for the first time.

Anyway—the Santana Blues Band was on Bill’s blacklist. I couldn’t believe this happened. I never missed gigs. Being late was not in my DNA. My mom and dad taught me that if you make an appointment, being punctual means being there a half hour early. I’m that way now, and my band knows it. If you want to get my stomach upset, show up late to a rehearsal or a sound check or a show. I still can’t stand it.

I knew how parents can be, but at a certain point when you know where you’re supposed to be going, you don’t let them stand in your way. You tell them, “I made a commitment. I need to be over there.” For me that was the end. I was thinking, “Your priorities are not my priorities—your priority is to please your mom and your dad, and you’ll end up putting that first for the rest of your life.” How could making tortillas or cutting meat be more important? A gig at the Fillmore in 1967 was a major thing for any musician, and it was the biggest thing in the world to me.