Carlos' Cosmic Bummer

He looks around.

The guys nod, but no one claps or cheers or starts chanting, "New-dawn architects! New-dawn architects!" Actually, it looks like some of them wish Santana would come up with a new message — and drop the whole Cosmic Carlos thing already.

"Carlos is very spiritual, obviously," says percussionist Karl Perazzo, who has been in Santana's band for 17 years. "He speaks in metaphors, sure, but all that is for the best of the music. There are moments when he plays just one note, and he takes everyone who hears it on a spiritual journey with him."

Santana spends the next six hours practicing with his band, working out a set list for the tour. When one or two musicians start to approach the songs too stiffly, he says to them, "Get the fear away. Take the joy back. We're not selling rugs or teapots. It's too smooth, like a woman's breast with no nipple. We need to make it more like water, more like a negligee. It's not alive. We need to get back to what we are."

It's been almost 10 years since Supernatural earned Santana all those Grammy nominations (10) and awards (8), and once again positioned him as a major musical force. He's happy for the success, of course, and for the successes that have followed, but right now he wants to look not to the past but to the future, to what's on his agenda seven years from now. That's when he plans to hang up his guitar for good, start a church in Maui and become its resident preacher.

"I'm going to stop playing when I'm 67 and work on what I really want to do, which is to be a minister, like Little Richard," he says. "I'm not sick of what I do, but I find that God gave me the gift of communication even without my guitar and with the ability to get people unstuck with certain sections of the Bible having to do with guilt, shame, judgment and fear. The God of that stuff is retarded, demented and not real. The real God is beauty, grace, dignity and unconditional love. And I'm the kind of motivator who can motivate people to believe that what I'm saying is good for them. It's like my manager Bill Graham once said to me: 'Carlos, you have to accept that your music is very sensual and stop apologizing for it. People want to have sex to your music, and that's just the way that it is.' And once I accepted that, I wasn't so much in conflict with my Catholic upbringing and thinking it was dirty or against God to have an erection."