CHAPTER 13

It took me around a year to go from being part of the band to being at the point where I was feeling that the name of the band wasn’t just a cool-sounding name: it was my name, and I had a responsibility to it. I think it’s good that I got to that point in my perception, because I wasn’t wired or equipped to deal with maintaining a Who or Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin kind of band—all for one, but no clear leader. I am Santana—if I’m not in the band and it has the name Santana, then it’s a Santana tribute.

I’m very lucky to have worked with all the musicians who played in Santana. They all brought different rhythms and beats, different ways to articulate chord changes, and different energies. I have learned from each one, and my mind is very clear about what and who—I can name you all the keyboard and conga players, all the drummers, all the bass players. They’ve all been important.

If you see a musician up there playing in Santana, he’s not there just because he knows the songs. It’s because of trust. I trust each one of them to be genuine and to have a deep respect for three things that they will never drop: the tempo, the feel, and the groove. We talk about that all the time. The tempo and feel have to be right for each song, and the groove—man, the groove is king.

One reason Santana survived all those lineup changes over the years is because every new keyboardist or bassist or singer wasn’t there just to sound like the records from thirty-five years before. Each Santana band has had its own identity. Every new musician has to show his own heart and bring new commitment into the mix and make it work with everyone else. Some guys ask me what they should do or rehearse. I tell them if you want to do research before playing in Santana, don’t research Santana. I wouldn’t even be talking to them if they didn’t know our music already.

I tell them to go and check out Marvin Gaye—get a video of him from 1974, and see that you have no choice but to believe every word he sings. Or Michael Jackson in ’83. Or Miles in ’69. Jimi in ’67. Howlin’ Wolf in the ’50s. You believe every note they play. I tell them, don’t justify the music and talk about chord changes without talking about how to make it come alive every time—like Frankenstein, up from the dead. I can see why Wayne Shorter likes those old movies—“It’s alive!” That’s what we need to hear in Santana.

One time we had a discussion on the bus. One band member said, “You know, we really don’t like it when you tell us what to do and what not to do.”

I said, “Okay, then surprise me. Don’t bring the same thing to every song. Don’t play me something you learned. They don’t teach audacity or sass or motherfuckingness at Berklee or any other school of music.” It’s not that they have to get to that every time. But I can tell if someone’s just slipping by, and it’s my role to say something, just as it’s my job to let a musician know, “Hey, that was some great shit you played tonight. Thank you.”

A lot of projects came out of guys hanging out, playing, and talking about ideas to work on together. The concert in Hawaii with Buddy Miles came out of Buddy and Greg Errico getting together with people like Neal and Coke Escovedo. Buddy and Greg had a mutual affection, so it was natural they’d do something together. And when I visited Buddy at his house in Nevada, he told me about a New Year’s gig at the crater on Diamond Head that he was going to do with Greg and other musicians.

Buddy Miles had been Jimi Hendrix’s last drummer and had been with Wilson Pickett and the Electric Flag before that. Then in 1970 he had a big hit with “Them Changes,” and at the time of the concert he had just signed with Columbia. From my point of view, things weren’t happening with Santana anymore, and who knew what the future held? Doing this concert was like imagining what Santana on steroids could be. It felt like it was the last part of the parade, and it was fun—an all-star band that was mostly Bay Area people, like Neal, Gregg, Coke, Luis Gasca, saxophonist Hadley Caliman, and Victor Pantoja. Carabello was there, too, and he played—but I had started to hang out with Coke more after we split, and Coke and I really bonded there.

Buddy and the others brought some tunes, but mainly we jammed on some loose ideas. We played them first and named the tracks later. The whole concert was recorded by Columbia, then Buddy and I went into a studio to mix the music. I got my first lesson in collaborating musically and finding the right way to say something that has to be said—away from Santana, in a studio filled with musicians, friends, girlfriends, and Buddy, who had a lot more experience than I did.

After a while Buddy got into the mixing room with the engineer and put the rest of us out. Hours and hours later, he played it for us. I listened to what were going to be the first two sides of a double album, and when it was fading out, I just said, “Buddy, you ain’t enough.” He said, “What?” with a hard look on his face. I said, “Man, I have to hear voices and horns and guitars. It can’t be just you. You’re too far up in the mix, and where’s everyone else? You ain’t enough. We need to mix it again.”

Everybody was looking at me, then back at Buddy, like, “Damn, he just sounded you, man.” Buddy started looking at me like, “How could you say that in front of everybody?” It had to be mixed again, there was no question about it. “Come on, Buddy, let’s do it once more, and this time make sure we can hear everyone enough.”

I liked the music—I was honored that he trusted me to bring something different out of him, and he definitely brought something different out of me. That’s the way I still hear that music. Buddy just sang his ass off on “Evil Ways” and “Faith Interlude”—he’s a phenomenon.

Buddy and I got tighter after that album, which was good, because we had to get behind it and tour that music when it came out. We found a way to speak with each other and to respect the music first. Buddy would say, “You talk to me in a way that most people don’t.” Most people were afraid of making him angry and saying the wrong thing. I told him, “Buddy, I’m never trying to put you down. I love your drumming and your singing. Sometimes I’m just saying you’re getting in the way of a lot of things with the mask you put on. I just want to get to Buddy Miles—the soul, the heart, the gift that God gave you.”

Buddy had a voice that could sing in any key, and he also played great guitar. The problems occurred when he wasn’t playing. He’d need to be the focus and have things serving him. It was Buddy, Buddy, Buddy, or he would get into trouble really, really quick. I still love Buddy in spite of Buddy Miles. We got together again in 1987, after I saw him with my friend Gary Rashid at the Boom Boom Room—it felt so good I invited him into the band. I have a good habit of using a bad memory, so I forget stupid shit that happened and I will give a person a second chance. We had fun for a few shows, until the same things started happening again.

Buddy was a pocket drummer—meaning he played in the pocket, which is great if you’re going to play “In the Midnight Hour” or “Knock on Wood” or other R & B grooves like that. If you’re going to play “Manic Depression,” that style doesn’t necessarily work. Buddy, and even the famous Stax drummer Al Jackson Jr., as great as he was playing with Otis Redding—they’re sometimes too tight. With cosmic drummers like Roy Haynes and Jack DeJohnette and Tony Williams and Elvin Jones and Mitch Mitchell, there’s a chemistry of bubbles and sparkles that is an entirely different kind of pocket. The extreme is Rashied Ali, Coltrane’s last drummer—that was a pocketless pocket.

John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders and Antônio Carlos Jobim and Alice Coltrane, with their looser rhythms and spiritual, praising melodies, were inspiring a change in the kind of music Shrieve and I wanted to do. If you listen to the music from the sessions we started doing in early 1972, you can hear that we sound like we were working with divining rods, looking for water—you can hear things changing in our music from February to March to April and May.

We were looking for our new identity beyond Santana. You could say we were looking for Weather Report and for Miles Davis—I mean, Don Alias and Lenny White, who played on Bitches Brew, are also on some Santana recordings. I think what we were all doing was looking for our identity in the same places—rock and jazz—with a spirit of exploration and the courage to try something new, even if it didn’t make sense or we weren’t supposed to do it. Caravanserai was the album we weren’t supposed to do.

For the next five months we were Santana mostly when we were in the studio—the band only did a few live shows under that name, and it wasn’t clear what the future of Santana was going to be. We went ahead with sessions from March to June of ’72 in CBS’s new recording studio in San Francisco—where we had done Santana III with Glen Kolotkin. The studio had originally been Coast Recorders, the place where John and Alice Coltrane had done one of their last sessions on the road in 1966, and it made sense that we’d be making the same kind of cosmic music in the studio they had used.

What was strange was that instead of the usual tensions we went through while making the other albums, these sessions were really smooth. We weren’t fighting—that part was over. Instead there was a kind of sadness. David Brown, Stan, and Carabello were gone, and Gregg and Neal agreed to do the music that became Caravanserai but were thinking about the music that would become Journey. For me, it was the sadness of feeling the original Santana coming to an end. I think about those months, and I remember I found myself crying a lot—asking myself what was wrong. My body was shedding tears at the dismantling of my relationship with everyone, mourning the fact that we didn’t have each other’s backs, like we used to. To this day I listen to “Song of the Wind” and break down inside hearing Gregg’s playing on that one—no solo, just a simple, supportive organ part that is not flashy or anything but supremely important to the song.

Transitions can be painful, but this period was made more organically smooth by Michael Shrieve. Musically he and I felt that we needed to walk a tightrope with Caravanserai—we knew it would mean trying new kinds of music, really stretching. It was Shrieve who said, “Let’s check out Jobim,” and we decided to record “Stone Flower” and write lyrics for it. Players on the album included Gregg, Neal, and Chepito as well as a few new members, such as Mingo and Tom Rutley on bass, who left after these recordings to go back to the jazz world, where he came from. We had Dougie Rauch on some tunes. You can really hear what he brought to “All the Love of the Universe” and “Look Up (to See What’s Coming Down)”—when we heard those tracks, we realized how much we needed Dougie.

Gregg was getting ready to say good-bye, too, but I had heard Tom Coster in Gábor’s band at the same time Dougie was playing with them. Tom—or TC, we called him—was a jazz guy, no two ways about it. He could play everything. I knew if he took over for Gregg he would bring something different to the organ feel in the band and would bring other keyboard sounds, too. He plays that high-energy electric piano solo on “La Fuente del Ritmo.” TC would help create some great songs for Santana when we needed them, such as “Europa” and “Dance Sister Dance.”

With Coster and the others I started to find my own way of talking about what I was hearing in the music. I was learning that especially with new people in the band I needed to be as respectful as possible but also as clear as possible about what I wanted, like: “The chord I’m thinking feels like this—you have to picture a sunset, when the clouds are painted red… no, that chord is the middle of the day. Try this other chord. Okay, that’s like four in the afternoon. Can we get to six o’clock, right before the sun goes down?”

To me, music has always been visual. I can see when there is color or mood, or water or fire or a tear rolling down from an eye, or a smile. That’s the business of a musician: to make the chord or the rhythm or whatever “sound-match” a certain memory or emotion and connect to something real.

I told Glen Kolotkin at the beginning of the sessions that I wanted the album to start with the sound of nature, and he said, “I got just the thing—in my backyard I have a cricket chorus, and you won’t believe how loud they get.” So that’s how the album starts, and then you hear Hadley Caliman playing the saxophone part—the fog whooshing in after the crickets. That’s also Hadley with that wild flute solo on “Every Step of the Way.” There were other local people we brought in—Rico Reyes sang on one tune, and a local guitarist, Doug Rodrigues, played with me on “Waves Within.” Wendy Haas played keyboards on this album, as she would on some other Santana albums. I decided my solo on that tune should cut through the music like a hot knife through butter—some of what I played came from listening to Freddie Hubbard’s “First Light” and Miles’s “Concierto de Aranjuez.” Neal and I were quoting a lot and using ideas and feelings that we got from other music. “Astral Traveling,” from Pharoah Sanders’s album Thembi, helped give birth to the opening song on Caravanserai.

The making of Caravanserai was when Santana really got into people working separately in the studio—Shrieve and Dougie and Chepito would get their tracks together and come to me and say, “Okay, we need you to come in and play your solo.” I’d hear it for the first time right then, and I’d wet my finger and point it up in the air like an antenna on the Empire State Building and let the melodies and inspiration come to me—I was thinking “Nature Boy”; “Love on a Two-Way Street.” Gábor Szabó licks. They’re all on that album. People would tell me later, “Whoa—that was a great solo on ‘Stone Flower.’” I’d say, “Thank you, man,” and be thinking, “I hope nobody busts me for it!”

For two reasons my favorite song on Caravanserai is still “Every Step of the Way”—first because it sounds like what we really loved back then: Herbie Hancock’s Crossings. The song also reminds me of Shrieve because he wrote it and because of how we played together. Shrieve was there to complete the journey that became Caravanserai. He was in my corner, and I was in his—we helped each other complete it. When it came time to figure out the order of songs for the album, he and I kept making cassettes of different sequences. Then separately, we would drive around San Francisco and listen to them. We would give them to each other and discuss them until we knew exactly how the tunes should run. More than any Santana album, Caravanserai was meant to be a full album experience, with one track connected to the next—a body of work like What’s Going On or A Love Supreme.

I remember telling Shrieve, “I found the word caravanserai when I was reading something by Paramahansa Yogananda.”

“Wow, sounds great… what does it mean?”

“The caravan is the eternal cycle of reincarnation, every soul going into and out of life, from death to life and back again, until you arrive at a place where you can rest and achieve an inner peace. That place is the caravanserai. How you live now determines how you will live again, if you can get there. Reincarnation is in your hands.”

It made a lot of sense to me—the cycle that happens to all of us: mineral, vegetable, animal, man, divinity. It’s in our hands. I remember thinking that I was glad I had become acquainted with Eastern philosophy, because up until then I thought that you just die and that’s it—you go to hell just for living. That’s why we put the quote from Paramahansa Yogananda’s Metaphysical Meditations on the album cover:

The body melts into the universe.

The universe melts into the soundless voice.

The sound melts into the all-shining light.

And the light enters the bosom of infinite joy.

For me, Armando Peraza was the most important person to come into Santana that year—maybe any year. He played in two tunes on Caravanserai—he added bongos on “Fuente” and later joined Santana on congas. He was one of the top four congueros to come over from Cuba in the 1940s, along with Patato Valdez, Francisco Aguabella, and Mongo Santamaría. Since the ’60s, he’d been living in San Francisco.

Armando was older and wiser than all of us—he was almost fifty then. He had been in the game for years. He was older than Miles Davis, which was another reason he didn’t take any mess from him. Armando was compact and tough. You could hear it in his congas—Armando was like a cheetah and a laser. He penetrated, and he was really fast. Meanwhile, alongside Armando, Mongo had a beautiful, burly, fatherly sound. It was a great combination.

Armando was an amazing spirit and force in the band. For me, he became a mentor and a tutor and a divine angel. He told me things when I needed to hear them, and he told great stories. He had stories about all the people he’d played with and the crazy things he’d done. He’d challenge people with his credentials—his badge of honor was that his first gig after arriving in New York City was playing with Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich. “Afterward they both wanted me to come play in their bands,” he’d say. Then he’d say, “What’ve you got?”

Another thing Armando liked to do: after a gig he’d look at his hands. He had tiny little hands and a big, big sound. Armando would say, “And I don’t use a goddamn sticket, man.” In his vocabulary, it wasn’t a drum stick. “I don’t need no goddamn sticket.” He had his own way of speaking—instead of saying, “Don’t gimme that shit,” it was “Don’t gimme that shick.” If he was into the way somebody played, it would be “I like that guy’s shick.”

I was called Carlo. McLaughlin was Maharishi, not Mahavishnu. Lionel Richie was Flannel Richie. There was Argentina Turner, Roberta Flop, and that Weather Report guy, Joe Sabano. “Hey, Carlo, you know I was with Sabano when he wrote ‘Mercy, Mercy, Mercy’?”

“Really, Armando?”

“Yeah, I helped him out.”

There was one story Armando told all of us a few times about being in Tijuana, where he did a little bit of everything—he was a dancer, a baseball player, and a bouncer. One night he bet a bartender that he could jump into a bullring and deal with the bull. You want to talk about full circle? Years later a beautiful, elegant woman saw him with me on the street in Daly City, California, yelled out his name, and came over. She said she was the wife of one of the Nicholas Brothers, then she said, “How come you don’t remember me? I was with you in Tijuana when you bet that bartender that you could face the bull!”

Armando turned to me. “You see, Carlo? Sometimes people accuse me of being senile, but I just have a great memory.” I still don’t know what that means.

I first read about Armando on the liner notes to one of the early Leon Thomas albums, which describes him playing in New York City. The first time I heard Armando play was in a park in San Francisco in 1968—he and a guy named Dennis were going at it. Nobody was buying or doing anything—there was just a big crowd focused on the two of them. They finished, and people were freaking out, jumping up to give them a standing ovation. Armando came straight over to me, sweating and not caring. “Carlos Santana?” He knew who I was.

“Yeah?”

“Someday I want to be in your band, man.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Oh, man, that would be an honor.”

“But I can’t do that right now because I’m playing with Cal Tjader at the Matador. Come see me.”

Another time, in New York City, Carabello told me that Armando was sitting in with Mongo at the Village Gate. We took a cab straight to the club, and all these drummers were there—on my right was Roy Haynes, and Tony Williams was on my left. Mongo was playing his songs—including several cha-cha-chas and “Watermelon Man.” Armando was up there, too—putting more and more “something” into the music. Then all of a sudden it was just Armando and Mongo—what everybody came for. The look they gave each other was, “You’re my friend, but I got something I need to show you.”

I’ve seen Armando go up against Francisco Aguabella and Billy Cobham. He’d do his thing, then pull back a little and put his hands out like a toreador working a cape—“Eso—there you go! What’ve you got?” Every time musicians like that get together, the walls start to sweat. I swear to you, they actually do rearrange the molecular structure of the joint.

Armando was still one of the most important people to come into my life—he was another angel who showed up at just the right time. He carried so much music inside him and could be such a character. By being the way he was, he instilled confidence in me. He helped me believe in what I was doing and where the band was going. I needed that in 1972, because when we finished Caravanserai all the people around us were shaking their heads, saying we had gone too far.

By that time Santana was almost six months past the first breakup, when Stan and Carabello were let go. Carabello was around, playing with other folks in the Bay Area, and starting his own band. David was trying to get himself together. But Stan was hooked, and eventually he became another drug casualty.

One good thing was that it hadn’t been a messy divorce—at least not financially. We never fought over royalties or anything like that—we don’t even now. But it was messy in the sense that people were very disappointed in each other, laying blame and guilt on each other like I don’t know what.

Santana was moving forward, and I was the one talking for the band inside and outside the studio. When we were finished with Caravanserai, Clive Davis asked for a meeting at CBS’s studio. It was just Clive, Shrieve, and I.

Clive was definitely not happy. He had heard the music, and he was not smiling. It was one of the most important meetings we ever had about Santana, as important as the one we had with Bill Graham before Woodstock. By that point, with the band falling apart, Bill and Clive were handling a lot of the energy around us, trying to help us keep it together. But when it came to the music, Shrieve and I were the ones to go to.

There’s a funny thing that Clive does sometimes, usually when he’s in his own office. He’ll look away from you and talk to you indirectly, through one of his people: “Uh, Harry—tell Carlos that we should release the album on this date.” Meanwhile I’m in the same room; I just heard him say it. It didn’t matter. “Uh, Carlos? Clive thinks that we should release…”

I remember we were sitting across from each other, and there was a candle on the table between us. Clive was looking right at me. It probably seemed strange to Clive, but I kept looking at that candle when we spoke—not to ignore him, but I knew something was coming. I knew he was going to try to persuade me to take the band in a different direction. But we were too deep into this thing with Caravanserai to turn it around.

Clive said, “I’m sorry; I have to ask. Why would you want to do this?” I have to say that he came into the conversation patiently. He was not pushy, just very gracious. I said, “Why would I want to do what?” He said, “Clearly there’s not one single within a thousand miles of this album. There’s nothing here to take to radio and get a hit with. It feels like you’re turning your backs on yourselves. The jazz stuff is great, but there’s already a Miles Davis; there’s already a Weather Report. Why don’t you just be Santana?”

I said, “It’s going to go like this, man. This is a body of work—the whole thing is a single.” I kept looking at the flame of the candle because I didn’t want to look in his eyes and be swayed into saying, “Okay, let’s go back to the studio and create another Abraxas kind of thing.”

I bored my eyes into the candle. I knew Clive was doing his job, and I knew Bill felt the same way. They were both right—there was no single on Caravanserai to take to radio.

I remember Quincy Jones once telling me about Ray Charles standing up for his music—the two of them had come up together in Seattle. When Ray got ready to do songs with strings and voices—a produced, pop kind of thing—some people who liked his R & B sound said, “I can’t get with that. I don’t like this ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ or ‘Crying Time.’ What are you doing?” Ray’s answer was, “Well, man, you’re not going to be ignorant your whole life, are you?”

I wasn’t going to put it that way. I had too much respect for Clive, so I said, “Clive, thank you for coming here and saying what you needed to tell us. You need to do what you need to do, and we need to do what we need to do. But we can’t be doing another ‘Black Magic Woman’ over and over and over. We can’t go back—with all the changes in the last few months, we literally cannot go back. We have to learn to change and to grow.” Clive didn’t really argue, he just thought for a moment. “Well, I do need to tell you there’re no singles in here.”

Clive was disappointed, but he didn’t try to put the screws to us: “Do it this way or else.” It wasn’t that kind of thing. Clive has always been very artist-friendly. He’ll give it to you straight, but he’s not a person who’s going to make you feel like a stupid child who doesn’t know what he’s doing. Bill Graham was kind of like that, only he would be straight without pulling any punches. When he heard what the title was going to be, he said, “Caravanserai? More like career suicide.”

“Career suicide”? Okay, it sounded a little like Caravanserai. Ha-ha. But no, I didn’t think we were doing that.

With all I know now I believe I still would make the same decision today. But I could not argue with Clive—I knew he was right in his thinking and that he was looking out for our best interests as well as Columbia’s. In hindsight what I wish I had said was, “Clive, let us do this one, and the next one we’ll work on together, okay?” But I didn’t know how to do that then—how to be diplomatic. Now I know. It’s all in the wording—all in the timing, presentation, and tone. Today I want to be able to invite people to invest emotionally with me and not consider it my music or theirs—it’s our music.

Columbia put out Caravanserai two months after Carlos Santana & Buddy Miles! Live! There were no hits on the radio and no gold records coming from either album, but they got great reviews. In Rolling Stone, Ralph Gleason really liked Caravanserai and reviewed it along with Miles’s On the Corner, but the general reaction was “What the hell is this?” It still sold well because a lot of people were curious about it, and we got so many compliments from musicians for that album. But without a radio single, sales went down compared to our first three albums. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t go back. We had to go forward, and Caravanserai is what we felt was right at that time.

A few months later, in ’73, there was an argument over money at CBS, and they let Clive go. Clive, in his way, had adopted us, as Bill had. Like Bill, he had a system and the right people working for him so that he could say with supreme conviction, “If we work together and you come with me, I’ll get on the phone, and your music is going to get on the radio. You are going to get not only gold but platinum records.” Clive and his people always know how to get music into the mainstream. Santana was still able to continue, but with Clive gone, there was never the same feeling at CBS.

Gregg left San Francisco by that summer—he got to the point where he was really over the whole rock scene. He started a restaurant with his dad in Seattle, where he’s from. I knew I was going to miss him. But he was just too caught up in what he wanted to do away from Santana at that point, just as I was focused on where I thought Santana should go. If there had been any chance for reconciliation and getting back together, it was gone by that point. I had been doing a lot of jamming with other bands around the Bay Area starting that spring and summer—playing in concerts with folks like Elvin Bishop and Buddy Miles; Malo, my brother’s band; and Azteca. In July I was invited to be a featured guest with Tower of Power at the Marin County Civic Center—they were on a double bill with the Loading Zone. I showed up in my Excalibur with two blond chicks who were friends of Neal’s. I got out my guitar, and we went backstage.

This is the night when Deborah and I first really noticed each other. When I saw her, I remembered she had been with Sly—she looked like she was Sly’s girlfriend. This time Deborah was by herself, looking very attractive in her eyes and her skin and holding herself with elegance. It was in the way she walked—like a queen—which was something I would come to know over time. I didn’t know yet that she was from a musical family or that her dad was a famous blues guitarist. I didn’t even know her name.

I was very single at that time, not really looking. In those days, women found their own way—guys didn’t always have to take the first step and do the walking and talking. I know what Deborah says in her book about my chasing her. But in my book, it went down like this: I went to get a drink from a water fountain, and when I straightened up she was right behind me. She really looked beautiful and had long eyelashes. We spoke for a little bit. Then I soloed on “You Got to Funkifize.” I went home, and the next day the phone rang. It was Lynn Medeiros, Jerry Martini’s old lady—Jerry is the saxophonist who helped put together Sly & the Family Stone. Lynn said that she and Deborah were working on a cookbook—favorite recipes by the ladies of rock musicians. Would my lady like to participate?

Man, I saw right through that. Come on. But it was nice and charming and kind of funny the way they did that. I said, “Okay, no. No lady over here. Thanks. Sure, I’d like to talk with Deborah. Put her on the phone.” That’s how it started.

Our first date was a week or two later, and it didn’t take long at all. She loved music, and she understood musicians, and she wasn’t someone who would get between a musician and his music. She was young and beautiful and was very close with her family, which attracted me. She talked about her mother and grandmother a lot. She had a strong foundation and confidence. Looking back on it now, I think that’s what attracts me most about women. Whether they are with you or not, they’re okay—they may want you, but they don’t need you. I don’t like women who are needy or whiny. If there’s any of that “Oh, without you I’m just nothing” stuff, then I know I got the wrong one. Got to go!

Deborah also had an inner beauty as well, a divine kind of spark. I found out almost immediately after we started dating that she was aspiring to a higher consciousness, as I was. She was reading about Swami Satchidananda and I was reading Paramahansa Yogananda and we were both disenchanted with the trappings of the rock-and-roll lifestyle and disappointed with people who were close to us. For some reason we always got to talking about that when we were crossing the Golden Gate Bridge—the hurt and disappointment that came from people going their own way and getting lost.

Whatever happened between her and Sly is in her book, and that and what was happening with me and my band had left us both needing support and consolation. I think a lot of what brought us together so quickly was that we were both like birds with broken wings: we needed mending. We were consoling each other.

There was still a hole in me from what happened with Santana, and Deborah came and stood next to me at the right time. Dougie Rauch used to say that everybody has a hole to fill. Some people try to fill it with sex or drugs or money or food, but everybody has a space inside that they need to fill—that’s the closest I ever heard Dougie get to having some kind of philosophy.

Did I know Deborah was the one at that time? I knew how I felt at that moment, and that was all I was thinking about. I was open to the possibility without even thinking about it. I think the important thing, looking back on it, is that people should know that you don’t attract whom you want or whom you need. You always attract who you are. So if you do whatever inner work needs to be done and deal with who you are, then your heart will be open and you can be flexible and vulnerable again and invite in your queen and take your existence to another level. I don’t believe it was a coincidence.

Deborah was sexy and exciting, and she made me comfortable. There was a side of her that was very generous and nurturing. Very soon after we started dating I had the feeling that one reason we met was that I needed help cleaning my inner closet. Then she started asking me to come over to Oakland to meet her mom and dad.

Deborah was the younger daughter of the Bay Area bluesman Saunders King—he was black, his wife, Jo, was white, and they were serious, churchgoing people. SK had been known around San Francisco during World War II, playing blues and ballads for black servicemen with his big band, or “orchestra,” as they called it back then. He had a smooth way of singing songs—“S.K. Blues” was his big hit in ’42.

SK had history. He was one of the first electric blues guitarists on the West Coast, the same generation as T-Bone Walker—he had heard Charlie Christian playing guitar with Benny Goodman, and that was it. SK got his own instrument, put a band together, and was playing in shows with Billie Holiday when she was at the top. From what he told me later, I got the idea that he sometimes got her West Coast band together for her. SK had known Charlie Parker and worked with him. SK was also a veteran of the old TOBA circuit—the black-owned Theater Owners Booking Association, the real chitlin’ circuit—and he had toured through some rough places and stood up to some serious racist shit.

To understand just how respected SK was, you have to know that B. B. King called him his personal god. SK’s response to hearing that was, “B. B.? I knew that boy before he knew how to hold the guitar.”

SK didn’t have a problem with his daughters getting with guys who had some sort of public profile. He had practice with that: Deborah had been with Sly for a while, and SK’s older daughter, Kitsaun, was dating Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at the time. Years later, Kareem and I would tell each other SK stories—he told me that he got some advice from SK when he was getting beat up while he was with the Milwaukee Bucks, which I guess was the only thing they could do to stop him. SK told him to defend himself, to not wait for the referee. Just once, just one good hit. He did, and that was all it took—opposing players started to leave him alone.

Later, when I started to call him Dad, SK would tell me stories. One of his favorites was about playing on a session with Louis Armstrong—a radio broadcast, I think. Everyone was looking over the sheet music before they went on the air, except for Louis. When they asked him what he was going to do if he didn’t know the music, he said that to him playing music was like walking through an orchard full of fruit trees and that each note was like a fruit hanging off a branch and that he was going to pick only the ripest ones.

Another time SK was looking upset, and I asked him what happened. “Man, I got this phone call last night, and this cat starts talking to me. I could tell he was a musician, but he was calling me the n word. I can’t stand it when someone calls me outside my name.” That’s how they talked about it in SK’s generation.

SK said, “I didn’t even know who it was! I hung up and I got so angry and suddenly I said, ‘I know who that was.’ It was Dizzy Gillespie, but I didn’t care. I got back on the phone and called him. ‘Man, don’t you ever call my house and call me outside my name again, you hear me? My name is Saunders King, you got that? Now I know why they call you Dizzy.’”

Kareem and I used to talk about how long it took to get past the probation stage with SK. He wouldn’t even turn his head to look at you; and with a toothpick in his mouth, he looked like Otis Rush. You can talk about Checkpoint Charlie and airport security and all that stuff, but it only scratches the surface of how it felt each time Deborah took me to her parents’ home. It took a while to get SK to actually open up.

It was Deborah I was getting close to, not her parents. But the more time I spent with her, the more I spent with all of them. I was getting another family. I remember Armando looking at me not long after I met Deborah, then just shaking his head, like he was thinking, “It’s too late to save this guy now.”

Caravanserai was released in October of ’72, and, as we had for our other albums, we got ready to go on the road, playing concerts to help introduce our new music. Santana was then Shrieve, Dougie on bass, Armando, Mingo and Chepito on percussion, and two guys on keyboards—TC and Richard Kermode, who had a bad, straight-ahead montuno, a consistent Latin feel in his playing and was steady like a horse. In my mind, TC was the Keith Jarrett of Santana, and Kermode became the Chick Corea. Kermode had been in Jorge’s band, Malo, and I remember my mom telling me that I should be more careful about taking musicians from my brother’s band. I didn’t think I took him—my thinking was that Santana was another opportunity for musicians, and if they wanted to they could try playing with us, see if it worked, then decide what they wanted to do. That was a really nice combination—TC and Kermode.

The Caravanserai tour started in North America in October. It was Santana, Bobby Womack, and Freddie King—rock, blues, and soul groups all together. I was in heaven, man, playing next to those legends. We played a number of chitlin’ circuit venues that didn’t usually have rock bands, so there were a lot of black folks in the audience who normally wouldn’t come to a Santana concert, and of course there were a lot of white rock fans catching Bobby and Freddie, whom they normally wouldn’t go and hear.

The one problem was that when we started playing the longer pieces from Caravanserai, our fans started screaming. “Hey, Santana—play ‘Oye Como Va’!” They weren’t shy about it, either—I’d be into a long, slow solo, and suddenly somebody would yell at the top of his lungs: “Play fuckin’ ‘Evil Ways’!” Oh, man. I remember turning around and looking at Shrieve, and then we’d go into “Stone Flower.” The people got loud on that tour. Other bands were picking up on that—I remember Freddie King saying, “Hey, Santana, that’s some weird-ass shit you’re playing now. Why don’t you play some ‘Black Magic Woman’? I like it better when you just play some blues.”

Changing musical direction is never easy, but that first tour after Caravanserai felt like it caused the most tension—both inside the band and between us and our fans. It even caused tension within my own family—my mom couldn’t understand why I would play original music, and my dad was still trying to figure out the structures to Santana songs. Both of them thought I was crazy to change Santana around. Meanwhile, we were on the road, and I was thinking about Deborah a lot and about my growing spirituality. I was meditating, and I had been introduced to a new spiritual guide by Larry Coryell.

Coryell and I were already going down the same path musically—he was a guitarist mixing jazz and rock intentions before I ever thought about doing it. He had even cut tracks with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Coltrane’s bassist and drummer, the year after John moved on. Earlier in ’72, before I met Deborah, Coryell came through San Francisco and stayed with me. We meditated together, and I noticed a photograph he carried with him—it was in a little frame, and it was scary. It showed a man in the middle of meditating so deeply that the photo was humming! His eyes were half closed, and it looked like he had a small smile on his face. I asked Larry who it was. “This is a transcendental picture of Sri Chinmoy in a high state.”

A very high state—I could feel the intensity from the man just through the picture. I would come to know that photograph and that face very well—I’d soon be meditating on the photo, just as Larry did, and would continue to do so for almost ten years. That face became the note I would use to get myself in tune with a Christ consciousness, a Buddha consciousness.

Sri Chinmoy was a guru who had moved to New York City from India and had started an ashram and meditation center in Queens. Larry was one of his first disciples, but that didn’t matter; if Larry had asked me to come meet him then, I think I’d have run the other way. But nine months later, after getting together with Deborah and finishing Caravanserai, I was ready. It started with John McLaughlin—he found me in a state of openness and helped plant the seed.

Here’s how it happened: just before the Caravanserai tour began, John called me about doing an album with him. I guess because of the Buddy Miles album, some people saw I was open to collaboration, and John knew that we both had a special place for the music of Coltrane. John’s album that year, The Inner Mounting Flame, connected with me in the same place—so it made sense. Later I learned that Mahavishnu was the name that Sri gave to John.

But John had been a guitarist in Tony Williams’s group—the guy who played with Miles on In a Silent Way and then on Jack Johnson. People ask me if it was intimidating to play with John back then—it’s always intimidating to play with John. He was busy restructuring the way a guitar sounded in jazz—in music. What could I do next to him?

It’s funny—I had no problem sticking up for Santana’s music; I could do that on my own. But when John asked me to record with him, I spoke to a lot of people, including Shrieve and Deborah, before saying yes. I remember Armando had good advice: “Don’t worry, goddammy.” (He’d say “goddammy” instead of “goddamn it.”) “You let him do his shick, let him play. When it’s your turn, you already got something he don’t have.”

That made sense to me—I’m there to complement what John does, not compete with him or be compared to him. Before I said yes, though, I was telling myself to get ready to wait—wait to see what he would play and how he would play it, then do the opposite. If he plays up and down the neck, quickly and staccato, answer him slowly, with longer notes, and it’s going to be a beautiful contrast.

It was like Miles had taught me—I’d always be learning, no matter what, because that was just who I am.

Those lessons never went away—I still carry all of them. I feel them today if I have to play with someone I know is great or even if I have to just meet someone like a president or Nelson Mandela. Fear and intimidation are like anger and hatred—all part of the ego game.

Saying yes to record with Mahavishnu—by that time I was calling him Mahavishnu, and he was calling me Little Brother—came down to this important lesson: my mind works for me; I don’t work for it. Whatever it is that I tell my mind we’re going to do, we’re going to do. I told myself, “Yeah, it’s going to be a little shaky the first couple of times in the studio with John, but I’ll find a way.” I still have that attitude, no matter whom I’m going to play with or where I’ll be playing.

We sealed the deal when John flew out to San Francisco to sit in with the new Santana at Winterland at the start of October, which was really the first time the new, full lineup performed. John sat in for the last half hour, and Deborah was backstage for the first time at a Santana concert. I felt so high from everything that was happening—the music coming together and falling in love. I felt light and open to whatever was coming next—like a weight was lifting.

The Caravanserai tour across the United States and Canada didn’t last long—it ended with a few shows around New York City at the end of October. Deborah met me there, and then McLaughlin and I went into the studio with our respective rhythm sections. We used Larry Young and Jan Hammer on organs, John’s wife, Eve, on piano, and Don Alias and Billy Cobham on percussion, balancing it out with Shrieve, Armando, Mingo, and Dougie on bass. The music included a few originals by John—he can come up with some long, gorgeous, celestial melodies, and I know that’s just one reason why Miles loved him. He did two for this album—“Meditation” and “The Life Divine.” There was also a beautiful, meditative spiritual called “Let Us Go into the House of the Lord,” which became a favorite song of mine to play at the end of concerts, because when people heard it they really understood: “Okay, it’s time to go home.”

John and I also did two of our favorite Coltrane pieces—the opening part of A Love Supreme and “Naima.” Coltrane was the reason the recording came together, so we had to celebrate his music and acknowledge him, even if we were rock musicians doing some of his holiest songs only a few years after he died. I was too naive to think anything about that—even after the music came out, I didn’t read any reviews about whether or not we had committed sacrilege. I know there’s a jazz police, just as there’s a clave police. Gábor Szabó had a name for them. “Eh, they aren’t musicians,” he’d say. “They’re just a bunch of jazzbos. Real musicians don’t think like that.” That’s how I felt. It wasn’t like we were putting a mustache on the Mona Lisa—it never felt wrong to play that music.

John and I would get together again in early ’73 to finish the music for the album. In the end we called it Love Devotion Surrender, which was the spiritual path of Sri Chinmoy. Coryell had been the first to tell me about Sri, then John started speaking about him with even more intensity, with a consistency of serenity in his persona. That last week of October, John and Eve took Deborah and me to meet their guru for the first time.

The meeting was at the Church Center for the United Nations, across the street from the main UN buildings. There were a lot of people around as well as Indian food and some live music. Later, some people read poetry—not that different from the meetings I was going to in San Francisco. I brought along a couple of flowers as a sign of respect—I had heard other spiritual leaders speak, but I didn’t know what to expect. Sri was a short, balding man wearing red robes and a big white smile—an incredible, sweet smile.

John introduced us, and Sri said, “Oh, Mahavishnu has told me about you. Good boy. I am so happy that you’re here.” I learned later that he greeted all his disciples that way—“good boy”; “good girl.” He looked at me intently and accepted the flowers. Then he said, “I can see your soul wants to be here so bad.”

Sri started speaking to everyone who was there—telling stories and speaking about his philosophy. I found out right away that desire was the word he used to describe uncontrolled forces of the ego, forces that separate and divide people. Aspiration was the effort of the spirit to get away from the yoke of those forces, reaching for a higher conscious and bringing people together. “Aspiration is the inner cry,” he would say. “It cries for endless bliss, boundless peace and light. Aspiration harmonizes; desire monopolizes.”

I closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew it felt like he was getting closer and closer, brighter and brighter, until he was right in front of me, even though he was still yards away at the front of the room. I kept my eyes shut, and in addition to Sri’s voice I remember hearing another voice inside me telling me that this is a man of the elements, that inside him he carried sun, water, and earth. The inner voice said, “You are a seed. A seed needs sun, water and soil. Together you will be able to grow and give divine fruit to humanity.”

I’m not making this up—that’s actually what I heard. Sri stopped speaking, and I had a feeling that I was inside a waterfall, but instead of water there was light, and instead of falling down, the light was all going up. I was thinking to myself, “Did this really happen?” By the time I opened my eyes, I knew Sri’s teaching was meant to be my path. Sri could see that, too. There was no contract to sign or handshake or anything like that. There was no official welcome—just Sri standing in front of me, smiling and saying, “I take you; I accept you. If you want, I take you as my disciple. But you got to cut your hair and shave your beard.”

I knew that Sri advocated no drugs, no drinking, and no sex until marriage. John had told me about all that. Sri was about discipline—that was the “surrender” part—and he was not into any hippie sort of lifestyle. I was happy he asked me, but I wasn’t sure. Cut my hair? I couldn’t even think of anyone asking me to do that except for someone like Sri. In 1972, your long hair was not just a mark of honor—it was your identity and your strength and your connection to a way of life that said, “I’m done with the old way of doing things.” What Sri was asking felt like some Samson and Delilah sort of thing.

When we got back to the hotel, Deborah asked me what I was going to do—if I was really going to join. She told me how she was feeling, that she was ready. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t want to sound weird, but I got to have some sort of sign.” I had hardly said that when suddenly a bird came swooping into the room—we had left the window open. It flapped around, then flew back out again. Deborah and I looked at each other with our eyes open wide. I was thinking, “Holy shit. Did that just happen?” After a few seconds, Deborah said, “Okay. I guess you’re going to cut your hair.”

We found a barber in the Village. I remember the look on the lady’s face when I walked in, like maybe I had walked into the wrong place. The next time I saw Sri, I was looking all clean. I was wearing a white shirt, and for the first time in maybe six or seven years my hair wasn’t touching my collar. All that was left on my face was a neat mustache.

Deborah and I were welcomed by Sri into his ashram. I felt like I had gotten over a big hump, like I had gotten rid of a cancer of anger and fear and come back from a very, very deep meditation. I immediately could taste and smell better. I felt healthy; my own saliva tasted sweet, with no bad odor, and I noticed that I didn’t smell funky even when I had finished a long concert and hadn’t yet taken a shower. Something had changed in my molecular structure—molecules obey your thoughts, you know.

Then almost immediately we had to leave New York and join Santana in London for the start of a European tour. When the band saw me they were shocked. I could see in their faces that they thought someone had kidnapped Carlos and sent his twin brother instead. I explained to them that Deborah and I had accepted Sri Chinmoy as our spiritual guide, our guru, and that he had accepted us. I think most of them understood, though my short hair was a big change. The one who really got it was Shrieve, because we both loved Coltrane and because we were both on this planet searching for the same thing: spiritual, mental, and physical stability. Not long afterward, he cut his hair, too, and became a disciple of Swami Satchidananda.

The European leg of the Caravanserai tour was a triumph after that—we played at Wembley Arena in London, and I remember that any doubt or frustration and anger I had about people not liking our new music went away after the reviews of our album and our show came out in Melody Maker. They were both written by Richard Williams, who was one of the best rock journalists in England then. He said Caravanserai was the “Hot Rhythm Album of 1972” and called the progress we were making “logical, organic, intelligent.” He said that each tune blended into the next. The review also compared some of the orchestral arrangements to the sound that Gil Evans got—and any comparison to Miles’s music made me smile.

The praise Williams gave our live show at Wembley Stadium pushed it up even higher—he said, and I’m quoting exactly, “It seemed like the Gods had descended from Olympus and were walking the earth once more.” He said this was the best version of the band yet, and he could tell how I was comfortable being the leader of the group, interacting with everyone onstage. He compared us to Miles’s band again—he gave special attention to Tom Coster and Richard Kermode, calling them a “couple of Keith Jarretts,” and to the balance between funky and sophisticated in the music.

To this day it’s my favorite Santana review. It wasn’t just the applause Williams gave us—there was power in what he said and in how he said it. He really understood the work we had put into Caravanserai and the chance we took going in a new direction. Who would’ve thought it would come from a British magazine and not one back home?

I was on a cloud—the band was working so well. We played various places in Europe, then Montreux again, and the blessings continued. Claude Nobs welcomed Deborah and me into his home. He cooked for us—cheese fondue, even cherries flambé. He gave us an amazing bedroom where he had hooked up his phone with some technology so that it would call up music that he had recorded at his festivals when you hit certain buttons. The music would play through the sound system in the room. Aretha Franklin’s “I Say a Little Prayer” was keyed to the numbers 1–7–9. I’d push the numbers, and the song would play. This was 1972, remember. How Claude got that technology together back then I still don’t know.

When we came back from Europe, we did a few more shows across the States that Bill Graham set up. He had asked me who I’d like to have open for Santana on that run, and it took me less than a second to say Weather Report. They agreed to be on the bill, and during every show I’d be backstage listening to them play—Wayne, Joe, Eric Grávátt on drums, and Miroslav Vitous, who was playing acoustic bass through a wah-wah!

I was loving the music, but I got such an uncomfortable feeling when people would scream “Santana” while they were playing. I wanted to go onstage, grab the mike, and say, “Hey, shut the fuck up! This is Weather Report—this is Wayne Shorter. You’re embarrassing me!” I had to take a deep breath. I was thinking that maybe we could open for them and get the Santana thing out of the way and then let them go on, but I remembered Bill saying that it wouldn’t be fair because people would leave as soon as we were done. “They just don’t know the value of this music like you do.”

Wayne is a harmonic genius and was one of the reasons Miles’s band sounded the way it did in the ’60s and why jazz sounded the way it did in the ’70s. He and Joe Zawinul brought electric rock and jazz together in Weather Report with elegance and supreme commitment and courage at a time when people would be complaining about it from both sides. Neither the jazz police nor the rock crowd knew what to think about it.

Later on I got to know Wayne and found that in person he is sweet and warm. He’s now one of the closest friends I have, and I’m very proud to say that. But it would be a few more years before we got tight. I need to express how much I feel for the man. I’ll put it this way: if there could be seven of me, one of them would stay with Wayne and just take care of him from the moment he gets out of bed through the time he gets on the plane or in the car to go to the show or the studio to the time he gets back home again. Just making sure he’s always okay, doing what he does. There are few things more important to me than being able to be of service to Wayne Shorter. That’s how much I respect and revere him.

Wayne’s temperament is like a mix between a kid with a new box of crayons—who’s just discovered orange for the first time—and an old Jedi Knight who has the wisdom of the ages. He might be giggling, thinking about a scene in an old movie he likes—and he remembers them all—then he’ll turn around and say the most profound things.

Once I was with him, the drummer in his band was really mad about the kind of road stuff that can happen anywhere, anytime. Wayne let him go on, listening, giving him respect. The guy finally stopped to take a breath, and Wayne said, “So what did you learn?”

What a perfect way to put it and make him think and end the complaining at the same time. Wayne has a way of framing things that gets you to totally change your perspective, such as the way he thinks about music. One time I saw him sitting at a piano, thinking, sweating, hanging over the keys like a praying mantis, getting ready to hit a chord. All of a sudden he brought his hands down, then jumped back and said, “Did you hear it?” Someone else there said, “Well, that’s an inversion of a B-flat augmented seventh with…” Wayne didn’t even let him finish. “No, it isn’t!” The other guy said, “But, man, it is—see, you have…”

“No. It. Isn’t! It’s a texture—a texture in sound.”

I had never seen Wayne get that way—what he was saying was, “Don’t always try to put music in a box with a pin sticking through it, like some dried-up butterfly in a collection. Let it live and be alive at least for a little while before you analyze it and nail it down. Keep the imagination open and flowing.” Wayne is in the business of creating music that sometimes doesn’t make sense but that always gives people chills.

Bill was right back in ’72. Most people couldn’t hear what Wayne and Weather Report were doing. Back then Wayne didn’t really know how I felt, either, so when I went up to him at the end of that run of opening for us, he was a little cool to me. I could tell that opening for Santana was not his favorite experience.

By the time we got back to San Francisco at the end of that tour, Deborah and I were looking at each other in a way that I had never, ever before experienced. We were in love, and it was time to introduce her to my family, which I did before the year was over. Then I went to Oakland—where her mother, Jo, welcomed me like I was coming home. She was totally accepting of me.

Next I spoke to SK—this was about the third time I got together with him, and this time he dropped his guard to the point where he came up to me and said, “Let me ask you something.”

“Yes, sir?”

He looked at me very seriously. “Do you believe in the Universal Tone?”

I said, “Yes, I do, sir. Universal Tone means that there’s one note that can connect alpha and omega, that can connect heaven and flesh. There’s one note that you can play at any time, in any place, that can make you communicate to all hearts at the same time.”

The first time I heard about the Universal Tone was not from SK but probably from the hippies, because of their connection to Charles Lloyd and Coltrane, the Beatles, the Doors, and the whole San Francisco scene. I didn’t know much then about the sacred sound, but I knew about om from my spiritual reading and of course from the John Coltrane album of the same name. I knew about the idea that there is a Universal Tone and that many religious paths, even those of Native Americans, use it to connect with Father Sky and Mother Earth. I understood that the Universal Tone is about a collective conscious. It’s not about one person but rather about everyone—it’s a way of using sound to connect with the divine in all of us.

I was surprised to hear SK ask that question, and I think he had seen many musicians who were out of balance, who were disconnected from the Universal Tone—some from my generation and I’m sure some from his generation, too. It was the first time SK had asked me a question like that, and I knew that it meant that he was starting to look at me a different way.