The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light (32 page)

Things were coming at us fast, and it didn’t help that drugs were getting easier and easier to get the bigger we got—you didn’t even have to look for them; the drugs would find you. I can’t deny that drugs had a lot to do with the environment that Santana came from, but my thinking was always that none of it mattered to me as long as the music kept going at the supreme level that it needed to be on. “Don’t lose respect for that, man, because that’s what got us here,” I would say to the band.

The real problem was heroin—some members of Santana and other people around us were using, and it
was
starting to get in the way of the music. We were playing a lot, but we weren’t getting together and rehearsing and thinking about songs and melodies and parts, as we had just a few months before. Some people couldn’t hang with the momentum of the band. I’d wake up with cold-sweat nightmares—we’d be scheduled to play in front of fifty thousand people, and they would have been waiting for us for twenty minutes… twenty-five…
half an hour,
and we’re still not ready to play because some of us are just too fucked up. I kept presenting that picture to the rest of the band. “Man, I keep having this same nightmare. First it concerned me, then it worried me, and now it’s fucking pissing me off!”

They’d look at me like, “Who are you to tell us this stuff? You’re doing the same kind of thing—smoking a lot of weed and messing with LSD.” They had a point—I hadn’t really been in a state to play at Woodstock, but at least I was together enough to pray to God to please help me. I’d tell them, “Yeah, man, but I’m not incoherent. That stuff is not getting in my way.” I always felt that heroin and cocaine were more than disruptive—they were destructive. That’s the best way of putting it.

I wasn’t an angel about this. I tried heroin a few times—the first time because some of the people in the band’s crew were shooting and they invited me to try it, and it was really incredible. I tried it a second time, and it was really, really incredible. I found myself playing all night and drinking water and thinking, “Whoa, this is easy, to play like this.” It felt like worries and fears just went out the window, and you’re super relaxed and just having a good time.

The rush was immediate, and it didn’t make me throw up. I just went to the guitar, and the next thing I knew I’d been playing for so long that my fingers were black from the strings—and they didn’t hurt. Playing after shooting up was very seductive and deceiving—while you were doing it, it felt like you attained a facility to articulate on a level beyond what you had previously known. You could play up and down the neck of the guitar without doing anything wrong—you thought. But the next day you’d listen to the tape you made and realize that you were deluding yourself. Heroin will do this to you.

It was important for me to know, really know, that I never needed heroin to get into that kind of trance with my guitar. On any given day I can be playing and look down an hour later and see drool hanging from my lip down to my shirt—I’m that euphorically into it. I look at myself when that happens and go, “That’s great—that’s a badge of honor.” But I do try not to do that onstage.

The third time I was getting ready to shoot up, I was in a bathroom with a cat who couldn’t find my vein. By the grace of God, just as he found a place to inject me, the door to the medicine cabinet opened by itself, and the mirror swung right into my face. Suddenly
all I could see was myself up close, and I looked like the Wolfman in one of those movies on late-night TV. I was like, “Holy shit”—it really freaked me out.

I said, “Hold on, hold on.”

“No, it’s okay—I found it.”

“No. Please take the rubber band off. Don’t put that in me. You can have mine.” He looked at me. “Really—I don’t want it.”

Something in the way the mirror opened up and the way my face looked in it told me once and for all that heroin wasn’t for me and that I would never touch it again. Thank God I wasn’t hooked yet and didn’t need to take it. I’m pretty good at listening to signals, and this one felt like more than an omen. I really got the message: heroin and cocaine are not for you.

So I knew how heroin felt and why people would do it—but by the end of 1970 I couldn’t stand watching what was happening to some of the people in the band and what it was doing to our music. There were more fights and arguments than making music—the joy of it felt like it was leaving. Being onstage in Santana was like being in a football team, but when you start throwing the ball and the same guys keep dropping it, then it begins to wear on everyone, and you can feel it coming apart. But every time I said something about it, people would deny it, and if I said anything about the drugs, they would react like I had a huge thermometer in my hand and I was going to put it in somebody’s butt. People would look at me and say, “There is nothing wrong with us; what’s wrong with you?” It was frustrating—it felt like there was no way to get through that.

On New Year’s Eve we played a festival in Hawaii and had a few days off. The morning after the concert I woke up around five thirty in the house we stayed in, right on the beach. It was still dark, but I couldn’t sleep, so I went and woke up Carabello. I said, “Michael, I need your help, man. I need you to wake up and take a walk with me.” He saw I was serious. We started walking down the beach, and he listened to me.

“You and I started this thing, man. But something has to change, because we’re not making any progress—we’re getting
worse with our attitude to the music. We’re getting really arrogant and really belligerent. It’s becoming a drag now to even deal with going to the studio, and if I’m feeling that then I know it’s got to be like that for the others. This merry-go-round is not going anywhere, and we’re not creating music that I feel has the same power as what we were doing at the start.

“Look, I’m in this and with all of you—I’m part of it, but I want to change. I want us to go back to the way we started, rehearsing new songs and trying out different things. I want to bring that joy back. But if things don’t change, I might have to leave the band.

“I need your help, man. I think we need to have a meeting and bring this up and talk about it and really, really deal with it.”

Carabello and I still talk about this conversation today. He brought it up recently, reminding me that I woke him up and took him walking. “You really tried to talk to us about changing our course before we hit a brick wall or went over a cliff. You were right.”

That morning on the beach, Carabello looked at me and said, “Okay, man. Let’s take care of this.” But it was a long time before we did.

Me in my Jesus T-shirt, Ghana, March 6, 1971.

I want to talk about Africa. I’ve only been there a few times, but each time I’ve gone the first thing my whole body is thirsty for is the rhythms—to hear the music and see the dancers. It’s about connections between us and where we came from. To this day, African music is my number one hunger. I can never get enough of the rhythms, the melodies, the second melodies, the colors, the way the music can suddenly change my mood from light and joyful to somber. If people ask me, I tell them that we play 99.9 percent African music. That’s what Santana does.

Ralph J. Gleason reviewed our album
Santana III
in
Rolling Stone
—everything he said was right on. He said that the rhythms we use should be put under a microscope so people can tell how each one leads back to Africa. In my mind, I can see a map that shows how we can trace all the rhythms we have over here in America back through Cuba and other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America, all the way to different parts of Africa. What was the rumba before it was a rumba? The
danzón?
The bossa nova? The bolero?

Maybe music doesn’t always fit into maps so well, but I’d like to see someone try. Some places need to be bigger on the map than they actually are because they’re more important than people know—Cuba; Cape Verde. It’s crazy—Cape Verde gave birth to music in Mexico and all over South America, especially Brazil. When you hear a certain kind of romance in music—the bolero, the
danzón,
the slow cha-cha—it all came from that one little island. You would have to bring the focus in on Colombia, too, with those bad
cumbias
that Charles Mingus loved to play. Then you have Texas, Mississippi, and Memphis shuffles, and all those street rhythms from New Orleans. It would be fascinating to see where the arrows point.

I wish there was a school here that just taught one thing—how to have some humility and recognize that Africa is important and necessary to the world—and not just because of its music, either. When it comes to African music, I got nothing but time to learn. I think I’ve surprised a few African bands because I was able to hang with the music—there’s too much groove not to!

One more thing about Africa: one of the greatest compliments I ever received was not on an awards show but from Mory Kanté. He’s a great singer and guitar player from Mali. I love, love, love his music. He was part of the “Dance to the Beat of My Drums” concert we did with Claude Nobs in Montreux. I was there in my tuning room, and an African gentleman came in and said he was Mory’s representative and that Mory apologized because he did not speak English, but he had a message to tell me. He told me the message in their language, then he translated: “Mory wants to tell you that your belly is full, but you’re hungry to feed the people.”

“Okay, thanks!”

Then the man bowed and walked out.

Wow. It
sounded
like a great compliment. I’ll take it.

I
f music is from many places it’s also from one place, and Santana could not have happened without San Francisco. If you needed to meet a good bass player, somebody always knew somebody else, or maybe you’d hear about a new piano player or drummer or group you had to check out. My own brother Jorge was coming up with his band, the Malibus, and getting a reputation on guitar—then they changed their name to Malo and got together their own mix of rock and Latin rhythms and Spanish lyrics. A few years later some musicians from Malo would come to Santana as well as certain players from Tower of Power, the great horn band from Oakland. Even today I look at bands close to home for people who might come into Santana.

That’s how things flowed in San Francisco. Santana was never exclusive—like many bands, we played and jammed and did sessions with each other and found new ideas and people to go on the road with. Just as Neal eased into the band, we were open to thinking about playing and recording with other musicians. We were open to having other people sing lead besides Gregg, too—as we did on “Oye Como Va.”

You get all that on our third album. We started the sessions for
Santana III
at the beginning of 1971. Rico Reyes came back to sing on another song in Spanish, “Guajira,” and Mario Ochoa played piano on it. We had the Tower of Power horns on “Everybody’s Everything,” which became the first single from the album later that year. We opened the door and invited Luis Gasca to play on “Para Los Rumberos,” another Tito Puente song we wanted to cover. We made it our “Dance to the Music”—we sang the names of Carabello, Chepito, and me before playing our parts. Greg Errico from Sly’s band and Linda Tillery from the Loading Zone played
percussion on some songs, and we had Coke Escovedo playing percussion all over the album.

Coke came in and added so much to the sessions from the start that we had to give him credit for the inspiration he brought to that album. Coke’s roots are Mexican, and he had played with Cal Tjader before he played with us. He’s one of the famous Escovedo brothers—the whole family makes music. His brother Pete also plays percussion and is Sheila E.’s father. The brothers had a Latin jazz group together that played around the city, and in ’72 they formed Azteca, the Latin rock-jazz group that many musicians got started in. Coke helped write “No One to Depend On,” the second single from
Santana III,
and he started touring with us.

The challenge of the third album was finding new tunes and new ideas to fit with our sound. We put the pressure on ourselves because, for a little bit longer, we were still at a point where we could be a unit. We would be rehearsing, and suddenly someone would say, “Hey, I have an idea” and play it, or someone would want to start playing a Latin tune or a B. B. King riff he had been hearing, and we’d work out our own interpretation of it right on the spot. The tune “Batuka” came from a musical arrangement that Zubin Mehta sent to us to play with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on
The Bell Telephone Hour
on TV. The piece was written by Leonard Bernstein as “Batukada,” and it’s a long score, and we were looking at it like monkeys trying to figure out schematics for a computer! “What the fuck is this?” But we liked the name, so we shortened it to “Batuka” and said, “Let’s just make up our own shit, man.” That’s how that tune came about—it was just based on the name of the score Mehta gave us.

That’s also how we were able to come up with “Toussaint L’Ouverture” in the studio. It was one of the last things we did with Albert Gianquinto. “Everybody’s Everything” was based on a 1966 song called “Karate” by the R & B vocal group the Emperors—it had a great hook that I couldn’t get out of my head. I had heard it once on the radio, then a few years later I was in Tower Records,
where I always did some research, buying 45s of old hits from the ’50s and ’60s. I found it still on sale, and the staff played it for me, and I was thinking, “Damn—this is like black hillbilly, hoedown kind of music,” and I loved it.

The song was about a new kind of dance, but that wasn’t what Santana was about, so I made the thing happen with the lawyers, who called the two guys who wrote the song—Milton Brown and Tyrone Moss—and got the okay for us to come up with our own words. Neal played the solo, and we kept the “Yeah, I’d do it” from the original.

I looked through my Rolodex of music that I loved and brought in “Jungle Strut” by Gene Ammons. I played it for the band, and they said, “Yeah, that sounds like Santana. We can do that.” We wrote “Everything’s Coming Our Way” together—it was my way of sneaking some Curtis Mayfield into our music. David was getting into Latin and Afro-Caribbean music more and more—he worked out some ideas with Chepito and Rico Reyes and came up with “Guajira.”

We normally did one song a day in the studio, but because of our touring in ’71 the sessions for
Santana III
stretched over more time than any other Santana album—we started in January and were still recording in July. We would record in San Francisco, hit the road for a while, and on the way back home go into a New York studio with Eddie Kramer. We were crossing those time zones—both in the United States and overseas. The road could be rough if you let it get that way. Chepito could burn like a two-ended candle—but then he had an aneurysm and got so frail he couldn’t play for a while. We asked Willie Bobo to come in and take over timbales, and he did.

In March we got on a plane in New Jersey that took us farther from home than we ever thought we’d go. We received a phone call about going to Ghana to help celebrate the country’s anniversary—they wanted Santana to play in a festival with Ike & Tina Turner, the Staple Singers, the Voices of East Harlem, Les McCann, Eddie Harris, Wilson Pickett, and Roberta Flack. We had a choice: we
could go to Ghana or stay home and see Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles at the Fillmore West—they were recording a live album. That was tough. But we said, “Let’s go to Africa.”

Next thing I knew I was on a flight sandwiched between Roberta Flack and Mavis Staples, and they were singing “Young, Gifted, and Black”—I got it in stereo. I said, “Whoa. This is going to be fun.” Next to us was Wilson Pickett’s horn section.

The whole plane started partying as soon as we took off. There was no one but musicians on board—everyone started smoking weed and doing coke. Willie Bobo turned out to be like a running comedy act, an instigator of practical jokes and funny stories. He knew how to poke you to see if you had the wisdom to laugh at yourself, although a lot of people may not have been ready for it. You’d either get pissed off or you’d laugh. It seemed that half the material he could have created for Bill Cosby. Willie had that kind of presentation. He and I got really close at that time.

It was the longest flight I’d ever been on—more than twelve hours. When we landed the whole airport looked like a tsunami of Africans—they were all there to greet us, all colors, sizes, and shapes. Some were so black they were almost iridescent blue. It was beautiful—they came right up to the plane. We walked down the stairs, and the crowd started parting like the Red Sea in front of Moses, and suddenly there was a line of local people representing Ghana’s twelve nations coming to meet us. Each nation had its own dancing style and costumes, some decorated with big buffalo horns and seashells. Each group greeted us one at a time, then the mayor of Accra and his party got their turn.

The whole scene was incredible to see and hear first thing after landing. Then we saw a witch doctor kind of guy—he was wearing animal skins and shaking a big gourd that was as big and round as a basketball. He made it rattle like a Buddy Rich roll. It was obvious by the way he took center stage that he commanded a lot of respect. Even the mayor’s people got out of his way, and the people who were filming the trip and concert loved him. We were like, “Who is this guy?”

Willie decided he would show off—he had an amulet that he wore, and he started saying that his voodoo was more powerful, that he had his own thing going on. Back then I figured we all had our own way of dealing with the invisible realm. I just wasn’t flaunting mine. But that holy man fascinated us and scared us at the same time. I could tell right away that he was a sorcerer and had a way of dealing with the invisible realm—he could reach the spirits. And that wouldn’t be the last time we saw him.

We got through customs and went straight to the hotel to get ready for a big dinner that the president was hosting. Before we started eating everyone was asked to rise, and a group of men and women sang Ghana’s national anthem, which was in a kind of call-and-response form. Suddenly I recognized it—it sounded very close to “Afro Blue.” I couldn’t believe it. If this wasn’t where Mongo Santamaría got the song, then they were close cousins, man. Both were coming from the same place.

We were there for almost a week, and there was a lot of looking and learning going on. The next day Carabello ate or drank something and came down with dysentery, which kept him in the hotel, close to the bathroom. Shrieve and I went into town to the market to just look around, and our taxi got stuck in traffic—bumper to bumper, all the windows down. I had brought a cassette player along and was listening to some Aretha Franklin on my headphones. A woman who was walking by stopped right next to the car and was staring at me like I had just stepped out of a flying saucer. I took the headphones off and showed her how to put them on her head. She did, and her eyes got real wide, and she smiled a huge smile. It was connection with penetration—it was like family there.

Workers were still constructing the stage when we got there, so we had to wait for them to finish. At night we were on our own and would all hang out in the only place we could—in the lobby lounge of the Holiday Inn. We ate there, drank there. We laughed when Willie Bobo was holding forth, making everybody hoot. One night
he started picking on Wilson Pickett—“Hey, Wilson Pickle. Wilson Pickle.” Pickett could be a tough dude. He was serious, like Albert King—he didn’t take any mess. But Willie kept at it. “Man, let me show you what you’re going to be doing in your show.” He got down on one knee and put his coat on like it was a cape. “Just like James Brown, but it ain’t gonna work, because here in Africa, James Brown is number one. Sorry to tell you.”