CHAPTER 10

In the week before we played Woodstock, I started hanging around a dude who was older than I was. He had some cocaine, and I said, “Nah, I don’t want to do that.” Then he started playing me bootleg recordings of Charlie Christian performing live at Minton’s Playhouse, and man, that shit was even scarier for me! I was hearing the roots of bebop coming out of swing jazz from a guitar player who had had TB, as I had, and who had died at twenty-five. His music went straight into me. He was one of those guys—like Django and Tal Farlow and Wes Montgomery—who could play intricate melodies with all these chords on every single part of the neck and never look at it once. If you look at videos of Jimi or me, you can see us counting frets.

I think Charlie Christian should be required listening if you’re a serious guitar player and not just a weekend musician. As I got to know his melodies—and the octaves and warmth of Wes and the atomic, bombastic sounds of Sonny Sharrock—I grew to believe that all that music and all those musicians came to me for a reason. I think everyone I was turned on to made me think in a new way about the instrument and how to get at something new.

It took me a while, but I learned to respect Christian’s way of playing. It’s a language that’s very, very evolved. Modern jazz has another kind of vocabulary, which came from a higher form of musical expression. It came from a special place—from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane, and it was deep in blues roots. But not the same kind of blues I started with—string benders like B. B. and Muddy. Django, Charlie Christian, and my former father-in-law, Saunders King—they were not string benders.

I used to ask SK, “Why weren’t you guys bending notes?” He’d say almost with disdain, “Man, we never had time.” I was like, “Oh!” You can hear that when you listen to Charlie Christian hitting those notes in those tempos. No time to bend any strings. Thank God Miles and Coltrane moved on to modal playing; it made it easier for me—it’s closer to the blues. I know what I can and can’t do and what I’m best at, and I still don’t know how to play solos around chord changes. Well, maybe subconsciously I do. But when someone like Charlie Christian or Charlie Parker starts doing chord changes, I can play along and hang for the first twenty seconds, maybe thirty. I think I did okay with that kind of feel on the end of “Hannibal.”

In 1970 we kicked off the year already riding on a rocket ship. Santana was busy touring—back to the Fillmore East and New York City; back home to San Francisco, where we played on a TV special produced by Ralph J. Gleason and a company called the Family Dog; and then a fund-raiser to help the Grateful Dead after they got busted in New Orleans. More festivals and colleges. Then the first royalty check for Santana came from Columbia Records—which was the first real money we had seen as a group. I remember some of the other guys started buying motorcycles and expensive cars right away.

The first thing I did was keep my promise to my mom—I bought her a two-story, big-garage house on Hoffman Avenue in a safe place in the upper Mission District, near Twin Peaks. Everybody was pretty much gone from the old house by then—it was my dad, my mom, and Maria. My sister Irma lived downstairs. Mom got her washing machine and dryer. They stayed there until 1991, when they moved to San Rafael and then Danville. My parents were twenty-one years in that house—longer than any other place they had lived.

I remember when I told my mom that her Safeway bag just got bigger and that I was buying her a house, she gave me a hug and kept looking at me like she didn’t know what to say. We had some distance between us then—it took time for us to act like mother and son again. I’d been out of the house for a while.

While I was away on the road, my girlfriend, Linda, found a house for us in the North Bay area of Marin County, up on Mount Tamalpais, with an incredible view of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge—hawks would be circling around there all the time, riding the winds. We moved in there together, and compared to the center of San Francisco, with all its street noise, it was so peaceful that I had trouble because the quiet was so loud. It took some time to get used to that. I wasn’t meditating yet and had just started reading the works of Paramahansa Yogananda and some other books on Eastern philosophy. You could say that moving one step outside the city and learning to listen to the quiet and really hear new sounds helped open me to the spiritual path I was about to follow.

What else to do with the money that was coming in? I started collecting a lot of music—tapes, record albums—and bought a set of drums. I told myself I was going to dedicate one room to all my music. Later that summer in New York I would meet a man who just started to work for Columbia Records in France named Michel Delorme. He was friendly with Miles Davis and had been tight with John Coltrane, too. In fact there’s a great color photo of him interviewing Coltrane in 1965 that a friend of mine turned into a T-shirt. He was instantly a hero and a friend. The second time we met was in France a few weeks later. Michel gave me a stack of reel-to-reel tapes, mostly unreleased music by Miles and Coltrane. I treated those things like they were precious metals—I took them home and carefully copied them, then returned them to Michel. He still likes to tell me how surprised he was that I kept the tapes safe and got them all back to him. He must be thinking about the three-hour interview he did with Coltrane: he lent the tape to a friend and never got it back.

Michel is one of a few special people I met over the years whom I like to call Keepers of the Flame because of what they do to keep the music thriving. They are collectors of the music and information and spirit like Michel, or Hal Miller, who has almost every jazz video ever made, or Jan Lohmann in Denmark, or Yasuhiro “Fuji” Fujioka, who has the Coltrane House in Osaka, Japan. And there’s people like Michael Cuscuna, who keep reissuing the music so it doesn’t disappear from the stores or the Internet. It’s more than just loving the music—it’s being supremely dedicated to nurturing and preserving the history any way they can.

Years later Michel gave me a compilation he called Intergalactic Wayne Shorter—Wayne’s best live performances in France. Incredible music—one of my favorite mixes to this day. Michel and I still meet in France, and he still turns me on to new old stuff—old music that’s being discovered for the first time. He also turned me on to a nice expression to use when the music’s not happening, or when something’s obvious—“Poof!”

Michel’s tapes were the beginning of my own library of rare recordings, including vinyl albums and tapes and videotapes and DVDs—I still have them and treasure them. I always had a special room for that collection and other things, such as my guitars and amplifiers, drum kits, and percussion. Now all that music, which used to take up a whole wall, can fit onto a few iPods, so I designed some that I occasionally give to friends—one of them contains all the music ever made by Bob Marley, and it’s colored red, green, and gold. Then I have one decorated with a stick figure of a trumpet player that contains every piece of music Miles ever made, including all his rare live recordings and sideman gigs—when he played on other people’s records. Same with Coltrane, Marvin Gaye, and other message givers like them.

Other than the music, which I was ready for, I bought one thing for myself that year that maybe I wasn’t quite ready for—a car. And not just any car—a special-edition, fire-engine-red Excalibur Phaeton convertible. It was beautiful. It was a 1970 model and looked like it had been made in Germany in the 1920s. It had running boards, a three-hundred-horsepower Corvette engine under the hood, and cooling tubes coming out of the engine compartment. Check it out on the Internet. This was a classic when it was new.

I never had a car before that—actually, I really didn’t know how to drive. Until then I had gotten rides from my friends who drove. With the success of Santana, we all had stuff to do and less and less time to do it in. Carabello and Gregg didn’t have time to come and pick me up, even for rehearsals. It was getting annoying. I thought, “I got to get me a car and learn how to drive.” In that order.

So I went to a dealership in San Rafael that sold these cars—Annex Motors, I think it was. They looked at me in my hippie clothes when I walked in, and a guy in a suit and tie immediately came up to me like he was sure I had walked into the wrong place. “Yeah? What do you want?” I was staring at the car. “How much is that car?” I asked. He rolled his eyes and got ready to walk away. I told him, “No—I want to buy that car. Here…” I gave him the business card of Sid Frank, the accountant Bill Graham had connected us with. “Call him. He’ll take care of everything.” Later on Bill found out that Sid was ripping us off—and Bill, too—and was ready to kill him.

Sid came around with the check, I signed the papers, and the salesman pulled the car around and gave me the key. I was like, “Okay, thanks. See you all later,” and I started driving away. I was fine on smaller streets, but I had to get on the 101 freeway to get back to my place—that’s when I started having trouble. I was driving around twenty miles an hour in the slow lane, cars whizzing past, just hoping I wouldn’t get hit. Now I think there wasn’t much chance that was going to happen—you could see the Excalibur from miles away. But on that day I was squeezing the steering wheel like you squeeze juice from an orange. It was a powerful engine, but I was just crawling along—good thing it was automatic transmission, too. Right away the highway patrol saw me. Two cops pulled me over, and then another car came. Four cops were looking at the car and at me, trying to figure it all out.

I think I’ve just been lucky in situations like that one—there was always a good cop riding with the bad cop. One guy wanted to do a search, but the top guy came over and said, “Okay, I need to see your driver’s license.” Suddenly I realized I didn’t even have one yet! The cop looked at me with no surprise in his eyes. “I know you don’t have a fuckin’ license because if you did you wouldn’t be driving that way.”

He took a closer look at me. “Hey, wait a minute: aren’t you Santana?” Then it looked like it all made sense to him. He thought for a minute and said, “Okay, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” He turned to one of the other cops. “You—come over here,” he said, then he looked at me. “Give him the keys.”

“What?”

“We’re driving you home. You’re coming with me, and he’s going to follow us in your car. And you see this other guy over here?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, he’s going to pick you up tomorrow and teach you how to drive.”

Can you believe it? That’s how things were. I think it was a smart move on the cops’ part, because if I was going to be driving their stretch of the 101 in that kind of car with that much power, it would be better if they helped me. Thanks to them, in around four days I had my confidence together, and I had my license.

I think that story says a lot about how well known Santana was in San Francisco by 1970—we were local heroes, even to some cops. That car was also a lesson in limitations and keeping the ego in check—it attracted a lot of attention in the following two years. One time I was driving on a two-lane road when another convertible came roaring up next to me, the people all hanging out and shouting—“Santana, man, we love your shit! That’s a bad car, Santana!” Only they weren’t watching the oncoming traffic, and along came a big bus that almost hit them head-on. I had to pull over and stop because my heart was beating so fast. I thought, “That’s not good. Those guys almost got killed because of me and this stupid car.” I didn’t want that on my conscience.

I toned down the Excalibur and got it painted black, which I know was like going from a 10 down to a 9.5. But it actually looked really, really good that way. I’ve driven many different makes since then. I’m not Jay Leno, and I don’t try to collect them, but I like a good car. These days I have a Fisker Karma with blue flake paint that I like—I love when the electrical system takes over, and it just purrs. Great stereo system, too, which is important.

That year I got to feel what it was like to become a celebrity, someone people recognize, and I learned how to act graciously—even when I was trying to eat or just drive down the road. If you don’t like people disturbing you, maybe you’re in the wrong business. It happened so fast and so strongly that it even affected my family—my dad told me that when he was playing with a Mexican big band at La Rondalla he got more recognition and respect because of our name. My sisters told me that people would call all the Santanas in the San Francisco phone book trying to find me. They had to change their number a bunch of times, and this went on for a while. My mom told me once in the ’80s that she was shopping at a department store downtown and needed some help, but the salespeople kept dismissing her. Then they saw her credit card and went, “Oh, you’re Santana’s mom?” and they got nice and helpful.

You know my mom by now—she said, “I don’t need anything from your damn store” and walked out.

We started work on the second Santana album—which would become Abraxas—in Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio in June of 1970. It had been a little more than a year since we recorded the first one, so we had been working on new songs and thinking about what we wanted to do differently this time or keep the same. We wanted Gianquinto to help us again—in fact, “Incident at Neshabur” was the first tune we worked on. We also knew we wanted the right producer from Columbia to work with us. I’ll put it this way: Santana didn’t actually like the sound of Santana until Abraxas.

I’m going to get into trouble, but this is the truth—Fred Catero helped many of the producers he worked with look good; their sessions would never have sounded the way they did without his help. At first he was Columbia’s engineer in San Francisco and had great credentials. He worked with Sly and Janis, and on that live album by Bloomfield and Al Kooper—he engineered Mongo Santamaría at the same time we were making Santana. We heard that he knew how to record congas. Even more important, he knew how to record congas and electric guitars, which is why he became our producer.

I think the guitar sound was becoming clearer—it’s obvious on Abraxas. One thing that helped my signature was my tone, and the thing that most helped my tone was a new Boogie amplifier—which, when I met the guy who invented the idea, Randy Smith, didn’t have a name yet. My friend Randy gives me the credit for saying his amp really boogied the first time I heard it. I got that word from the original boogie man—John Lee Hooker.

Randy the Boogie Man, as I call him, gets the credit for making a small amplifier with enough beef to it so you could play with drive and sustain, whatever the volume was. He put turbo in it, and what a tone—damn. Some of the best things I ever played—including much of Abraxas—came through that first Boogie amplifier I got from Randy.

At the time, everybody was taking sounds and ideas from Jimi Hendrix and the British guys or from R & B guitar players like the ones who played for Motown. I was thinking more from the back of my brain—way in the back—like, “What’s the sound of a soul praying or a ghost crying?” I think my sound was closer to what Pete Cosey would do later with Miles. Fred helped make it easy for us to paint and play without worrying whether we were getting recorded in the right way.

Fred did that when Carabello came up with “Singing Winds, Crying Beasts” in the studio. Carabello didn’t play keyboards, but he could sing the melody he wanted to Gregg, who’d figure it out on organ. When I hear that tune now I still remember that I loved getting to the studio on time and finding that Gregg and Carabello were already there and they had a track ready to go—which was funny in a way, because they could fight a lot. I think they might have been there from the night before. But if that was what it took to get to the point where there was a tune that needed my guitar, that was okay with me.

Michael’s a dramatic cat—you can hear it in “Singing Winds,” which was a very evocative way to start an album—a little mysterious. You don’t know what’s going to happen after that, and then we go into “Black Magic Woman.”

Gregg brought that one in, and it was an instant okay—I was already into Peter Green, and, as I said, the song was like a brother to Otis Rush’s “All Your Love (I Miss Loving).” I think we took that tune and really made it our own. It’s still our most requested song—and I still get women coming up to me saying, “You know, I’m the black magic woman.” Of course over the years, a few more Santana songs have had the same impact. I’ll get “I’m Maria, Maria” or “I’m the Spanish Harlem Mona Lisa,” and if they all claim to be, who’s to say they’re not?

The segue into “Gypsy Queen” we thought was a perfect bridge between those two songs—we did that many times in concert and it worked so well. When I hear “Gypsy Queen” now it makes me think of how persistent Michael Shrieve was during that summer, getting me to listen and understand Miles and Coltrane. I could tell the two of them were using different scales from the ones we were using, but to me it wasn’t about figuring out sharps and flats, it was about the emotion they were going for and how they went about it. In the studio we would ask ourselves, “How would Miles approach this mood?” In a way, I didn’t want anyone to explain too much about their notes and scales—once I know exactly where a chord is, it’s like hearing the punch line before the joke. “Damn, I wish you hadn’t told me.”

Abraxas was very good to a few people who had songs we covered. They all got nice royalties for a long time, and I’m happy about that—Peter Green, Gábor Szabó, Tito Puente. Tito was always funny about it in the years after the album went big. He complained that people expected to hear our version of “Oye Como Va” rather than his, and he had to deal with that. “People are always saying, ‘Why don’t you play it like Santana?’ First I want to get mad, and then I think, I just got a new house because of that. ‘Okay, no hay problema.’”

The first time I got into the song I didn’t know Tito Puente at all—Ray Barretto, sure, but not Tito yet. I was at the house with Linda and I had just dropped some acid and was full-on into the trip, and all of a sudden I wanted to turn on the radio, which I never did normally. It was tuned to an obscure local station that was playing Latin music all night—a late-night party kind of mix. A tune came on that had a great groove, and I started breaking it down, thinking how close the feel was to “Louie Louie” and some Latin jazz tunes. The next morning I went down to the Mission to find this song, went through all the records till I found the right one, and listened to it nonstop—my own heavy rotation. It had some great solos—trumpet and flute, plus crowd noises and a kind of false ending, like one that Ray Charles would do. Just a great party atmosphere. I kept saying to myself, “We can play this song. We got to play this song. This will drive the hippies wild—especially the women.”

There are certain songs that really get women to be women—no apologies needed, no excuses. “Oye” is one of them, and that was what I wanted, even back then—to make women crazy. I think it comes from the Tijuana thing. I think some people were more interested in playing music that could impress in the way that Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin did. I couldn’t care less about that.

We were getting ready to record, so we were already thinking about the number of songs we would have. I brought that song in and I started hearing, “Hey, man, that’s not rock. It doesn’t sound like rock.” It was the first time that happened—that people in the band were uncomfortable with a song because it didn’t sound like Cream or Hendrix or the Doors. Santana was about building bridges between different music styles—and apparently this was a bridge too far. To me, rock and roll was anything that felt good. So this was also the first time I really put my foot down. “No. We’re recording this song because we’re recording it.” I think Gregg did a great job playing on “Oye Como Va.”

I had my own prejudices, too. Gregg was growing as a songwriter, and he had some great tunes, such as “Hope You’re Feeling Better.” He pushed us to record that song—we had been doing it live, but not often. To be honest, it was one of those tunes that Carabello and I thought was too rock and roll, too white. When we played it in concert, sometimes Carabello and I would pretend to hide behind our amps just to tease Gregg. We could be cruel like that—I had a lot to learn about appreciating and validating what was right in front of us. It’s a great song. What I should have been doing was going up to him and saying, “Hey, Gregg—you got any more like that?”

We liked to tease each other—we used to tease Gregg about the fact that he walked like John Wayne. We’d imitate the way he talked, too, and Gregg would play along. He’d say, “Okay, pilgrim,” as Duke would. “Are we going to rehearse today, or are we just going to sit here? A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” Man, we’d all be laughing so hard!

I had to fight for “Samba Pa Ti.” The song came to me in New York City, after our first tour in Europe that spring, when I was jet-lagged to death. I couldn’t sleep; the walls were moving like I had just fallen off a merry-go-round. Then just about when I was falling asleep I heard some guy trying to get a sound out of a saxophone in an alley outside. I opened my window, and I saw the guy staggering around, not balancing so well. He couldn’t seem to make up his mind what to put in his mouth, the saxophone or a bottle of booze. He took a deep breath and was just about to blow, then he stopped and hit the bottle again. I heard a voice inside me saying, “Man, that could be you, lost like that.”

I grabbed a pen and paper, and a poem came to me, and as soon as I wrote it down I could hear the melody right with it. The words and music came symbiotically. The music reminded me of how my dad would sound when he’d be playing by himself, plus I could hear a King Curtis, “Soul Serenade” groove. “Samba Pa Ti” was definitely about developing romance and beauty in my playing—I wanted a naked, undressed feeling, a feeling of vulnerability.

It was fun playing it for the band for the first time. I don’t think they expected something that was a little delicate. They were looking at me like, “Damn, that don’t sound like rock and roll, but it’s honest and real.” To our credit we never dismissed any music that was honest and heartfelt.

A melody can be memorable or fleeting. “Samba Pa Ti” is not music that just passes by. If you want to see what’s happening when you’re on a moving train you have to look at what’s off in the distance, not at what’s up close. For me, it’s like that with music. The best songs get the big picture and take the high road—they are long, beautiful, memorable melodies.

Through every step in life you find

Freedom from within,

And if your mind should understand,

Woman, love your man.

Everybody searching

Searching for eternal peace

And it’s there waiting for you

All you have to do is share.

We went into the studio not knowing who would sing the lyric. I didn’t have the confidence to sing it. I felt that I couldn’t sing it as well as I could play it on the guitar. I think it’s a lot more transparent without a vocal. Of course it depends on who sings it, but it could have been too thick, too much like… mayonnaise. I know José Feliciano recorded it with his own lyrics, but they aren’t mine. When I play it now in my head, I’m still playing along to that poem—maybe I should record it again and sing the words.

That shift in the middle of the song just happened in the studio. It happened because I was listening to the grooves in King Curtis’s “Soul Serenade,” “Groovin’” by the Young Rascals, and Aretha’s “Angel.” All that music just gave birth to an idea, and we all knew to follow if one of us wanted to go someplace.

When we finished playing it the first time in the studio, we knew it was going to be big. I was going to call it “For Every Step, Freedom from Within,” but Chepito was the one who came up with the name on the spot: “Eh, Carlos—llámalo ‘Samba Pa Ti.’” I thought, “You know, I like that,” and trusted my instinct.

Abraxas was a group production that was done song by song—so really Gregg, Carabello, and Chepito coproduced their own songs with Fred, and I coproduced “Samba Pa Ti” and “Oye Como Va” with Fred and “Incident” with Gianquinto. We loved that album—it was the first album we made that was as good as it could be. I love the way it looks, and I even love the name.

The title Abraxas came from a book by Hermann Hesse that Gregg, Stan, and Carabello were reading. A quote from the book is on the album. For the cover, we got a painting from the artist Mati Klarwein—he did the painting on Bitches Brew. He had done it in 1961, and we saw it in a book that Carabello had. It was perfect for us—the painting matched our music and incorporated our themes of Africa and spirituality and sexuality and Latin music. It had a beautiful naked black woman in the center, and on the left there was an angel riding a conga, which for us is now like what the Stones have with the tongue and lips—a trademark. Carabello showed it to me, and we were sure it had to be on the new album—Columbia Records helped make that happen.

Abraxas came together so easily that the album almost seemed to form itself. Of all the albums I ever did, Abraxas was the easiest to make. The sessions were nice and laid back and took place between some touring in June and July, and we were able to relax and not rush anything. We spent more time on sounds than we had before—getting the congas and guitars and organ right instead of settling for a compromise—and getting the room sound right, too. Some friends came by the studio and sat in, including Steven Saphore, who played tabla, and percussion player Rico Reyes. Reyes had a group called San Pacu, which he started around ’68; it was a cross between Santana and Tower of Power. Rico was a great singer and reaffirmed the Mission District vibration around us—he was also a beautiful-looking cat, but he became another heroin and cocaine casualty.

Another friend who hung with us was a guitarist named Neal Schon, later of Journey and Bad English, whom Gregg and Shrieve knew from San Mateo. They all lived in that part of the Bay Area. Neal was already tearing it up—he was just seventeen, but he had a reputation and was really smart. We didn’t jam, but he did play one solo on “Hope You’re Feeling Better” that was not on the original album. He had a great tone and great ideas when he played.

Clive Davis was one of the reasons Abraxas was so easy to make. He was out there in CBS’s office in New York and wasn’t checking on us or disappearing. He trusted us, and he was there if we needed him. He understood that we made music from the heart to go straight to the heart of people, and even though he was someone who started as a lawyer, his love for music transformed him into something beyond a tie dude. To this day, his main talent never changed—he hears music that can hit the mainstream, and he puts it there. That’s what he does.

Clive will probably laugh at this, but if you played a B-flat⁷ on a piano he wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. He wouldn’t care—that’s someone else’s job. Just as Bill Graham did, he understands by hearing you—except he’s not imposing, as Bill could be. Sometimes Bill’s tenacity would get the best of him, and it would alienate me—like, “Dude, back up a little bit.” Clive is expert in the way he uses diplomacy. “For you and your music, this is my heart; for everybody else, it’s work.”

“Clive, that’s so sweet; thank you.”

“No; I’m telling you the truth.”

It’s amazing to attract people who want to go to bat for you and invest in what you’re doing. We were still recording Abraxas, and I remember one day the phone rang in the studio and Carabello answered it. “Hey, man—it’s for you.” Carabello had gotten tight with Miles Davis and Jimi, so it wasn’t so strange when I asked him who it was and he told me it was Miles calling. But we had never met. Why’d he want to talk to me? “No, man, don’t fuck around like that.”

“No, really—it’s him.”

I took the phone, and damn, it was Miles, with that sandpaper whisper. “Hey, whatcha doin’?”

“Oh, hi, Miles—nice to meet you. We’re recording an album.”

“Yeah? How’s it goin’?”

“We’re learning, you know—learning and having fun.”

He kind of chuckled. “Okay, just checking up on you. How long you doing that?”

“We’re going to take a little time, Miles. We’ve been on the road for a while.”

“Okay. Don’t take too long.”

Over the years, we got to be friends, and he’d call me up and ask how I was doing. My answer was always the same: “Learning and having fun, Miles.”

The Abraxas sessions happened before and after our second visit to Europe—actually, our first European tour, because our first visit in April was to play a two-night Royal Albert Hall show featuring Columbia Records acts such as Johnny Winter, Taj Mahal, and a group from San Francisco called It’s a Beautiful Day, which Bill Graham was managing. Bill’s role with Santana was expanding with everything that was going on—sometimes he would be the producer of the concert we were playing, sometimes the booking agent for the show, and sometimes the guy who got us recorded at the show. Sometimes he was all three.

Stan Marcum was still our manager, and I could tell that even though he had a desk in Bill’s office, they didn’t always agree on things. Bill was a businessman, and there was a side to him that was about the money. I learned in Tijuana that too much power can cause some people to do things that make you want to check your pocket every now and then. But I also knew that it was good to have strength on your side. And that’s pretty much where I landed when it came to Bill.

Most of the guys in Santana had some distrust of Bill—they felt that when he had the chance, he would take more than what should be coming to him. I intuitively felt that what he would bring was worth a lot more than the money that he might have been making. I also know a lot of guys on the scene got pissed off at him because of deals that went bad and some other problems. But even though we didn’t always see eye to eye, I always felt I could trust Bill, that he had my back.

Let me put it another way: when you consider all the other promoters and managers and agents at that time, how much they were taking and how much the artists were getting, I had no problem with Bill.

Bill was closer to me than he was to any other guy in Santana, and I got to see him in action. He was making things happen and getting things done back when the rock scene was still very new. He had used his position to get us to play Woodstock, and he had helped us work out our deal with Clive Davis at Columbia. He took the time to play a Willie Bobo tune and break it down for us. How do you put a price on all that? To me, he put more in than he took out.

Bill was like a big brother to me. He would sometimes ask me over to his house, and I’d get there just as Tower of Power or some other band was leaving. Over the years, he was a friend and adviser and helped us run parts of our business and negotiate a number of important deals. At times, people in his organization represented us and took care of paying bills. Bill wanted to handle all of Santana’s business and take us under his wing, and I was tempted to accept his offer, but he never really became Santana’s bona fide manager.

I had read the Ouija board—I could see what that would be like. It was like my relationship with Miles—sometimes you had a feeling that if you get too close, you’re going to get burned. Bill could be very intense, and I didn’t want to test our friendship. Bill accepted that, but he’d still say things like, “Well, if you’re ever stuck on the ten-yard line and need someone to drive it home, I’m here for you.” He always was there for me, and man, he knew how to drive it home.