The Epic Life of Carlos Santana

Most of the guest stars came with their own compositions — the one true songwriting collaboration was with Dave Matthews. He and Santana went into the studio together to write and record; "Love of My Life" was one of the results (another song may turn up on the next Dave Matthews album). The song had a peculiar genesis. When his father died, two years ago, Carlos found he couldn't listen to music. "I was numb," he says. And though he hadn't played the radio in years, one day, while picking his son up from school, he turned on the car stereo. The first sound he heard was the melody from Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 3. That was the music, somewhat disguised, he began playing to Matthews. "He gave me some lyrics, a couple of lines," Matthews says, "and I didn't know what to do. I think he wrote it about his father; I wrote it about my lover."

Eric Clapton, a friend from the Seventies, actually sidestepped Santana's invitation — "I was so wrapped up in my own world, trying to put together the treatment center in Antigua" — until he saw Santana performing with Lauryn Hill at last year's Grammys. "I was, 'What am I thinking?' I quickly sent him a message, 'I'm sorry I've been such a dick — is there still room for me?' " Clapton didn't have a song, so they just jammed. "And he put together a song out of it," Clapton says. "We started playing," Santana remembers, "and it was literally two Apaches with some sage at the Grand Canyon calling out the spirits." ("Ah, that's hilarious," says Clapton. "That's Carlos.")

One of the last songs to appear was one of the most crucial: "Smooth." Santana's A&R man at Arista, Pete Ganbarg, sent the backing track to Rob Thomas from Matchbox 20, looking for different lyrics and a different melody. "I had no intention of singing it at all," Thomas says. He thought Santana could use a vocalist like George Michael, but Santana heard Thomas' vocal on the demo and insisted he do it himself.

"When people hear 'Smooth,' it's boogie," Santana says. "It's an invitation to have a good time. Like Little Richard used to say: It's Friday night, I got a little bit of money, I did my homework, and it's OK to rub closely with Sally or Sue; she gave me that look like it's OK. I brushed my teeth, and I got deodorant. I got her going.

It's cool. Certain songs —'Smooth,' 'Oye Como Va,' 'Guantanamera,''La Bamba,' the 'Macarena,' 'Louie Louie' — that's what these songs are for."

In his mind, Supernatural's guest stars were not random pairings. Rob Thomas remembers what Carlos told him: "That the record was put together just so — through sound, it could change people's molecular structure. And he sat me down and explained to me that that, as a musician, is what we do. You can play one note and change the way people feel. You don't want to try to ever quote Carlos, because it never comes out as eloquent as it does when he said it, and it sounds hokey coming from me, of all people, I guess, but it gave me my new purpose on why I do what I do. It just put perspective on everything."

We go out for lunch to a nice Italian restaurant in a local mall. Santana drives, playing a CD that fuses Miles Davis' music with Gregorian chants and opera. Davis, whom Santana knew fairly well before his death and once, in 1986, played with (the musical highlight of his life, he says), sometimes visits him at night. On Santana's fifty-second birthday, last July, Miles Davis visited for two hours. He was poking fun at a friend, cracking jokes. When Davis appears like this, he doesn't acknowledge that he's dead. "He just seems as cool as ever," Santana says. He never doubts that it's really Miles Davis. "I can smell him," he explains. "Even on the other side there is smell. Like, when babies are born, there's two smells — one is chicken soup, which is the flesh, and the other is lilacs, which is coming from the spiritual garden. The spirit has a lilac smell."

A rationalist would say, I interject, that that's your unconscious communing with your memory of a man you used to know. How do you know it's not?

"Well, I know when I'm hungry," he says. "I know when I'm cold. I know when I'm horny." An answer that, like many of his answers on such topics, is smarter and more subtle than it might at first appear.

At lunch he talks about being invited to play for the pope two years ago. "When I read the letter," he recalls, "the main thing that happened to me was ..." He shakes his head. "I'm a visionary guy, so I see visions, and I started seeing Zapata and Geronimo and Che Guevara and Pancho Villa and Miles Davis and all these revolutionary guys saying, 'You're not going to do this, are you?' And I was like, 'Hey, hey, back off, man. I just got this letter — let me finish reading it."' But he knew they were right. He has also turned down President Clinton. "I've got nothing against Christianity per se," he says. "I just have a problem playing for politicians and the pope."

After lunch, driving to his house, Santana waits and waits at an intersection for a dawdling car to pass.

"This century, thank you," he mutters. He is only human.

Santana, father of seven, was a mariachi violinist. "My father was a musician," his middle child, Carlos, says. "And my first memory of him was watching him playing music and watching what it did to people — he was the darling of our town. I wanted that — that charisma that he had." They lived in a small, remote Mexican town called Autlan de Navarro. There, the young Carlos liked to make paper boats and watch them sail down the street when it rained.

He remembers riding on the back of his father's bicycle to church and to his father's performances. "All of my sisters and brothers were special," he says. "But for some reason, I know in my heart — I hope I don't come out like I'm slighting my sisters and brothers for it — it's just, I felt I was the apple of his eye. I felt like I could get away with more. I don't know if it's because I was lighter in skin, like my mom, or he knew I was going to be a musician. He was less tolerant with everyone else, but he would give me just a little bit more clutch not to grind the gears, you know. And I needed it." His father was away a lot, playing music, and Carlos would miss him. He would imagine hugging him and remember the way he smelled: a combination of flesh and cologne, and a little bit of sweat. Sometimes he'd pick up his father's belt and smell his distant father on that. ("It is true." he now reflects. "Your dad becomes your first God.") He loved his father's stories. The best ones were about tigers, and when he told those his eyes would bulge and you could feel the tiger's breath, and the suspense would build and build and build. "He knew how to create tension," Carlos says. "It just reminds me of where I learned to build a guitar solo. Got to tell a story, man."

There are other lessons, too, from the rhythms and tempos of childhood. He realized in the early Seventies that a certain kind of solo came from the sound of his mother scolding him. " 'Didn't-I-tell-you-not-to-duh-duh-duh-duh,' " he counts out. "'And-I'm-going-to-spank-you!' You can cuss or you can pray with the guitar."

Before all of this, as a child Carlos had to find his instrument. He learned violin, but, he says, "I hated the way it smelled, the way it sounded and the way it looked - three strikes." But the guitar and him, it was love.

The Santana family moved to Tijuana when Carlos was seven, because that was where the money was. "It was a shock," he recalls, "to come to a border town." His father sent the boys out selling Chiclets and spearmint gum on the street. They'd shine shoes. Later, Carlos would play Mexican folk songs for fifty cents a song. He knew that just across the border there was another world. He started learning English by watching TV through other people's fences. His first phrase, borrowed from Roy Rogers, was "Stick 'em up."

For a time he played music with his father. They always seemed to end up in the sleaziest parts of town. "No floor, just dirt," he describes. "Tables black from cigarettes because they didn't have no ashtrays. And a cop with his hat backward like rappers do, putting his hand on the prostitutes' privates in front of me, sticking his hand right in her, and she can't do anything because otherwise he'll arrest her. My stomach just got really, really sick, man, at the smell, the whole thing." One night, Carlos said he didn't want to be there and he didn't want to play that music. It was the first time he had talked back to his father. His father told him he was just like his mother and that he should go. He was fourteen.

He heard about a gig on Revolution Street, playing from four in the afternoon until six in the morning, one hour on, then one hour off, while the strippers stripped. Nine dollars a week, which seemed like a lot. "The first week," he recalls, "you walk around with a hard-on the whole time, like a flagpole. After a while it wears off. It's just watching an assembly job. After a while you learn the most sensual thing is innocence." He worked there for two or three years, and gave the money to his mother.

We are driving around San Francisco, between Haight Ashbury and the sea, when I ask Carlos Santana about the Tijuana strip-joint years.

Had you had much practical experience at that point?

Yeah. You play spin the bottle and sneak in a couple of kisses here and there, and you smell somebody's hair after they take a shower. If you're asking me, "Was I a virgin?" no, I wasn't a virgin no more by that time.

How old were you when you weren't?

I don't remember. I don't remember because it's a subject I don't want to get into. It's a whole other department store that I don't want to ...

Fair enough. But by the time you were fourteen, You weren't a virgin?

No, I wasn't a virgin.

For your friends, that was normal?

I can't speak for them. For me, I thought it was normal. My mom or my father, they were very naive, and so I was thrown into the streets in a certain way ... Let's say my first encounter with sexuality was not a pleasant one or romantic or tender or wonderful. It was more like a shock kind of thing: gross, disgusting shock.

But that didn't put you off?

No. Women never turned me off. I mean, the smell of men, it makes me sick. I'm not into men at all. That's one thing I could never be in this lifetime is attracted to male bodies.

[Puzzled] Um ... why do you mention that now? Were they attracted to you?

Who?

Men.

No. Never.

I just didn't understand why you said that then.

Just, women have a different kind of alluring smell. He drives on, up the hill, away from the sea.

In the early sixties, the Santana family moved north to San Francisco. The teenage Carlos didn't want to go. He was working in the strip joint, earning money in a grown-up world, and the notion of going to junior high school — of becoming a kid all over again — did not appeal: "I'm hanging around a bunch of older guys and prostitutes, eat when I want, sleep when I want ... to hang out with a bunch of little kids talking about bullshit stuff? No way."

The first time he came to America with his family, he sulked and was angry all the time. He wouldn't eat. He was even angrier when he discovered that his mother had used the money he'd saved to pay for the immigration papers and for work on his sister's molars. Even so, he knew there was still $300 left, and he asked her not to touch that: It was for his guitar. But when he eventually spotted a Stratocaster and asked for the money, she confessed: She'd spent it on rent. They fell out for a long time after that. "Basically from my ignorance," he says.

Eventually, after two weeks of his sulking, she gave him twenty dollars and told him he could go back to Tijuana. He got his old job back and was there another year before his mother and older brother came to get him. "They actually kidnapped me," he says. "My brother grabbed me — my legs were dangling. Put me in a car."

This time he stayed. Went to junior high. Learned English. But he was right in thinking he wouldn't fit in easily. "The stuff they were talking about was silly-ass corny shit," he says. "I'm hanging around a bunch of old guys talking about Ray Charles and the blues, and they're talking about playing hooky and stealing cars and doing some pimple Beach Boy stuff that didn't make any sense to me."

Driving round San Francisco, honoring my request to see the sights of his early years in America, he turns off Mission Street in the Mexican part of town and drives a couple of blocks. "This is the house," he says, pointing. He slows down but never quite stops, as though he wants to make clear that he's happy to show me his past but he has no intention of lingering there.

In that house, seven kids shared two bedrooms. That's where he finally got a guitar, a Gibson Les Paul Junior, and where his brother Tony's friend sat on it and broke it in two.

As we drive away, he tells me about the time when Tony came home from a party and needed to steep before work the next morning. Carlos, his four sisters, his younger brother and his mother were watching a Dracula movie on TV. There were twenty minutes left when his brother turned the TV off. A scuffle broke out, and in the end Carlos hit his brother hard, hard enough to make his eye swell up. That night the brothers slept, as always, in the same bed, and Carlos lay right on the edge, trying not to breathe, waiting for retaliation.

But his brother did nothing. And when Carlos came home from school the next day, there was a new white Gibson Les Paul — the very guitar Carlos would play at Woodstock — and an amplifier. His brother Tony was sitting there, a steak over his eye. "I broke down, man," Carlos remembers. Tony told him, "You gonna pay for it — I just paid the down payment."

We pass Mission High School. "I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there," he says. "I wasn't much of a school guy." In class, he'd think about playing with B.B. King and daydream of being onstage at the Fillmore, That was all he saw ahead of him. Already he had started heading over to Haight Ashbury with his guitar, where he'd find a harmonica player, put a hat down and get some money. A bit of Donovan. Cannonball Adderley's "Work Song." The Beatles' "And I Love Her." "That romantic thing," he says. "Next thing you know, we'd go and get some wine and pizza. That's what gave me confidence that I could make a living with this."

We drive by San Francisco General Hospital. Again, Santana slows but never stops. He points up to a window. "Right up there," he says. "The top floor."

He spent three months in that room. It was the spring of 1967. He was a nineteen-year-old Mexican guitar player whose group, the Santana Blues Band, was beginning to get going: As he remembers it, the group had just opened for the Who, playing blues and its souped-up versions of songs like Mary Poppins' "Chim Chim Cheree," and had been invited to do the same for Steve Miller and Howlin' Wolf. Then ... it all stopped. Perhaps for good. At school, he tested positive for tuberculosis.

In the hospital they treated him with penicillin, and after he developed an allergy, they shot all this streptomycin in his butt. "I couldn't sit for about a month," he recalls. He graduated while he was in the hospital. A tutor would visit him. Aside from that, he says, "there was nothing to do but do pottery and watch TV and just watch people die."

Friends would visit and deliver inappropriate party favors. "To pass the time, they'd bring me a couple of joints and LSD," Carlos says. "And I'm taking LSD like a dummy, watching The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with Glenn Ford; the next thing I know, I'm inside the bed with my sheets over my head, going, 'Oh, shit, why did I do this, man?"' But in a way this trip was also his salvation. It made him realize that this was no place for a young man with plans. "Everybody there was dying of tuberculosis and cancer," he says. "I said, 'Man, this is like hell. I've got to get out of here."' He called a friend and asked him to bring some clothes. They stopped the elevator between floors so that he could change, and he fled. Everyone was looking for him, a potential tuberculosis carrier on the loose: the police, the board of health, his mother. But they didn't find him. He hid out at a friend's house; he felt fine, he was free, and he had music to play.

Up the top of a rickety wooden ladder, Carlos Santana and I crawl into his church attic. This is where he keeps the T-shirts he wore onstage until recently: almost all brightly colored and almost all with a picture of at least one of his heroes on them. He has a couple of artists whom he keeps busy with commissions like this (they also do his album artwork). He picks out one T-shirt as an example. "I'll be, 'I want Jimi Hendrix with angels and flying saucers,"' he says.

Before we climb down, he shows me other prints he's commissioned. He'd like to open a version of the Gap or Banana Republic called River of Colors. His own clothes are becoming a little quieter, though; for the Grammys, he's considering black. "I'm kind of weaning myself out of the colors and dressing more straight now," he says. "I'm fifty-two — for ten years I wore mostly these colors, and people used to say, 'Oh, Santana always wears dead people on him.' " He shrugs. "They're not dead. They're more alive than most people you see on MTV today, you know."

After he left home, Carlos barely saw his parents for two years, though they came to see him opening for Steppenwolf and the Staple Singers at the Fillmore. His mother told him that she felt so bad for the hippies, because they were so poor, they were sharing cigarettes. He didn't explain.

He insists that he never wanted Santana in the band's name; he was the guitarist, and his was simply the name that sounded best. Later — when they began incorporating Latin rhythms and chants before the release of their first album — they dropped the "Blues Band." That first album, Santana, was an immediate hit, but it was after their appearance low on the bill at Woodstock, and particularly the inclusion of "Soul Sacrifice" in the film and on the soundtrack, that it really exploded. Onstage, he was on psychedelics he'd taken in the mistaken belief that the band wouldn't be on for hours. "When I see it on TV, it's like another guy playing," he says. "He was trying to get in there, dealing with the electric snake. Instead of a guitar neck, it was playing with an electric snake."

He took a lot of psychedelics in those days: LSD, mescaline, peyote, ayahuasca. He considered these sacred sacraments at the time: "I felt it would make it more real and honest. It's a spiritual thing, you know. Maybe my wife won't be too fond of me sharing these stories because of our children; I don't recommend it to anybody and everybody, yet for me I feel it did wonders. It made me aware of splendor and rapture."

Ultimately he decided he'd seen enough. The last time he did anything like that was when he took some mushrooms on a tour day off at Niagara Falls in 1987. He says he can imagine doing it again when his children are grown up. Take something, go down to the beach. "Just to see if it has that innocence feeling," he says.

In the early days, he didn't enjoy success. "I would turn on the radio and Abraxas would be on every station, just about," he says. "And I found myself more and more depressed, and I'd find myself crying. The band was deteriorating, and my friends who I grew up with were total strangers to me. We started sounding like crap. It became all those things that happen to most bands. It was basically too much too soon: excess, big egos, myself included."

One of your band members said back then that your head "got about as big as Humpty Dumpty." Was that fair?

Yeah. Mine and everybody else's. You're going from a Mission District kid with nothing to having everything — you're Number One, buy your mom a house. Too much drugs, everything to excess. You start feeling really lonely. And for me, it was the beginning of my journey.

What made it come to some kind of crisis for you?

Drugs. Certain people in the band were into heroin and cocaine, and I used to have cold sweats, nightmares, and I would wake up screaming: The place would be packed, 60,000 people, and the band is in no condition to play because so-and-so are fucked up; Bill Graham is screaming at me, "You're nothing, you're unprofessional, you're a piece of shit." That was my recurring nightmare.

It never actually happened?

No. But it was happening every other night in my dreams.

By 1973, he had decided that the band with his name was also his band, and he took over. Though he has worked with some original members since that time (none currently), there has been bad feeling over the years about his coup, and the parallel implication that it was him all along. "I don't want to shortchange the original guys in the band," he says. "For a long time I felt, in their minds, that I was riding on a wave that they started. But it's been thirty years, so hopefully this time they will be appeased that I still want to honor their contribution to the band and how we grew up together."