For a time he played music with his father. They always seemed to end up in the sleaziest parts of town. My stomach just got really, really sick, man, at the smell, the whole thing. 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.
After a while it wears off. After a while you learn the most sensual thing is innocence. 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.
It was more like a shock kind of thing: gross, disgusting shock. Women never turned me off. I mean, the smell of men, it makes me sick. I n the early Sixties, the Santana family moved north to San Francisco. No way. The first time he came to America with his family, he sulked and was angry all the time. They fell out for a long time after that.
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. Put me in a car.
This time he stayed. Went to junior high. Learned English. 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. In that house, seven kids shared two bedrooms. As we drive away, he tells me about the time when Tony came home from a party and needed to sleep 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. We pass Mission High School. King and daydream of being onstage at the Fillmore. That was all he saw ahead of him. A bit of Donovan. We drive by San Francisco General Hospital. Again, Santana slows but never stops.
He points up to a window. He spent three months in that room. It was the spring of 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.
He graduated while he was in the hospital. A tutor would visit him. Friends would visit and deliver inappropriate party favors. It made him realize that this was no place for a young man with plans. 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. U p 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. A fter 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. 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.
It made me aware of splendor and rapture. The last time he did anything like that was when he took some mushrooms on a tour day off at Niagara Falls in He says he can imagine doing it again when his children are grown up. Take something, go down to the beach. 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 thing that happen to most bands. It was basically too much too soon: excess, big egos, myself included.
Too much drugs , everything to excess. You start feeling really lonely. And for me, it was the beginning of my journey. By , 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. As we leave the church, I notice a guitar strap neatly laid out in a cabinet.
On it, spelled out in large letters, is the word Devadip. That was the name Carlos Santana took from to , when he was a disciple of an Eastern guru called Sri Chinmoy. The friend he was with noticed the way Carlos looked at Deborah across the room.
She was twenty-two. But she felt the connection too. He knew for sure the first time she came to his house. By the time Santana met her, he was already looking for some spiritual guidance. He had been fasting and praying, and, inspired by the example of John Coltrane, he had started to read about Eastern mysticism and philosophy.
Then, when he met guitarist John McLaughlin, McLaughlin had a photo of Sri Chinmoy, and the guru seemed to have an enormous peace about him. They signed up to a stern regimen. She also ran a devotional vegetarian resturant in San Francisco. I once ran a forty-seven-mile race. The few interviews Carlos gave in those years are crammed with reverence toward Chinmoy. I am the strings, but he is the musician.
It was not too long afterward that he and Deborah had their first child. It was so delicious. She gets uncomfortable sometimes. His wife has laid down some firm family rules. Since their third child, Angelica, was born ten years ago, she has insisted that time working is followed by sacrosanct time off, in which he takes a full role in family life.
He has a contretemps of sorts with some of his staff when he complains that he has no time off before his imminent promotional trip to Europe. The executive—then the head of Arista Records—suggested that Santana collaborate with a range of current hot artists. One of the enduring qualities that ties together every project in which Carlos Santana has engaged is intention. For Santana—who has also made collaborative albums with virtuoso guitarist John McLaughlin, Alice Coltrane and his brother Jorge—all of his work fits together.
And the only way to uplift someone is to help them be aware of their own light, their own magnificence. True to form, Carlos Santana brings a mixture of mindfulness and intention to the question of whether a revival of the iconic festival is even a good idea. Are you coming to sell more records? Are you coming to sell Mountain Dew or tacos or marijuana? Or are you just coming here to celebrate the good qualities of humans?
We reinvent ourselves, but the song is unity and harmony and healing and coming together and doing away, eventually, with patriotism, which is prehistoric. For Santana, making music with intention is part of that mix, a vehicle to achieve those hippie goals. Dan Pulcrano and Nick Veronin contributed to this story. This is an author search.
In San Francisco, he got the chance to see his idols, most notably B. King, perform live. He was also introduced to a variety of new musical influences, including jazz and folk music, and witnessed the growing hippie movement centered in San Francisco in the s.
After several years spent working as a dishwasher in a diner and busking for spare change, Santana decided to become a full-time musician.
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