CHAPTER 23

(L to R) Salvador, Angelica, Deborah, Stella, and me, 1998.

In 1998, Santana had just gotten into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and in some people’s books that meant that our best work had already been done—as a friend said, “You got the stature, now it’s out to pasture.” You know what Supernatural was like? It was like getting into the Baseball Hall of Fame, then coming out of retirement and taking your team all the way to the World Series. Retirement? Not yet.

I’ve spoken a lot about the phone ringing and hearing Miles or Bill Graham or John Lee on the other end and feeling like that was validation. After Supernatural, if I had an idea for a special concert or a benefit, or even if I just wanted to give praise to someone, it felt like I could pick up the phone and call anyone. And people called me back. It could be someone at HBO or MTV or Rolling Stone. Or it could be someone in Hollywood.

It could be Plácido Domingo—we asked him to sing on Shaman, and he did it in one take. He finished the tune like a bullfighter who had just dealt with the devil and won. I wish I could do a whole album just with him. That cat is brutally good.

In fact, there’s a lot I wanted to do, and now I have—including albums like Guitar Heaven and Corazón. I want to do an album called Sangre, which honors my dad, and record it with my children, Cindy, and my sister-in-law Tracy, who’s a great singer and songwriter—I call her Sil. And we are working on Santana IV, which will finally reunite the guys who are available from the original lineup—Shrieve, Carabello, Rolie, and Schon—and a few guys from Santana today. When we’ve talked about this there’s a different tone in our voices, like everybody is yearning to visit it once more. We’ve actually rehearsed a few times, and the chemistry was immediately there—a sacredness and a natural chemistry. Maybe we can tour this band together with Journey—each band playing separately, then getting together at the end. I have to give credit to Neal for initiating and diligently pursuing this idea and making me think, “Okay, maybe we can all get back together, jump on our horses, and ride—not into the sunset, but into a new sunrise.”

I can take a deep breath now and say that it’s a good time to be alive, because there are very few obstructions and it’s not a struggle anymore to manifest music that brings a lot of people together. One of the best compliments I ever received was from the bassist Dave Holland. We met backstage at the Hollywood Bowl one time with Wayne, Herbie, the great Indian percussionist Zakir Hussain, Cindy, and others. Dave said he needed to tell me something, as if he’d been holding on to it for a while. He said, “Every time I’ve heard your music or seen you in any configuration you always achieve commonality with all people—young and old, black, white, and brown.” I have a lot of respect for Dave and for what he had done with Miles and on his own afterward. I was humbled. “Thank you, man. That means a lot.”

I love creating music that connects as many people as possible, not only to each other but also to their own divinity. My thing is to use what I have to try to open hearts and minds and to help people crystallize their own existence, reach a deeper awareness, and find their real purpose in life. That’s it. That’s the alpha and the omega.

When we finally got back into the studio in 2001, the pressure was on to follow Supernatural with something that was just as big. We started working on Shaman, and we had one tune that I knew was going to be as big as anything that had come before it. “The Game of Love” was not just a great song—we had invited Tina Turner to sing on it, and what she had done made it incredible. Unfortunately we couldn’t release it at the time, and then Michelle Branch did a great job with the song, giving it a different feel, and it became a hit. Still, I’m glad that we were able to include Tina’s version on the Ultimate Santana collection in 2007, so people can know why I feel that way about the song.

While we were making that album I’d be in the studio every day, and it was taxing my brain because I’d be concentrating so much on each song—getting the mix right and getting all the parts together. I would get home late and go straight to the Electric Church. I was still getting late-night calls from John Lee Hooker, and once I surprised him and called him on his birthday, and he said, “Man, when I hear your voice, it’s like eating a great big piece of chocolate c-c-cake!” I told him, “Man, it’s your birthday, and I feel like you’re giving me the present.”

I came home one night and was so tired that I went straight to bed instead of going to the Church to wind down. I woke up the next morning, and the phone rang—someone was calling to tell me that John Lee had passed the night before. I was numb. I needed to be alone and let the feelings go through me, to hold a guitar. I went to the Church and saw the answering machine. I had one message—it was from John Lee, from the night before. “C-C-Carlos. I just wanted to hear your voice, and I wanted to say that I loves God, and I loves peoples.” He hung up, and that was it.

My philosophy is that being conscious means knowing that you are a creator. Yes, there’s the supreme creator, but he gave you free will so that you can be the creator of the movie that is your life. Be that creator—work with what you are given.

Around 2003 I went back to Autlán, and this time it was with my whole family—all my brothers and sisters, and my mom in a wheelchair. She was in her glory, because everybody who remembered her made a beeline to her so that they could hold her hand. “Oh, Josefina! We missed you—te hemos echado mucho de menos.”

I was there because the town had put up a statue of me—Supernatural Carlos, not young, hippie Carlos. I remember I thought it was too big—my hands were huge, and the guitar was not any model that I knew. Maybe it was a one-of-a-kind original.

This was an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate myself and share who I am with others, but it was also an opportunity not to OD on myself. I still feel like I’m learning to receive and smile and be gracious.

So when I was asked what I thought of the statue, I made a joke about pigeons using it for target practice, and people started cracking up.

On that trip I was overwhelmed with memories of my dad when we were in Autlán and I was very young—riding close to him on the bicycle and smelling that Spanish soap. I was thinking about how it felt to know that he had different eyes for me. But this time I felt proud of it and was not uncomfortable about it anymore.

At one point it suddenly dawned on me that my dad was missing from our group and I just started sobbing. I had no idea that was coming. It was like something had been accumulating since he had died until it had to burst, and I had to excuse myself. I went to the bathroom, and my eyes were all red. I remember I was pouring water on my face when my brother Tony came in and said, “Está bien?”

“Yeah, man. I’ll be right out.”

“Qué pasa?”

“I can’t stop thinking that Dad’s not here. I’m sorry I didn’t do this kind of event earlier.”

“No, Carlos, está aquí—he’s here.” The town officials had just put up a big picture of José, and some mariachis came out and started playing music, and there he was.

The town of Autlán put the whole thing together—the statue, the mariachi music, everything. I wasn’t involved. The guitar in the statue got stolen a little later because it was just attached, not built in—but it was as big as a sofa, and I guess the thief thought, “How can I hide this thing?” They found it later in a ditch and put it back so that I wouldn’t just be playing air guitar.

In 2005 Santana played Mexico City for more than one hundred thousand people in the country’s biggest outdoor plaza—Zócalo. I wanted to give the crowd as much of the old Santana as I did of Supernatural. To me it felt like Santana and Mexico never got a chance to really get to know each other, so I wanted to show them the full story of the band. We started sounding like Sun Ra—Sun Ra and Jimi Hendrix. People were looking at each other—“Donde ‘Maria Maria’?” It was a nice break from the stiff Supernatural set lists. It was almost like a collective LSD thing, watching the musicians stretching and having fun and playing like kids again. Then we played songs from Supernatural, and people were freaking out by then. I found out that in Mexico, when they claim you, they really claim you.

These days my set lists are still like that—open and flexible, respecting the different Santanas—from Abraxas to Supernatural and now welcome to Corazón.

By 2003, the Milagro Foundation was five years old, and Deborah and I were constantly looking for ways to utilize energy and to give hope and spiritual support to people. The greatest support anyone can give is to remind people that they’re significant and that they have value, that they’re a beam of light no matter what they have or don’t have. Real philanthropy isn’t about pushing money—it’s about moving light, and it doesn’t matter how many zeros you have to the right in your bank account as long as you have a 1 on the left.

That year Deborah put together a party in our home for Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Artists for a New South Africa to deal with the AIDS crisis that was happening in their country. I had first heard Archbishop Tutu talking on Larry King Live around 1983, and he said something really amazing then. He was talking about apartheid and the way the brutal South African government had its knee on the throat of black South Africans, but what was really happening was that black South Africans were looking up at the oppressors and saying, “Join us in our victory—celebrate with us. We’ve already won.” I was like, “Wait a minute: what did he just say?” I heard a song right there.

Twenty years later apartheid was gone, and the African National Congress—no longer a terrorist organization—was running the country. We were dedicating all the profits from the entire Santana tour that summer to ANSA to support organizations fighting AIDS. Governor Brown came to our house with other dignitaries, and Santana played, then Sal played. The archbishop spoke, and everyone donated money to help cover his travel costs. It was maybe the best example of being able to bring together everything I had—my music and shows, my family, my friends and contacts—to help accomplish something that had to be done.

Billy Cosby’s wife, Camille, was the connection to ANSA—Deborah and Camille are old friends, and Camille had produced a documentary on the AIDS crisis. When I saw the movie, I said, “Damn. This situation is about as real and desperate as things can be.” It was a cycle of neglect that was just getting started and could be stopped with the right medicine and compassion in the right places. Camille’s documentary convinced me that the problem would go on for a long time if something wasn’t done right away.

In August we were able to present the organization with more than two million dollars, and we stayed in touch with ANSA and Archbishop Tutu. Three years later, in September of 2006, Deborah and I hosted a special event in Beverly Hills to help celebrate the archbishop’s seventy-fifth birthday and to talk about the lives that had been saved and what had been done to stop the epidemic. A month later, we went to visit South Africa along with a group of friends, including Samuel L. Jackson, to see what had been done.

I can tell you about meeting Nelson Mandela and other stuff that I will always treasure. But what I will never forget were two things: the first was seeing around fifty people do a traditional dance, way, way out in the rural country, where they didn’t have any electricity or running water. As they were dancing, one of them would step out and throw his leg above his head and slam it back on the ground at the same moment as the rest of them were clapping and singing and hitting on the 1. I remember Sal saying, “Not a flam,” and he was right. “I know how they’re doing that and why it’s so tight and synchronized.”

Samuel Jackson said, “How, Sal?”

“Two things—it’s in their history, in their DNA. It’s not last week’s beat. And no TVs or other things like that, so no distractions.”

The other thing I remember from that trip was going to a clinic and seeing the real faces of AIDS—the people who had been dying but were then recovering. But it wasn’t just the sickness—it was the extreme poverty, despair, and sadness. That’s what I really felt. I remember that when Deborah, Jelli, Sal, and I were helping to hand out boxes of supplies to the families of AIDS patients, one old lady had been sitting there for a long time by herself, lost in her thoughts, wearing a blank, faraway look. When we came to her, she looked up at Deborah, then at me and Salvador, and slowly became more present. Then she realized that the box of flour, sugar, and canned foods we were holding was for her, and suddenly she started crying.

It’s a memory I will never be able to get out of my head. Just thinking about it now still gives me chills—some of us cannot know how lucky we are in this world until we meet someone who has been through devastation and seen what hell looks like. You can’t help but think about what we have in this country, and I believe too many people think that opportunity is something you get and then keep to yourself. How did you get it in the first place? You had to take it from someone who didn’t want to share it—so now everybody has to do that?

America takes what it wants and says that’s the right thing to do without looking at the consequences. But all those justifications come from fear and prejudice. We might like to think that we have God on our side, but if you start with fear, it can only lead to negative justifications and lost opportunities. There’s no consciousness in that, nothing divine. Look at all the disasters that have happened recently, such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and Hurricane Sandy. Even then we had trouble getting it together and helping each other. On the government’s part, there was more fear—about people taking too much and about who should pay the bill—than there was an effort to do the right thing and help out.

What we need is to be free from fear and prejudice. That’s a blessing everyone can use.

In 2006 a few things happened one after the other, even before we went to South Africa. Deborah came out with her book, Space Between the Stars, which spoke about her life and our family history and brought many things about us into the light. I supported her and did interviews with her to promote it—that’s when I walked the red carpet with her to help celebrate her honesty in writing it.

A few months later, in the middle of summer, her mother passed away. SK was already gone, and I knew Deborah would need some time to heal. At that time we were in the middle of so many things—a worldwide tour as well as the ANSA trip to South Africa coming up.

I had just spoken to Jo a few weeks before—she had called the house one night, and I answered. “Hi, Mom. How you doing? Let me get Deborah.” She said, “I’m doing fine, darling—actually, I want to talk to you. I’ve never said this, but I wanted to tell you that ever since the first day Deborah brought you to our home, you brought me a quality of peace of mind, because I knew that you would always take care of her and protect her.”

Deborah and I had been together almost thirty-four years by then. I think the examples of both sets of parents played a role in the way we handled our marriage. They helped us to be wise and not get caught up in little stuff. They also taught us the importance of constant maintenance—paying attention to the inner romance and honoring each other’s feelings—because unconditional love comes first before our individual stuff.

Through 2006, Deborah was as busy as I was—taking care of the family, promoting her book, and overseeing Santana Management. As she later told me, I was the one who came up with the ideas and visions for projects, and she was the nuts-and-bolts person: “I’m the one dealing with the agents and lawyers and accountants. I’m watching over everything—the business and the royalties and the houses”—by then we had a house in Maui—“and it’s just too much now.”

This was in February of 2007, and I remember it very clearly. We were in the house in San Rafael, and I was playing guitar when Deborah came in and started telling me how she was feeling. “Your world is crushing me.” That’s how she described it. “I need to find myself and do my own thing. I need to take care of me now, because I feel like I’m disappearing in your world.”

I said, “Damn, Deborah, what can I do?” and she told me, “You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s just the way things have come to be. I need to do something for myself now, because I’m sinking under all these duties—taking care of the kids, the business, your family, and my family. I need time away for at least six months. I need you not to call or contact me. I’ll be at the office once a week to take care of stuff, but please don’t be there when I am.”

I did not see this coming, not at all. It was totally out of the blue for me. We had decided to put Santana on hold for most of 2007—no tours or albums, just a few shows—so I was thinking this would be our time together. Deborah could tell I wasn’t expecting this. She said, “I know this is a surprise. Why don’t you go to Hawaii for a week and see your friend Tony Kilbert, and let’s you and I think about things?” So I went to Hawaii.

I was only there a few days with all these thoughts in my head, going through these dimensions of pain and frustration, not knowing what was really happening, when one night a storm came that was brutally loud. It hit the house, and everything was shaking without mercy. I was by myself, facing all these fears, wondering whether any of the windows would break, and when it was finally over and the sun came out the next day I felt so good to be outside and alive that the fear of facing what could really be going on with Deborah was lifted. So I called her that morning and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” She said, “I told you: please don’t call me for a while.” I had to ask, so I did. “Are we getting a divorce?” The tone in her voice changed right away. “Well, do you need to know that now?”

I thought to myself, “Damn.” I had not heard that tone many times at all—it sounded like something she had been holding inside for a long time. There was part of me that wanted to say that she always had help in the house and with the kids and that she had people in the office to help her. I had been wanting to say this even before I left for Hawaii, but thought she might not be ready to hear that then, so I didn’t say anything. Now I was thinking, “Wait: you knew who I was and what I did before you married me—the music and the touring and the commitments.”

By then I could see it didn’t matter. For a few days I was hoping that there was still a chance things would get better right away, that Deborah would change her mind about the six-month idea. Even during the following few months I kept hoping that this was just a trial thing. I did what she asked and stayed away and hung out with my friends, who did their best to keep up my spirits. “This is about her, like she told you,” my friends would say. “So don’t make it about you, man.” Still, my mind would not stop going around and around, asking, “What does that mean? What went wrong? Why can’t she live with me anymore? Why is it so unbearable? Why, why, why?”

When I got back home, Deborah had moved out, and all the kids were away at school or living their lives, and that was the worst—the darkest night of the soul. Things got really intense—I remember it was a beautiful summer, and I would get up in the morning and the sun was shining and there was an incredible smell of flowers when I’d come into the kitchen, but there was nobody there to enjoy it with, no one to share it with. Things were getting really, really intense. The whole house started to feel like a coffin, and I was the only one in it.

I had my brothers and sisters, who were constantly calling me and checking on me. I had my friends, whom I’d get together with even though I knew I wasn’t always good company. I had old friends, such as Quincy Jones, calling. I had one friend who told me it was time to get on a plane with him and go to a place in Brazil, because he had some girls he knew I had to meet. “All you need is some…” I told him, “Thanks, but no thanks. I need that like I need a hole in my head, man.”

I remember my mom’s reaction was, “What did you do to her? What did you do to Deborah that she would do this?” I said, “Mom, why don’t you ask her?” I had enough to deal with just keeping my brain from torturing me, from taking on all that guilt and shame.

It was a few months later, when Deborah and I were talking on the phone, that she said she wanted to talk about what we needed to do now that our marriage was over. That was the first time she used those words. I said, “So you’re going to pull the trigger?” She didn’t say yes or no, just, “We’re going to need to do this, and go through this procedure, and…” I remember asking, “Where are we with love—do you still have any feelings for me?” She said, “Well, I don’t need to tell you that.” I just said, “Okay.”

I never really got a clear “I don’t feel anything anymore” or “I’m not in love with you,” and what made it more difficult, I think, is that we never really fought or argued or let our emotions go.

But that was when I finally told myself it was over, period—when it’s broken, it’s broken. We were talking about stuff we needed to figure out so we wouldn’t have to do the whole thing through lawyers, and I kept hearing a voice inside saying, “Just ease up on this. Don’t fight, don’t resist, don’t argue, and don’t bargain. This is not about money for you, and it never has been. Give her what she wants.”

The kids knew about the divorce before anyone else did. They had known about Deborah moving out and getting her own place, and they all had their own way of dealing with it. From the start I told them that I’d be calling and texting them just as much as before, no matter how they felt, and if necessary I was ready to wait for them to get to a point where they could ask me anything they wanted and I would answer as honestly as I could. Even when things were getting bad and I was feeling depressed and angry, my plan was just to believe that anyone can make each day the best day of his or her life, even though it might be in another configuration. I always believed that was the best way to show your kids anything, really—by example rather than by talking.

In a way it was good that they were not around and were doing their own things. Salvador came around a lot to check up on me, and he was like the Switzerland of the situation—very neutral and not taking sides, just wanting to be there for both his mother and his father. It’s not that the girls weren’t that way, too, it’s just that Sal was older and more able to demonstrate wisdom and compassion and fairness. That really affected me and helped a lot. He had really gotten into Keith Jarrett at the time, and he’d come over and play piano and just transport me. Keith was already one of my favorite pianists of all time, and he could be the spiritual deliverer of such romantic, raw, beautiful melodies. There’s something very therapeutic and healing about them.

I remember driving through Napa by myself around this time when Keith’s version of “It’s All in the Game” came on. Suddenly I started sobbing and had to pull over. Whatever I had been going to do wasn’t important anymore, so I turned the car around and went home to spend some time alone, look for some inner guidance, and heal some more.

Divorce is a very personal thing, and I had no experience dealing with something like that in public. Talking about stuff that happened to me years ago was one thing, but talking about personal things going on right then—things that can get the TMZ treatment so easily—was another. No one wants to feed that machine. I had the feeling that somehow Deborah and I had earned enough respect from newspapers and TV programs to keep them away during this period—they didn’t feel the need to get in our faces about it. I also think we both consciously made a commitment to take the high road for the sake of our kids and our families. When it was finally announced that we had broken up because of irreconcilable differences, I took a long, deep breath. I consider it a blessing that it didn’t get played out in the media.

Through the end of 2007 time moved very, very slowly. I was still in recovery, man—it was all a blur of pain. I was doing a lot more inner work, doing what Wayne Shorter likes to call inner gardening—pulling out the weeds. I was reading a lot, just to keep my brain from torturing me with guilt and shame and all that ego stuff, and was finding wisdom in a lot of different books. In one magazine, Sedona Journal of Emergence, I found a line from a Persian poem: “The sun will never say to the earth, ‘You owe me.’” Can you imagine benevolence or light that is more supreme?

One night around Thanksgiving I lit a candle and started reaching out for help, and that inner voice came back again, saying, “I’m right next to you: isn’t that enough? You need to let go of Deborah and your kids. They’re fine—I got them, and they’re okay. Take care of yourself.”

That was around the time I got in touch with author Marianne Williamson. She and I first spoke just before Deborah left, and by the end of that summer, after we were separated, something told me to reach out and see if Marianne could help me. It was like I was scuba diving into a big lake of pain, and I really needed lessons on how to breathe again. She listened to me and heard something in my voice, and right away she referred me to Jerry Jampolsky and Diane Cirincione, who are married and live in Sausalito. Jerry and Diane are therapists who use the book A Course in Miracles in their work. They also run a network of counseling centers that help people by giving lessons in spirituality and transformation.

I went to visit Jerry and Diane at their house, and they really saved my life. I remember that the first time we sat down together Jerry asked me to define myself—separate from my siblings and family and friends. I said I saw myself as the one puppy that gets away from the rest of the litter because he’s distracted by something to play with, such as a slipper, and then goes from playing with it to tearing it apart with his teeth—grrrr.

Jerry said that was pretty interesting. Then he said, “But why don’t you see yourself first as a child of God?” It was such a revelation to me, the way he opened my eyes to how far I had drifted away from the path of divinity, especially after the breakup with Deborah. He also opened my eyes to how much I was fighting and struggling with everything, both within myself and within the situation. I said to myself that it had been a long time since I looked at anything from that perspective. Other people may have said something like that to me, but when Jerry said it things really shifted for me, and I began to heal with honesty and an energy I didn’t have before. I got back onto the track I had been on before—holding my wholesomeness together.

We began to talk almost every day, reading A Course in Miracles over the phone, which became a source of inspiration and guidance, with Jerry and Diane’s coaching. We still do it—I think we are on our fourth or fifth reading of the book. They call me every morning between seven thirty and eight, whether I’m at home or on the road, which is amazing to me because sometimes my morning will be the middle of the night in Sausalito! We read the lesson of the day together, lessons that I apply to whatever is going on in my life. It was Jerry and Diane who were finally able to get me past my anger about being molested when I was in Tijuana and forgive the man who did that to me. They asked me to imagine him in front of me, and turn him into a six-year-old child with a divine light shining behind him. I looked at him, forgave him, and sent him into the light, releasing both him and myself from the past. Finally, I could breathe—it felt like that chapter of my life was over.

Jerry and Diane helped me to get to the other side after Deborah left. Meeting them gave me another chance to see that in my life it’s always been about recognizing the angels who appear when I need them the most. I was able to get back to the point where I could wake up and be happy with myself. I’m sure that one of the reasons Deborah and I came apart was because it had to be tiring for her to start the day with someone who couldn’t accept himself and was creating distance between himself and the rest of the world. Who knows for sure?

It was painful that first year and a half, but life continued. At the start it was especially difficult because Santana was taking a break from the road. I did a few sessions—Smokey Robinson called me and asked me to play on a song called “Please Don’t Take Your Love,” which I did two versions of, and he took the best from both. In 2008 Santana was back on the road, and that helped me to stop thinking about the past, to be present and to get back into my usual swing.

Seven years later I am now at a point where everything that’s left from my life with Deborah, her parents, and my former sister-in-law, Kitsaun, is beauty and blessings. I’m now in a place where I can sincerely give my best to Deborah and say thank you for everything. I can honor her and all that we had and at the same time embrace what has come after—the way I grew and changed and then received Cindy, my love and my wife. I have never been happier in my life than at this moment.

Everything that happened in 2006 and 2007—ANSA and Archbishop Tutu and Deborah—came to mind in 2014, when I went to play in South Africa for the first time. I had visited the country but never played there, and it was incredible. I think the first time playing in South Africa has to be amazing for any musician, especially those who went through the days of apartheid and boycotts and discovering all the great artists who came from there, including Hugh Masekela and Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

I called Archbishop Tutu and asked if we could get together—well, my assistant, Chad, did. We were playing in Cape Town, where the archbishop lives and is building a center for his spiritual foundation; it’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen. He invited us to his home, and after we spoke for a little while, I reminded him of something he said recently—that if heaven discriminates against homosexuals he didn’t want to go there. I also mentioned that two months after he said that, the pope himself said the same thing, which shows that the archbishop really knows how to use words so people wake up and get the message.

I embrace knowing that his message is for all people and that he’s still talking about things that need correcting—he didn’t clock out after apartheid was over. It’s like what Martin Luther King Jr. said about no man being free until we are all free.

The night before I visited the archbishop, Stella had texted me a photo of my ex-wife, Deborah, meeting the Dalai Lama, and I loved seeing that we were still both on the same path, even if we weren’t on it together. I was thinking, “What are the chances of this happening at the same time—that Deborah and I would each meet two of the world’s most inspiring spiritual leaders?” Then suddenly I had a vision.

I started to think of who would be able to channel all this energy. What if we could get Archbishop Tutu and the Dalai Lama and the pope and top leaders from the Jewish and Muslim worlds together on a plane? They could travel to places such as Ukraine and Syria and Venezuela—and to places that CNN doesn’t even talk about—bringing light into the darkness and dismantling the hate that’s starting there before it builds up into wars. I would come along with Santana and we would play, and I’d help recruit other headline groups to join in, too, so that we make world news and can stop the carnage before it has time to happen.

I mentioned this idea to the archbishop and asked if he could imagine doing this and helping us by reaching out to other leaders, such as the pope. His eyes went wide, then he became modest and said, “But why would they listen to me?” That’s when my friend Hal Miller, who was with us, stepped in and said what he needed to hear: “Because when you speak, the world listens.”

The archbishop smiled, and when we left he asked me to stay in touch about the idea. I know—it’s a dream, naive and audacious. But that’s the kind of audacity I want to live with. I have faith in the principles of John Lennon and John Coltrane, Jesus and Martin Luther King Jr. I have faith in those who believe with all their being that it’s never too late to fix this planet.