CHAPTER 8

The classic Santana lineup, 1969. (L to R) Michael Shrieve, me, Gregg Rolie, José “Chepito” Areas, David Brown, and Michael Carabello.

Santana was in New York City in 1970, and that was when we really, truly understood what clave was—when we got that word into our vocabulary. A bunch of us went to hear Ray Barretto at the Corso, a dance club on East 86th Street where all the Latin stars played, including Larry Harlow and Tito Puente. There were moments when Ray would suddenly stop the band, but the audience would already be clapping and keeping the rhythm going, hitting that clave time: ba-ba-bah—ba-bah, ba-ba-bah—ba-bah.

It was like seeing something on the wall you had never seen before but had always been there and being told, “Well, that’s what keeps the wall together.”

“Oh, now I see—that’s the foundation for all Latin music.”

Then at one point Ray grabbed the microphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have in the audience—”

I was thinking, “Uh-oh. Here it comes,” because here we were, right on their turf. The clave can be like a sacrament in church to some people; to them, “Latin” can only be the music of people like Machito, Mario Bauzá, and Tito Puente. But what Ray said was:

“—some people who have taken our music to another level, to all four corners of the world, and their music represents us very well—Santana!”

You can take all the awards and accolades in places like Rolling Stone and The New York Times that we started getting—you can keep all that stuff. When Ray Barretto said something complimentary like that, there was nothing better. We had gotten props from one of the masters.

This is my thing: clave should be honored and understood and respected for what it is, but the traditional definition of clave is not all there is. When I hear Buddy Rich or Tony Williams play Afro-Cuban or Latin music, I don’t think they’re honoring it less than Tito Puente or Mongo Santamaría does, even though Buddy and Tony don’t play strict clave—and that’s their choice. But if you look at the clave as something that doesn’t change, then it becomes like a ball and chain. It might be a golden one, it might be studded with diamonds, but with that attitude you’re locked into one way of doing it.

Santana was never a purebred when it came to music—we were always a mutt. We were using some of the clave but not the complete conception, and we were using other ideas from Latin music. It took almost ten years for that stuff to go away about Santana not doing the clave right. When it did, it wasn’t because things changed with our music. It was how people heard it that changed. We still have congas and timbales, and Santana still does not play clave in a strict sense. We play Santana.

In 1967, the world heard about San Francisco. We already knew it, but Monterey Pop had been huge—it helped Hendrix go worldwide, it got Janis Joplin and Big Brother signed to a record contract, and it put the spotlight on San Francisco. A year later it was like the whole world was visiting the city or even moving there. Bill Graham moved his concerts to the Fillmore West so more people could come. New clubs were opening up around town. Record companies were sending people to hang around and check out bands and sign them up. We didn’t see them, but we knew they were there.

The summer of ’68 was when everything started to roll for us. That was when we started calling ourselves just one word: Santana. You can see it on the posters from that summer. Bill was the guy who got down and lit the fuse for us. Everything that came after that happened in some way because of him: our record deal, our first time in a studio, our first trip to the East Coast. Playing Woodstock. And it all happened very, very fast, beginning with Bill bringing us back to play for him—playing the Fillmore West the first month it opened.

Bill put us on the bill with the Butterfield Blues Band—Michael Bloomfield wasn’t in the band anymore. The week went great—the music felt good, but most of all it was a relief to be back in Bill Graham’s embrace. He was such an important person in San Francisco to have on your side. I was gun-shy from our last experience with him, but I know he noticed that I was with a new band and that our music was more conscious, that we had our own sound going on. His ears could hear where we were coming from. Later he’d say we were the perfect child of two parents—B. B. King and Tito Puente.

Bill forgot to mention some of our other musical ancestors, but that was okay. Overnight Santana went from being the band that showed up late to the band that was on call. He was constantly calling us—“Hey, I need you guys to play tomorrow night, man. Procol Harum got busted!” Or “This freaking group canceled.” We weren’t headliners yet, but our name was on the poster next to national names like Steppenwolf, the Staple Singers, and Chicago—on the bottom, anyway. We got a reputation opening for every band that came through, and we put it to many of them. I think they could feel how good we were, that they should look out for us. We were capturing the headliners’ fans—they were getting on our train. I think it was somebody in the Grateful Dead who said, “It’s suicide if Santana opens for you. They’ll steal the show.”

It was great for Bill, too, because we weren’t getting paid nearly as much as other bands, and we were local. No hotel rooms or transportation costs. The trade-off was that we were getting a lot of exposure. Bill actually said that out loud a few times to remind us.

At first Bill was rooting for us, not really managing us. It was more like he was a coach. He was like that with many bands—he’d do things no other promoters would even think of doing. He had that habit of carrying his clipboard and taking notes. You know that guy in the movie The Red Shoes—the impresario who pushed the ballerina to dance beyond limits she didn’t think she could get past? Bill was like that. During a concert he would walk around backstage, onstage, all over the venue, writing things down on that clipboard. You could be working in the box office or you could be the star of the show. Bill took notes on everything and everybody. If a song went on too long, if something was set up in the wrong place—if he felt something was wrong, even if it was just okay but it could be better—out came the clipboard, and down went another note.

Then he would pull you aside at the end of the night and let you know what he wrote: “Listen, Carlos—that one song is no good: nobody’s going to understand it.” Or: “You could have started with this, and that one’s great, but it went on too long,” or, “It should have been longer.” Stuff like that. That was Bill—he did that with Jimi Hendrix, and I know he took notes on Barbra Streisand and tried to do it with Bob Dylan as well. I don’t think he did it to Miles.

I remember in 1985 I flew with Bill to a show he was producing with Sting in Los Angeles. Sting had a really special band—Omar Hakim from Weather Report, David Sancious on keyboards, Darryl Jones from Miles’s group on bass, and Branford Marsalis on saxophones. I had to hear the show for myself.

I was hanging with Sting in his dressing room after the concert when Bill came in. He was shuffling his notes. “What, Bill?” Sting saw the number of pages in his hand and rolled his eyes. “Can we do this some other time?” There was a plane waiting for us, too—Bill and I had to get back to San Francisco that night, and time was running out. But Bill stood there like a statue. “We should go over this now.”

I remember Sting looked over to his manager, Miles Copeland, for help. But Miles kept smoking his cigarette and walked away like he hadn’t heard anything. He didn’t want to come between them. I saw that I should leave, too, so Sting and Bill could talk.

“Okay, Bill,” Sting said. “But only one thing. Let’s have it.”

“Just one thing?” Bill looked at the clipboard. “Great—one thing. But there’s parts A, B, C, D, and E…” I closed the door behind me.

Bill adopted us. He gave us space to rehearse in a warehouse where he kept all his old posters, near the original Fillmore. He gave us advice on getting an accountant and a lawyer and how to think about the band like it was a business. This was before we even saw a record contract. Bill made sure he put us in the spotlight when he could.

We were still playing all over the Bay Area and in halls like the Avalon and the Sound Factory in Sacramento. We played colleges and a few high schools. We did lots of benefits for a radio station and an arts company and a protest against the war. There was some serious political stuff going on. In one year the feeling in San Francisco went from flower-power vibes to serious consciousness and revolution and “Who are they to judge us because our hair is long?” and we were right in the middle of it, and across San Francisco Bay the Black Panthers were raising their fists in power salutes and marching in their black berets.

We were living in the middle of the hippie revolution, but we were different. Our attitude was that even though we loved the principles of the hippies, we didn’t wear flowers in our hair or put psychedelic flowers on our bathtubs. We were more hardass, more street. It wasn’t a put-on or marketing gimmick. This was when we had those first photos made of the band—Marcus wore a jacket and a turtleneck and sometimes a sombrero, like a mariachi. That was not my idea. I wore a leather jacket, and all of us had really long hair or Afros. We looked very scruffy—except for Marcus—and very different from each other. That’s who we were, and those were the people we hung around with.

It was the band 24-7, man. I had really been away from my family for a while—again. Almost another whole year and hardly any contact. My sister Maria remembers our mom asking Tony to look for me. Tony would find me and tell her, “He’s fine; he’s perfectly fine.” Maria told me that one time my mom made her call the police to report me missing. When she told them I was eighteen, they hung up. “What do you mean they can’t do anything? He’s my son!” My mom was upset. She didn’t really know what the rules were—but that wouldn’t stop her.

I had seen my mom just once after leaving our place on Market. When I went to say good-bye she gave me a hug, and I could feel her hand going inside my pocket. She gave me a twenty-dollar bill. “Mom, I can’t take this money from you.”

“Por qué no? Why not? You need it to eat—who knows if you’re eating in that place you’re living?”

I said, “Because when you give me something somehow it has strings attached. I’m okay. I like the life that I’m living now. I love living where I live.”

In fact, I was moving. I had met Linda Smith. She was one of the ladies who used to come hear us at the Matrix—she and her friends were listening to our music and looking for companions. We started hanging out, and the next thing I knew I was living with her and her two kids. She was white and from Oceanview. I was almost twenty-one at the time, and she was almost thirty, and she had a beautiful body and beautiful legs. She taught me many things. She also graciously took care of me. She offered me not only her body and her heart but also her support. She fed me and sometimes the whole band because we were so poor. There were some weeks when we were living off her food stamps.

Linda and I were together off and on for almost four years. I got to know her, her kids, and her family well. I wrote “Europa” for her sister when she was having a bad LSD trip—I started singing: “The Mushroom Lady is coming to town / And she’s wondering will you be around.” That was how it happened—the melody of “Europa” came from a lyric I made up on the spot to help calm Linda’s sister.

Around this time my sister Irma was on a bus going to work and she saw SANTANA on the marquee at the Fillmore West. She told my mom, and next thing Irma knew my mom was telling the family to get ready to go out. “We’re going to see Carlos play.”

The rest of this story is now a family legend: my mom and dad got dressed up like it was the 1950s—Mom in her dress and nylons and heels and a nice coat, Dad in his tie and sport coat and hat. They all came to the Fillmore, and of course there were no seats—there was no place to sit but on the floor, so they all sat down. My mom saw hippies passing around what she thought was a cigarette, and she said to my dad, “Viejo, my God, they’re so poor, they don’t have any money. Let’s give them a cigarette.” So he opened his box of Marlboros and handed them out—they were all laughing.

I had no idea they were there until after the concert. I went out to meet them, and they were all excited. Maria says now that she liked the music, but she was thinking I was really shy because I never looked at the audience—I played to the amplifiers. Her friends who saw the band used to ask her why that was. I think it was because I was focused on the music, looking at Gregg and Doc and David—not David’s foot, of course. But it was also true that I was shy—I wasn’t all the way comfortable in front of an audience yet.

When I came out after the show to say hi, the first thing my mom said was, “Oh, mijo, the songs are too long. You have to cut them down.” I said, “Well, these are our songs—that’s how long they are.” I told her I thought we could write our own songs and get paid playing our stuff, not somebody else’s songs all the time. My mom thought I had been smoking too much weed, and she said so. My dad didn’t say much. He was happy to see me, but I’m sure he agreed with my mom about the music. A few years later he was interviewed by a local paper, and he told them that he was confused because he didn’t know when a song began or finished. His songs were in the old forms—thirty-two bars or whatever.

My mom was right—our jams were long. There are some recordings of Santana at this time that came out on a CD in 1997—Live at the Fillmore 1968. The shortest track is almost six minutes, and the longest is more than half an hour! We really got into that music, and we didn’t want to be interrupted. We didn’t want to put it into sound bites, like the ones you’d hear on some TV interview. A sound bite is not memorable in the way we wanted to be.

These were not just jams: we played some jazz, including a Chico Hamilton tune, and Willie Bobo’s “Fried Neckbones”—we never recorded that one, but sometimes even today somebody will request it. We also played funky grooves: we were all listening to James Brown at that time—all the bands in San Francisco were. There was that mix of funk and Latin—what they called boogaloo. Our brand was a psychedelic boogaloo. We definitely had enough energy to get something across, even back then.

I like my guitar playing on these recordings because I hear myself really getting the guitar sound right. I had been teaching myself for a long time. The process felt like what the diamond cutters who work in that one little section of New York City do—they have a few apprentices learning how to cut the rock so it doesn’t break. Same thing with guitar—you have to learn how to bend the note—get what you need from it—but not to the point that it goes twang, twang, twang and loses its bite. A note has an aura, which comes from harmonics and overtones, and that’s where your guitar personality comes from. Every guitar player’s harmonics and overtones are different.

At the end of ’68, you could hear my personality. A few years later Miles would tell me that he liked the way our songs sounded live more than the way they sounded on our albums—he liked the way we stretched out and the way I took my time, playing the notes in slo-mo, “endearing and with clarity.” Those were his words.

One person who agreed with my parents about the length of our songs was Bill Graham. He could see we were ready for a step forward in our music and that record companies were getting interested. Bill knew they would need songs. At that time, Santana didn’t know songs—we only knew jams.

Bill called us into his office. He was direct, as he always was. “You need to stop messing around with these long-ass jams and other stuff. You need to put a song in there. I’m going to play this song…” He put on a Verve record—I remember the label as it spun around. “Listen to that: that’s an intro. And hear that? That’s a verse.”

Never mind that most of us knew all this. But the song Bill was playing for us? “Evil Ways”—written by Sonny Henry and played by Willie Bobo and his group. What a gift, right? Bill knew what he was doing. Later he told me, “I told Willie that you’re going to kick ass with his song.”

By thinking about our needing a song to get on the radio, Bill was preparing us for Clive Davis, who was the head of CBS—the record company we would sign with. How did Bill know? That was what he did—he knew things before they happened.

By the end of ’68, Santana’s name was at the top of the posters. Stan was doing business out of Bill’s office, booking us, and we were all making decisions together—what gigs to do and what to do with the money. We were a collective, and we were ready for a record deal. Stan and Bill had been going around with Elektra, Atlantic, Warner Bros., CBS, and all the other labels for a while. At one point that year, Bill told us, “I want you guys to audition.” We said, “What? We thought we were through with auditioning.”

“You’re not auditioning for me—this is for Atlantic Records. They’re coming over in the afternoon. Just set up and play for them.”

I heard stories that Atlantic had not done right by some of the older R & B guys who used to be on the label. It was just a feeling, but I didn’t want to be with them. At the audition I played the worst I ever played on purpose, and the Atlantic dude just walked out. The guys in the band went, “Man, what are you doing?” I said, “Man, fuck them. I don’t want to be with Atlantic, man.” They were pissed.

It didn’t matter. We kept playing, opening for everybody: the Grateful Dead, the Youngbloods, Taj Mahal, and Ry Cooder. We kept hearing that the scouts were chasing us. One day, a guy with CBS came up to us after a show—real excited. He told us, “Man, the buzz about you guys is at a fever pitch.” I remember he said he saw us four times. Then he said, “Your set list doesn’t matter!” He meant it as a compliment, but we were like, “What?”

“Yeah—you could tear your set list apart, throw it on the floor, start with any song, and end with any song. I see what you guys do to the people. You take the crowd with you.”

I was already fixated on Columbia, which was part of CBS. I didn’t want to hear about Atlantic; I didn’t want to hear about Capitol. I wanted to be where Bob Dylan and Miles Davis were. That winter in a music store I saw a poster that CBS had made for the holidays—something about Christmas caroling. The poster had cartoon faces on it: Simon and Garfunkel, Dylan, and Miles. Johnny Cash; Blood, Sweat & Tears; Johnny Mathis; Barbra Streisand. That poster convinced me more than the guy who came backstage. I wanted Santana to be on that poster.

I heard about Clive Davis at Columbia back then—he had been one of the only big record company presidents to come out to San Francisco. He went to the Monterey Pop festival, heard Big Brother, signed them, and persuaded his superiors to invest in the San Francisco sound. He started signing a lot of bands after that, which I heard pissed off some other musicians who were with Columbia because they thought these rock groups were hurting their brand. But that was not true for us. Clive Davis was unknown to me until Santana started having hits. That’s when I met him and saw what he could do.

My own connection with Columbia actually started before Santana did anything with the label. That September, Michael Bloomfield and Al Kooper were booked to record a live album at the Fillmore West. It was Bill who invited me to play—“Michael’s not in condition to play tonight. He’s been up all night. Can you do me a favor and substitute for him?” I was like, “Are you kidding? Sure.”

I think Michael was starting to show the inconsistencies that come from being a heroin user. I think he had trouble disciplining himself and keeping a schedule and getting enough sleep. That’s why he only plays on one half of The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper—and why I got to play on “Sonny Boy Williamson,” a song by Jack Bruce, the bass player from Cream. It was the first time my name was on an album—right on the back cover. That felt great, but it was strange because I didn’t get to play with Michael.

There’s a photo I like of Michael and me together, onstage at the Fillmore West in 1971—a rehearsal for the closing night. We’re both really into it, looking really good. Man, he looks strong. You know what I did that night, again? I said how sorry I was for challenging him that one time and being an asshole. He looked at me as if to tell me I’d better get over myself. “You need to stop apologizing for that. I love you and I told you, it’s cool.”

Michael never stopped being gracious to me. I tried to stay in touch in the years after Santana got really big, but I think he was into having his own space. He was living in San Francisco, and he died there in 1981. The last time I went to his house, I thought it was unkempt and kind of crazy—I left there feeling concerned and more than a little discouraged. Whatever arrangement he made for himself was the wrong arrangement. They found him OD’d inside a car. That just tells you what kind of lifestyle he was leading—or not leading.

Michael was the first guitar player from my generation whom we all heard. Everybody else came after, including the gods, such as Clapton and Hendrix. And Michael wasn’t worried by the other guitar players who came along. He welcomed everybody, as he did with me. But as beautiful as he was I don’t think he had the inner strength to see his validity in that picture. I think he shunned the publicity and felt he had to pay his dues, even when he had done that already.

At the end of 1968 there were a lot of great electric guitar players in the room—a lot of chances to get discouraged and put your guitar down. But that kind of reaction is the ego talking. Whether your reaction is to stick out your chest or to run and hide—superiority or instant inferiority—either one is full of shit.

You’re supposed to be you. When I saw Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton play, they didn’t make me want to quit—they made me want to listen harder to something that they weren’t listening to. I had this idea that I had to see myself in the whole picture of the time, not just in comparison to one or two others. I knew a lot of us were listening to the same blues people. So I told myself, “Maybe Hendrix doesn’t know about Gábor Szabó or Bola Sete.” The competition wasn’t about how you played guitar, it was: “Yeah? Who you got in your record collection?”

I call them the Igniters: they’re the musicians who make you feel that if you spend more time in your own heart you’ll see that the same thing that was given to them was given to you—but you have to develop it for yourself. I’ll tell you something—if Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley were alive and they came to see my band on a good night, they’d be like, “Damn!”

Maybe some of this was me overcompensating and being a punk about it, but I thought that instead of trying to be as loud as this one or as fast as that one, I could beat him in another way, like maybe go low when he goes high or go slow if he goes fast. By then, in 1968, people who heard me play realized that I was bringing something different, not just copying Buddy Guy and B. B. King.

Santana signed with Columbia in October of 1968, and our contract took effect in December. The first person we met was David Rubinson—at that time he was Columbia’s staff producer on the West Coast. He produced Mongo Santamaría and Moby Grape and Taj Mahal for CBS, so he had experience with congas. He later started two record labels with Bill Graham. He was going to be our producer, and the nearest CBS studios were in Los Angeles. That’s where we got ready to go to in February of 1969.

A few days before we left, Stan said he had to tell me something. Marcus was in jail—for murder. Just like that. He had been messing around with a Mexican lady who had split from her husband, but they hadn’t divorced yet. The man came home when Marcus was there, and they got into a fight. They said he ended up stabbing the Mexican guy, who later died. It might have been self-defense, but Marcus was in big trouble, and he wasn’t going anywhere except lockup. We were hurt and disappointed but not really surprised. There was a side of Marcus that was about being hard and street, so his pride could put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I don’t think Marcus’s being a street guy helped him any—he eventually wound up in San Quentin. Later, when he got out, I think he began working in clothing design somewhere in North Beach.

We had to think fast—Carabello had stopped playing with the band, but he was still hanging out with us. He knew all the songs and the parts, so the decision was easy. In early February we went down to LA and moved into a big house in Hollywood that the record company rented for us for a week and a half. It was only a few blocks from the studio. I remember we all thought it looked phony and plastic compared to San Francisco. The house felt like it was the record company’s, as did the studio—they just couldn’t get a good sound on us. Some of the instruments sounded so thin and different from what we’d been used to. We couldn’t find the energy that was in all our shows. It didn’t feel like our music. Santana was different from the other groups CBS had going on—we were a street mutt. We needed a different kind of intention and independence.

A lot of it is how someone walks into a room. If a producer starts a session wearing his credentials and an attitude that the band is making an album for him, that’s not going to work. We just didn’t feel any authenticity with Rubinson that time. Santana recorded with him later, in ’76, when we did the Festival album, and that was much better—I think all of us knew a lot more by that time.

It wasn’t all Rubinson’s fault—I think we didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t have to apologize for what we didn’t know, and we let ourselves be led in the studio instead of taking the reins ourselves. We should have said, “No; we don’t want the guitar or the drums to sound like that.” Or, “That’s not the right tempo or the right groove.” I don’t think we knew what to do with ourselves until after we did that first session. The album was going to be called Freeway Jam, after the tune we used to end our shows with, but this was nothing we wanted to come out, and CBS felt the same way. Now it seems impossible, but somehow we persuaded the record company to let us go back into the studio and not impose a producer on us.

We finally agreed in 2004 to let that music be released for historical purposes. Also, by that time I don’t think we had any more reservations about it. But back then we thought it was like being a man from the jungle who sees himself in a mirror for the first time and just doesn’t like what he sees.

We went back to San Francisco—back to the house on Mullen Avenue. Gregg had his room, I had mine when I wasn’t at Linda’s, and Carabello had his loft in the attic, where the floor was basically plywood over two-by-fours, and he played his music loud. I used to hope that everyone on our street liked Jimi Hendrix, because you could hear the speakers moving air. At four in the morning.

That was one old house—one night we locked ourselves out, so Carabello climbed in through the attic. It was dark and he was running and he went right through the floor. Gregg and I got into the house anyway, heard the crash, and found him in this cloud of dust and plaster and everything. He was okay, but man, we couldn’t stop laughing.

Crazy things like that were always happening to Carabello. He was just that kind of guy—as I said, he was the goofball in the band, but he had a charisma that you could not resist. He kept the rest of us loose, especially during tense times. He would talk to anyone, and he knew everybody. He had his finger on the pulse. He used to hang with Sly, he was friends with Jimi, and he got to know Miles before I did. He even got tight with the women we called the Cosmic Ladies—Betty Mabry, Devon Wilson, and Colette Mimram, all the ladies who hung around Jimi and Miles. In the ’70s Carabello used to stay at Miles’s town house in New York City. It was easy for him to meet people and make friends and hold on to them for a long time—the two of us are friends to this day. Carabello is my oldest friend from all the Santana lineups, from back when we didn’t even have a name. I never will forget that he visited me and brought me all those things when I was stuck in the hospital with TB.

Carabello used to go to the beach and play there with whoever was hanging out. While we were waiting to find out what was happening with Marcus, Carabello met a guy who played percussion and was part of a group called the Aliens. Carabello went to a club called Nite Life, just off of San Bruno, where they were playing, and called us. At first we didn’t want to be bothered. “Aw, Carabello—what are you talking about?” He wouldn’t let go. “There’s this guy I met today at the beach, and he’ll blow your mind. I think we need to add him to the band.” Gregg and I came down—our place was just up the street—and man, we couldn’t believe it.

The guy, José Areas, played congas on one tune, then timbales on another—then soloed on trumpet, too! He was incredible—he sounded as good as anyone on any record we had been listening to. His rhythm was so strong and firm, like the steel beams of a huge building before they start putting the floors in. It felt like his playing could support anything. He was from Nicaragua and kind of small, and they called him Chepito. He looked like he just came into town—straight clothes and hair, and he didn’t speak a word of English. I spoke to him in Spanish and asked him to come jam with us the next day.

Chepito fit right in. Gregg and I felt it right away. I think it took a little longer for David, but we all realized how much he added to the music—a precision, a stability without being stifling. In just a few rehearsals, Chepito knew all our music, and it felt like no matter how good the rest of us were, the wheels would fall off without Chepito. His right hand on the cowbell was like Tony Williams’s hi-hat—pure and steady. He was serious, too, not gentle at all; if you suddenly had a “To be or not to be” moment with the music, he’d give you a look like, “Get it together!”

Carabello was really happy, of course, to have Chepito helping with the rhythm—he had been complaining for a while about Doc Livingston, that he couldn’t get a lock together with him and get a good groove going. Doc had been part of the problem in Los Angeles—he isolated himself from the band and didn’t want to talk about songs or band business or anything. He was being a lone wolf and a bit of a rebel when we needed someone to get into the huddle more than ever before. We had an album to do: we needed someone who was going to bring all his spirit and contribute.

By the time Santana went back to the studio in May for a second try, Chepito was part of the band. CBS said we didn’t have to use their producer, but we had to have somebody producing, so we asked around and kept hearing about Brent Dangerfield. We had worked with him at the Straight Theater, where he had been the soundman. He had never worked in a studio before, but he had a reputation around Haight-Ashbury for being able to “get around a knob.” We needed someone we could feel good with and who came from our scene.

We also needed someone to help us in the studio, to help us arrange our jams into songs, and that was Alberto Gianquinto, a friend of David’s who lived with him and played keyboards with James Cotton when he came into the city. He was an older, very stout, no-nonsense gutbucket kind of piano player who had grown up in the Mission, and he could handle blues as well as jazz and classical. Although you wouldn’t know it from his name, he was a white dude—but with a black militant attitude. I remember he had a big poster of Huey P. Newton in his home, and his wife was black, from the Caribbean. He was a very assertive guy—he had to be to go up to Chicago and play with those blues bands and not get his ass whipped. We needed that in the studio.

I had gotten to know Alberto from playing around town, and I think it was Stan who came up with the idea of using him. His contribution to the Santana sound was enormous—he became our producer behind the scenes on our first three albums. We lost touch after that, and he ended up another drug casualty after having battled an addiction for many years. I heard he passed away in an accident in 1986.

We decided to use Pacific Recording Studio—a new facility in San Mateo that also had rehearsal space. The Grateful Dead had been there, and some jazz groups, too. We had definitely learned a lot from our experience in LA, like getting right into it and not wasting time, which was good because once we were in the studio we would only have a week to make the album. We went in and started rehearsing some new tunes, but nothing was coming together at first. This was when we decided to let Doc Livingston go—he kind of fired himself, really. Gregg asked him to leave, then we had a jazz drummer, Johnny Rae, with us for a few gigs—he played often with Cal Tjader and Gábor Szabó.

We weren’t the only band getting it together in that building at that time—Vince Guaraldi was rehearsing there, too. At one point, he came over to our room and said, “I got to tell you, man, I was listening to your music, and I can tell the direction you guys are going—you guys are going to be big, man. Big.” That was an amazing confirmation of what we felt. I used to see Guaraldi a lot because we played in a lot of the same benefits. I also saw him play at an outdoor show at Stern Grove with his trio, and Bola Sete and John Handy were on the bill, too. It was my first love-in, and everyone was smoking weed, but the music was amazing. It felt like Guaraldi stepping in and giving his approval helped turn things around.

Then it all seemed to come together. We figured out how to get the sound we wanted on each instrument. Day by day, each song sounded better. Gianquinto helped us eliminate wasted hours and figure out how to make the jams shorter—showing us how one section of a song went into the next and how to not lose the flow.

One day I saw Michael Shrieve come into Pacific looking to get some studio time for his band. He was a drummer I knew who hung with some of the guys in Jefferson Airplane, so I invited him to jam with us. We played “Fried Neckbones” together, and then he played on a tune we were putting together called “Waiting,” which became the opening tune on our first album. Shrieve was really open to what we were doing and was flexible—he didn’t use the same pattern every time, and we could tell him what we were looking for. We kept playing into the night. He had a looser, more jazzy feeling than most rock drummers—a kind of hummingbird energy, like bubbles bubbling. It was a little like Mitch Mitchell’s playing with Jimi Hendrix, but more on top of the rhythm.

We felt a chemistry right off the bat. We asked Michael to join the band almost immediately, and he said yes. He wanted to play and jump in with us and hang out. He was from the white area of Palo Alto but was not afraid to come to the Mission. It was like Gregg all over again. Carabello and I wanted to know what kind of house his family had, what kind of cars they drove, and I got the feeling he wanted to know what kind of places we were hanging out in and what food we were eating. He started coming to the house and looking through our records, and he said, “Man, I got to turn you on to Miles and Coltrane.” He did just that soon afterward, and my life would change—again.

Santana had its first stable lineup together, the one the world would get to know from our first three albums—Gregg, David, Carabello, Michael, Chepito, me, and a few people we added later. It came together like it was waiting to happen, and the music felt like that, too. You can tell we all contributed by the fact that everyone in the band shares credit on almost all the tunes. Except for the two covers we did—“Evil Ways” and “Jingo”—there’s only one song, “Shades of Time,” that was written by just two of us. Marcus got his credit on “Soul Sacrifice.”

If I had to choose one tune from that first album that still sticks out for me, it’s “Treat,” which was Santana doing its version of B. B. King meets Eddie Harris. To understand that, you have to know just how big Harris’s tune “Listen Here” was in San Francisco, especially up and down Potrero Hill—everybody had that album and played it all the time. You couldn’t escape that groove, and that’s what inspired “Treat” in a big way. I’m very proud of that one.

It was during the sessions for our first album that the ideas came together for “Incident at Neshabur,” which ended up on our second album, Abraxas. We wrote it bit by bit, pulling a little from here and there and putting it together with all its tempo changes. One part in the first section was inspired by a bad groove in a TV commercial for Ajax that showed a white knight blasting people clean—“stronger than dirt!” Alberto came up with a vamp for the second part, which was basically Horace Silver’s “Señor Blues.” He played piano on that, going between two chords, which set me up for a solo that sounded to me like the divinity that comes after sex, when you’re just lying there after giving it all you got and you both arrive at the same time and she’s happy and you’re happy. “Incident” had to wait to come out—it was a little too long for the first album, so we kept it safe for the next one.

We recorded the first album in five days. It took a little longer to mix it—we didn’t get everything right, and we didn’t feel like it captured our sound perfectly yet—but it was close and was much better than the LA session. Some genius at Columbia decided that “Jingo” should be our first single, and we had no power back then, so we went along with that. When it didn’t really go anywhere I think it was Clive Davis who stepped in and chose “Evil Ways,” probably with some push from Bill—it was his choice all along. That’s when everything took off—we had a hit single on the radio and a bestselling album.

I picked out the cover for the album—I wanted to use the poster for the show we played at the Fillmore West with the Grateful Dead and the Staple Singers, so the artist Lee Conklin designed it again, and it really worked. When our first album came out, my favorite thing on the cover was the line “Produced by Brent Dangerfield and Santana.” We’ve worked with various producers over the years, but if you look at the albums we’ve done after that very first effort, you’ll see that we have always produced ourselves.