The Epic Life of Carlos Santana

I am, by nature, probably more cynical than most, but all I can tell you is that when he talks about this stuff, it doesn't seem kooky or unhinged or even that spacey. Likewise, in all the time I spend with Carlos Santana, I see no signs that he is unaware of life's mundane realities. Rob Thomas — who sings "Smooth," the Number One hit that has propelled Santana's commercial rebirth — describes the experience of spending time with Santana accurately: "I don't know any other way of saying it, but I always just felt a little bit better after being with Carlos."

Nor does he proselytize. His attitude is: Now, in the wake of the success of his latest album, the 7 million-selling Supernatural, the world is interested in hearing him talk, and he is going to talk about the things he finds important. "What are you going to say?" he scoffs. "'There's no business like show business'?" Not in his case. "I don't care, man, about what anybody thinks about my reality," he says. "My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There's an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o'clock in the morning, everything's really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you've been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice:

Write this down. It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert."

He tells me more about Metatron. "Metatron is the architect of physical life. Because of him, we can French — kiss, we can hug, we can get a hot dog, wiggle our toe." He sees Metatron in his dreams and meditations. He looks a bit like Santa Claus — "white beard, and kind of this jolly fellow." Metatron, who has been mentioned in mystical disciplines through the ages, also appears as the eye inside the triangle.

Santana credits Metatron with alerting him to the recent changes in his life. In the mid-Nineties, he met some people in a spiritual bookstore near his home, and they invited him to their afternoon meditations in Santa Cruz. The last time he was there, Metatron delivered some important messages. "You will be inside the radio frequency," Metatron told him, "for the purpose of connecting the molecules with the light." Carlos Santana understood. He would make a new album and be on the radio again. And he would connect the molecules with the light: He would connect an audience with some of the spiritual information he now had. Metatron offered a further instruction: "Be patient, gracious and grateful," Santana was told, and he resolved to do just that.

When he is here in his church and he is not meditating, often he is playing the guitar. Sometimes he'll scrutinize records by his heroes — people such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Ray Vaughan. (Today, Miles Davis bootlegs are scattered over the floor.) "There's so much to learn on each person alone," he says. "You really study. How do you get this note to sound like a baby crying in the middle of a nuclear bomb? First you imitate, like a parakeet, then you enter in." Whenever he finds something special onstage, it is not just a happy accident. "The fingers remember," he says. "People say, 'You hit a note last night'. . ." — and he throws a hand around the room -- "It started here."

And now, casualty, he picks up a guitar, flicks on the amplifier. "Sometimes words get in the way," he says. "But when you go. . " — he plays some beautiful high, fluid notes — "Palestinian, Hebrew or Aborigine or Mexican or Chinese, this speaks really clearly."

He puts down the guitar and shows me round. There is a photo of his wife taken in the Seventies in Philadelphia, holding a guitar the wrong way. (Her father, Saunders King, he notes, was one of the blues-guitar pioneers, played with Billie Holiday and, he says, "was B.B. King's inspiration.") There is a prized picture of John Coltrane looking stern, thoughtful and dignified. Davis and Coltrane bootlegs burned onto CDs. A shelf of books about jazz. Photographs of his parents from around the time Carlos was born. On the second floor, I point, impressed, to the Spider-Man pinball machine. "Yeah, that's from the early Eighties," he says, dismissively. "I didn't have any kids, so I am like a kid myself."

Spider-Man was always his favorite comic as a teenager. He could relate to Peter Parker: "He had teenage problems, teenage doubts and insecurities."

It is at that moment he rushes downstairs, without explanation, leaving me there, He has seen one of his daughters coming up the path with the cable guy.

Santana's business affairs are run from offices in an industrial park a few minutes' drive from his house. Today, as he walks into the reception area (where his last Rolling Stone cover story is framed — from 1976, nearly half his life ago), six or seven staff are waiting for him.

"We're Number One!" they chant. "We're Number One! We're Num-"

He accepts their congratulations, though he also looks a little embarrassed by the attention. Their jubilation marks the return of Santana's Supernatura album to Number One on the charts in the wake of the announcement of his eleven Grammy nominations — just one more triumph in a career renaissance that is becoming bigger than the original career.

In the rehearsal room out back, he puts down his Santana fanny pack and lights up some incense, an Indian brand he was introduced to in 1972 by Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane's widow. He wears sneakers with no socks and a shirt printed with golden angels of various sizes playing guitars. The brim of his brown hat is folded up at the front. As we settle in, he mentions that he recently started working out twice a week with his wife. It makes him less cranky. "As soon as I saw the CD enter the chart," he explains, "I knew the old energy I had wasn't going to make it."

On this earth, Carlos Santana principally credits two people for what has happened. First, his wife, Deborah. "Spiritually, emotionally, financially, she's a guiding light," he says. In 1994 She restructured his business life: "I'd probably be a hobo if it wasn't for her." Second is Arista Records president Clive Davis, who signed him when other record companies were letting it be known they felt he was simply too old: "I'm not into kissing anybody's behind, it's just, I need to honor these people who stuck their neck out over and over for me."

He had not made a new studio album since Milagro in 1992. He had been holding back on recording, trying to get out of his contract. And it was hard. "I felt I had a masterpiece of joy in my belly," he says, explaining that he felt pregnant with a new record, just as he imagines Marvin Gaye felt before making What's Going On or Bob Marley did before Exodus. His wife thought Clive Davis was the man to help him. It was Davis who first signed the Santana band to Columbia Records in 1968. In his meditations, Santana would think of Davis: "I chanted for Mr. Clive Davis twenty-seven times each day. I'd picture him coming out of a car or a limousine, and a cab passing by, playing my music. So wherever he goes, I want him to be connected with my music."

They met in a Los Angeles hotel. As Santana tells it, Davis got really close to his face and said, "What does Carlos Santana want to do?"

"I'd like to reconnect the molecules with the light," Carlos told him. ("And he wasn't fazed," Santana recalls. "He could have said, 'Uh-oh, here's a far-out hippie.... Whatever."')

"How do you propose to do that?" Davis asked, and Carlos talked about how Miles Davis played pop tunes in his later years. About how two things about Santana never go out of style — the spiritual and the sensual. About how Clive Davis was the man who could find him songs. (There was nothing new about Santana thriving on this kind of input. Their early manager, the late promoter Bill Graham, persuaded them to record their first hit, a Willie Bobo salsa song called "Evil Ways." "This will get you airplay," he informed them, and he was right.)

Santana wanted to reclaim a younger audience. "I'm not at all into becoming a twilight-zone jukebox prisoner of the Sixties," he says. Davis got working. "I blueprinted the architectural plan for the album," Davis says. "And that was having half the album be vintage Santana, in the spirit of 'Oye Como Va,' which he wanted for himself, and the other half I proposed was those organic collaborations that would not be a compromise of his integrity but also be calculated to serve him at radio, in the spirit of what he had said. I would look for what turned out to be the list of Lauryn Hill and Wyclef Jean and Everlast and Dave Matthews, etc."