Santana's 1969 debut album followed close on the heels of the sextet's coming-out party at the Woodstock Festival, where the multiethnic, single-minded San Francisco band nearly stole the show from the likes of the Grateful Dead and Sly and the Family Stone. Santana was a nonstop thirty-seven-minute rhythmic onslaught: Hand percussionists Mike Carabello and Chepito Areas duked it out with the relentless Michael Shrieve on the drum kit, Gregg Rolie's churning Hammond runs kept the horns in his Leslie cabinet spinning wildly and Carlos Santana's lead guitar delivered both passion and improbable delicacy. Rolie aired out his pipes on the hit "Evil Ways," the LP's lone conventional piece; otherwise the song form was sucked into the undertow of jams such as "Jingo" and "Soul Sacrifice." The two-CD reissue is stocked with extras, most compellingly the band's entire Woodstock set. Live and in-studio, it all sounds as shit-hot as it did in the summer of '69.

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.