CHAPTER 17

Do you ever get tired of smelling bread when it’s just been baked and it comes out of the oven early in the morning, even if it’s the same old recipe? Water doesn’t get tired of being water; the sun doesn’t get tired of being the sun. It’s the ego that gets bored. That’s when I have to tell my ego, “I’m in charge here, not you.” If the ego gets to be in charge, everything will be old, or it will have a date stamp on it. So I have to tell myself, “No. I’m not afraid to play ‘Black Magic Woman’ or ‘Oye Como Va’ and make it new again.”

Great music has no expiration date. In the ’70s I was starting to feel that some of the music on the radio was becoming very disposable—and that feeling never went away. I call songs that come and go sound bites—they’re like meaningless quotes on the nightly news. How can you get meaning or timelessness or elegance from a sound bite? To me, a sound bite is the opposite of a “memorable forever.” “Light My Fire” by the Doors—that’s not a sound bite. “No Woman No Cry” and “Exodus” by Bob Marley—those are memorable forevers.

In the ’70s we had the Bee Gees and Tony Orlando. Disco and punk. People were glorifying the Ramones and the Sex Pistols, and I was telling myself, “Okay, let me look at the energy.” I felt it—it was valid. At the same time, Jaco Pastorius and Tony Williams—that was punk to me. My point is that no matter how intense it might be, I don’t know any punk music that’s more intense than Tony Williams Lifetime.

What was really happening for me back then? Marvin Gaye and Al Green. I think there will always be a time and a place when I’ll listen to Led Zeppelin or AC/DC and love it. But when I really need to replenish myself—when I feel I’ve been under water too long, and I need to come up for air—it’s always going to be Coltrane or Miles.

At the end of the ’70s I would not allow myself to think that some other music was “happening” and my music was old hat. But when I read interviews I did for Creem or Rolling Stone, my values seem like they were from another generation. In a sense they were: the ’60s was, “Let’s change the world.” You hear it in the music—let’s help people, and let’s be gentle. Let’s be this kind of people—kind people. It was a consciousness of healing.

Bob Marley was the heart and conscience and soul of the ’70s. No question about it. I think he is the most important artist of the ’70s. When everything was going disco or discord, he was the glue that made music meaningful. His was music with a purpose, to spread the Rastafarian mission of oneness—I and I—which was no different from the philosophy of claiming your own light, which Sri was talking about. “One Love,” “A Love Supreme”—I don’t get tired of saying those two back to back. Bob Marley had purpose, and his music had beauty and movement and sex and truth.

I started listening to Jimmy Cliff and The Harder They Come back in ’73, and then I got interested in music from Trinidad and Brazil. Do that and you’ll start to hear all the sounds that came from Africa, you know? But I’d come back to thinking, “What is this music from Jamaica? Okay, reggae. First they called it calypso; now it’s roots reggae.”

Third World, Burning Spear, the Abyssinians: Bob Marley had a whole other spin on it. The first album I had of his—Catch a Fire—looked like a big lighter that you could use to light your spliff. I was saying, “Wow, this music is really different, man. Really, really different—where’s the 1? How’s that beat work?” He had two brothers in the band—Carlton and “Family Man” Barrett—on drums and bass. He took them from Lee Perry, who had been Marley’s producer, and I don’t think Perry ever forgave him. I don’t think I would have.

I never met Bob Marley—we never crossed paths. But once I left Sri, I lit up again and listened to him more and more. He was the saving grace of the ’70s—each album he put out just got better.

What was amazing, though, is that there were not a lot of black people who were into Bob Marley. Especially strict black church people—they couldn’t get with his philosophy or his hair or his ganja. Some people were trying to change that when they made a decision to have Marley open for the Commodores, and he played Madison Square Garden. Same thing happened with Jimi Hendrix—he never had much of a black audience, and I think it troubled him.

All that reggae music introduced me to the island kind of life. It helped me see that someday I could slow down and relax and live in a place like Maui. You cross a road, and the ocean is your bathtub. The sky is your roof; the food is fresher than fresh. This is better than the Ritz-Carlton. That made me realize that this is what reggae is about and where it’s supposed to take you: no problem, man, no worries. Far away from “What is wrong with me? Why can’t I learn to relax?” Listening to Bob Marley takes you on a natural, mystic flow. These guys were never in a hurry. It still sounds good.

I’ll tell you the best bands that came out of that scene. One was the Police. They were straight-ahead punk, and because of Sting, they wrote intelligent songs with that punk energy. Another group was the Clash—they wrote smart songs with a message and a purpose, and they loved Latin music. I met them backstage in ’82, when we both opened for the Who in Philadelphia. They were playing cumbias on a boom box they had, and Joe Strummer was humming the lines and the whole band was into that music. Then they were playing black music—early hip-hop stuff. I was pleasantly surprised. Their music had a symmetry of Africanness in it.

Sometimes the music in the ’70s and into the ’80s was surprising, like rock getting together with hip-hop. There was Afrika Bambaataa with Johnny Rotten and James Brown, and a few years later Run-D.M.C. teamed up with Aerosmith and then came black rock and white hip-hop—Living Colour and the Beastie Boys. That was in the ’80s, but that kind of unexpected mixing had been there before—for example, in what Miles did at the Fillmore. That’s how things change in music—one kind of music comes up next to another, and suddenly, shift! That’s what’s important to me.

Columbia Records supported us reluctantly. With Clive Davis long gone, no one was putting pressure on me to produce radio hits, but I knew they wanted another Abraxas from Santana. They didn’t say it, but I could feel it. I was ready to return—I’d gone so far out and up ahead with Santana, and with Alice Coltrane and John McLaughlin, that I figured we should try to take Santana back in a song direction, to be more radio-friendly. It was like taking a walk back down a familiar path. Amigos—with the songs “Europa” and “Dance Sister Dance”—came out of that.

Greg Walker is a very, very soulful singer, and we needed someone new in 1975, when Leon Patillo left. Ndugu brought Greg to a rehearsal at SIR in San Francisco, and that was it. He came into Santana right on time—just when we started Amigos. The first song he sang with us was for the album. Leon’s voice had a clean gospel sound, but Greg’s voice was coming from Luther Vandross. Greg has that same facility and presentation of soul.

The one thing I remember saying to Greg was not to sell a song. Don’t make it like, “Hey, buy this tire.” Offer me your heart. I still say that to singers in Santana, because they’re the front part of the show. Treat the song like you’re making a love offering; don’t look or sound obvious.

Greg had some fearlessness in him—many musicians who join the band and get onstage for the first time will say, “Damn, we didn’t know it was going to be like this. It’s like a 747 taking off, and I’m holding on the best I can.” Then they have to decide if they want to be hanging off the tail or up in the cockpit. Greg was up front from the beginning, no problem. He helped define Santana for a time. Except for Leon coming back to sing on Festival, Greg was front and center on three important albums—Amigos, Moonflower, and Inner Secrets.

We reconnected with Dave Rubinson because of Bill Graham, and this time around we all had more experience and worked better together. He wrote “Dance Sister Dance” with Ndugu and TC—to me, it sounded like their version of what they imagined Spanish Harlem to be like. When I first heard it I was like, “Okay…” But I really like the ending, with its synthesizer chords. We could work with synthesizers and other technology from the start because Weather Report made it okay, and I loved Jan Hammer and George Duke and Herbie, of course.

I wasn’t afraid or ashamed of that technology—I tried an ARP Avatar for a while, playing my guitar directly through the synthesizer. But I always felt that as soon as I played the guitar, all the other stuff was just stuff. I mean, if you play Albert King next to just about anything on the synthesizer, what can I tell you? It’s like putting up a whale next to a goldfish.

I think the best Santana tribute is a song Sonny Sharrock made just before he died. He told me about it one night in San Francisco at Slim’s. I went to see him, and he said, “I wrote a song about you, man. It’s called ‘Santana.’” I kept looking for it, and I finally found it. I remember I said, “Brother Sonny must have been listening to the ending of ‘Dance Sister Dance.’”

Columbia told us that Amigos was a hit, so everyone was happy and loved Santana again. We made another album with Rubinson—Festival—for which Paul Jackson came into the band on bass and Gaylord Birch on drums. Ndugu left and recommended Gaylord.

Usually when someone leaves Santana it’s because it’s time for us to grow in different directions. Sometimes a player will know it himself, and sometimes it will be my job to say that it’s time to go and grow and be prosperous and maybe see you again—thank you for everything. That happens the majority of the time. Very seldom will people leave because they want to. But Ndugu had other things to do, and he was the one who decided to leave.

Ndugu is a perfect feel musician. He played beautifully on “Europa.” He could play with us, then with Marvin Gaye or George Benson or Michael Jackson. And before us he played with Miles! You can hear what I mean on the beginning of “Billie Jean”—that beat is swinging. In 1988 we got Ndugu to come back as part of the Santana-Shorter Band.

Santana was still a rock band, but it was creating its own identity—it was changing, creating new music, coming up with new hats for us to wear. About “Dance Sister Dance”: I’m not trying to be facetious or funny, but I’m always surprised when any Santana song becomes a hit. Even when we released “Black Magic Woman” and “Oye Como Va,” there was a voice inside me saying that maybe it was a mistake; maybe it’s just not rock and roll enough to be popular.

Then another voice answers, “Excuse me: why would you put any limitations on yourself? You don’t want to be a prisoner of yourself. You don’t want to be putting out your hand, saying, ‘Hi, I’m Carlos Santana, the Latin rock guy.’”

By 1977 Lotus was selling enough copies as an import to make Columbia want a live album—that was part of the inspiration for Moonflower. The album was half live tracks and half studio songs. Bill Graham is credited on the album for his “direction,” and he was the one who wanted us to cover a song by the Zombies. He kept insisting, asking us to choose either “Time of the Season” or “She’s Not There.” Bill was more directly involved this time around—sometimes he was even in the studio.

That was a challenge, because Bill could be strong in his opinions anywhere he was, even though he wasn’t really a producer. One time we were recording a song, and somehow he got the notion that he needed to step in, like a producer would. Tom was playing a solo, and Bill started going, “Stop, stop”—he stopped the take! TC goes, “What’s going on?” Bill starts explaining that he needs to do the solo again and think about when he enters, and he’s saying, “I’m picturing a helicopter above a beach and it’s got a rope hanging down and holding on to the rope is a naked woman and there’s a horse running along the beach without a saddle and she needs to land just right on the horse, okay? Your solo should be like that, so you need to try it again.”

Everybody was quiet. I said, “Bill, why don’t you just tell him he started too soon?” He said, “I just did, schmuck.”

The other thing Bill loved to do at recording sessions was tell stories. When he did, we knew we were going to be there for a while—at least until someone would say, “Hey, who’s going to pay for this studio time?” It was worth it. We decided to do “She’s Not There,” and it was another hit. Over the years, Bill picked two songs for Santana, and both were hits.

I like the artwork for the two albums we did with Bill—man, I’ve been blessed that few people try to stop me once I make up my mind about an album cover. The cover of Moonflower is a photo taken from the top of a mountain that I loved, with the gold of sunset spread across the clouds. I found that in a photo book on the Himalayas. The photo on the cover of Inner Secrets was taken by Norman Seeff, the photographer who did the cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. In the photo, I was dancing while the band was clapping. I forget what song we were dancing to—maybe one from the album—but I remember that Norman made me feel more comfortable than I had felt in any other photo session.

You can see it in the covers and in the music: things were changing again inside Santana. We did Amigos, and a year later Gaylord Birch left and we got Graham Lear on drums—another Ndugu recommendation. He had heard Graham with Gino Vannelli, and said, “This cat is bad!” He was right—like Steve Gadd, Graham had precision and soulfulness. He stayed with us for almost seven years, into the ’80s, and I learned a lot from him. Chepito liked him, too, and used to call him Refugee because he was from Canada—that coming from a Nicaraguan. Onstage I would announce him as “Graham Lear the Great.” If you want to hear how good a feel Graham could bring to a track, check out “Aqua Marine” on Marathon from ’79 or any other instrumental from around that time. Soulful precision!

Around the time Inner Secrets was about to come out in ’78, Greg Walker was getting ready to leave Santana, and we brought in Alex Ligertwood, someone else who was in my Rolodex. I first heard him when he was singing in David Sancious’s band, Tone, and they opened for us at the Beacon Theatre in 1976. David is a bad dude. He plays guitar and keyboards and came from Bruce Springsteen’s band and wore Zorro hats like the ones Lenny White used to wear—a real rock fusion guy. I noticed that David’s singer had a great R & B voice, even though you could hardly understand him when he’d speak to you—he has such a thick Scottish accent. I called Alex, and he did a few gigs with us with Greg singing, too, and I found I liked the idea of two singers. They could cover for each other—one higher and clearer, the other lower and more bluesy, more across the tracks.

Over the years I’ve tried that again and again. That’s how we do it today, with two singers—Tony Lindsay, Andy Vargas, and sometimes Tommy Anthony, who plays guitar but can also go high and clear with his voice. It’s like basketball—some guys bring the toughness, and other guys are like cheetahs. Still others are like anchors to a song. We need the versatility, but I need you to not drop the ball. I perceive the musicians in my band as players, and our goal is to reach the heart, any way we can.

By the spring of ’79 Greg left us, and Alex fit right in. He became the voice of Santana on many of our albums and on most of our tours in the ’80s and into the ’90s. He can make you feel God in his singing—as he did when he sang “Somewhere in Heaven” on the Milagro album in ’92. You believe him.

One thing that hadn’t changed: I was still Devadip. When I did my own albums at the end of the ’70s I used that name because those were albums between albums: there was Santana the band, then there was Devadip Carlos Santana the person. Oneness and The Swing of Delight are two of my most personal albums. I did Oneness in 1979, and I was influenced by Weather Report and synthesizer sounds and their great album Mysterious Traveller.

I did The Swing of Delight a year later, and Dave Rubinson helped me persuade Columbia to do that one, too, so I could get Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams to play. That was Miles’s band from the 1960s.

I looked around the studio and was scared to death, thinking, “What the hell am I doing?” That will make a guitar player turn down—turn it down and go deep, deep inside himself for the inner stuff. In the middle of the recording Wayne had a moment of doubt, which was very unusual for him. He stopped the song. Everybody stepped back from the mikes, and Tony put his sticks down. Wayne just shook his head and said, “That wasn’t me. I never play desperate or frantic. Let’s start again.”

I was feeling very blessed that we achieved everything I set out to do with that album at a high level. DownBeat magazine gave it a great review. I guess they could feel the intention. That album came from my wanting to honor Sri for what he had done for us—Deborah and me. He made the painting on the cover, with its pattern of gold and cherries.

I really started to get friendly with Wayne and Herbie during the making of that album. That was when I got to know them, to sit and talk with them. Wayne was much easier and more relaxed than he had been eight years earlier, when we first got together. He opened up and started to tell me stories about Miles and insights about the music that would take ten minutes to explain. Or he would show me something from a big, thick book of drawings he had. Once he showed me a picture of a woman from Venus. I asked Wayne why she had four feet. He said, “She doesn’t have four feet, she’s just moving really fast.” Okay, thanks for clearing that up. One thing I can say about my relationship with Wayne is that I often have to slow down to catch up with his velocity. He’s the one who’s always moving fast.

Wayne never takes anything too seriously—least of all himself. Here’s something else he told me once: “I’m going to go on the road as a comedy act, just me and a soprano saxophone. And I’m going to be the straight man.”

From the first time I got to hang with Wayne and Herbie, I could tell they were about spiritual principles and observations and cracking each other up. They were about being themselves, untainted by any particular way of behaving, like children with integrity and pristineness.

Herbie is a supreme genius and sweet as ice cream and pie, as Elvin Jones would say. I first met him when he opened for us at the Boarding House in ’72, and after that we would see each other around and he’d tell me about his chanting and that he liked to eat at Dipti Nivas, which by the end of the ’70s was the number one vegetarian restaurant in San Francisco. In ’70, he was recording in San Francisco with Ndugu, and Chepito told me that Herbie wanted me to come over and sit in. I was honored but didn’t have time to play, because we were leaving the next day for Brazil.

Herbie is from Chicago, and that’s in his sound, by way of the blues. Once I was telling him to listen to some Otis Spann, and he said that he wasn’t familiar with him. I realized, “Oh, right. There are always two sides of town—at least two. There’s the blues sentiment of Otis Spann and Sunnyland Slim and Johnnie Johnson, who backed up Chuck Berry—that’s one side, and there’s Wynton Kelly and Red Garland and John Lewis on the other. Still, Herbie can give you all of them at the same time.

Nobody’s more modern or fearless than Herbie is with electric pianos and synthesizers—real artists are not afraid of technology. Starting when he was with Miles, he found a way to utilize those instruments so they didn’t sound offensive or weird. Years later, when he and I were welcomed together at the Kennedy Center Honors, Snoop Dogg thanked Herbie for giving birth to hip-hop. I’m not sure how many people understand how huge that is and how true. Just listen to his album Sunlight, which came out even before “Rockit”—everybody uses those ideas now.

Today if I put on Oneness and listen to those tracks I remember that by then Deborah and I had gotten back on track and I was hanging with SK a lot more. Some of the music came from that, including “Silver Dreams Golden Smiles.” SK played guitar and sang on that one, and Clare Fischer did the string arrangements.

In 1981 Deborah agreed that we should both leave Sri—it was time to dust off our feet and get moving. We left our place in Queens late one night, leaving behind all our things, just like that. Later I heard that Sri was going to take my name back and told some disciples not to associate with us anymore because Deborah and I were going to drown in a sea of ignorance, which I didn’t like hearing because I didn’t want to back down from what made me go to him in the first place. I didn’t stop believing in the principles and the divinity and light within—but that was a dark thing to say.

The Sri I knew would say things like, “When the power of love replaces the love of power, man will have a new name: God.” I’m not sure how it happened, but many people think Jimi Hendrix said that. He didn’t; that was Sri.

Sri helped me be more than just Santana the guitar player. He helped me get to a deeper awareness of my own light, a deeper awareness of my own connection with divinity and humanity and the invisible realm. It’s God, no matter what you call it, and he is beyond all praise. He doesn’t need a billboard—he doesn’t need us to worship and adore him. We need to honor and worship and work on ourselves, to crystallize our existence by discipline. That’s the most important thing I got from Sri, and I’m still guided by that principle.