King Carlos

Santana talks about coming to Dubai, the blues, peace, love and…water with Philip Moore who stumbled across one of the all time greats as he was swinging through an airport in the US.

I’m on a flight from San Francisco and the credits are rolling for a cartoon movie called Surf’s Up. Some of the soundtrack in this movie is by Carlos Santana.

The great man, with the trademark fedora hat, doesn’t notice. He’s dozing with his iPod on.

Then we talk. The guitar genius is one of the gentle souls of music. Dare I say it, he’s a flashback to the era when we hoped – no, we expected – everyone was going to end up like that. And while Carlos Santana found fame in the hippie era, his playing was timeless. He tweaked and combined salsa, blues, rock and jazz. He gave us blues-based riffs with Latin percussion. In 2003 Rolling Stone magazine named Santana No.15 in the greatest guitarists of all time. The other 14 were lucky to be in his company.

Santana is a special kind of muso’, the guitarist’s guitarist. Singers are there to fill the gaps between his playing.

There’s no marketing mumbo jumbo or PR hype with Carlos Santana. He is committed to a sincere, genteel message of love. You relish it or you snigger. Few snigger when they meet him, however. Try this comment from Santana for size - and if you came up in that era and it meant something, what else would he say?!

“When you use your imagination and you can see yourself like an astronaut outside the earth. You don’t see flags, you don’t see separation, and you only see one planet. I’ve been blessed to see beyond nationality, beyond tribes.

“For me water and air are more important than patriotism because water has compassion for everyone. It doesn’t have greed or gain, or a position to maintain.

“I want my music, like Bob Marley or John Coltrane, to be like rain – everybody gets wet. There’s no good or bad.

“I’m sure a lot of people in America would not understand this; even Mexicans do not understand this. I graduated from thinking like a Mexican or an American a long time ago. I’m not a guerrilla who only hangs in one tree.”

Carlos Santana was raised on a diet of traditional music in his native Mexico but the blues kept calling. Carlos’ father, José, an accomplished mariachi violinist, introduced his son to ‘traditional music,’ in their village at the age of five. Carlos played the violin before he ever picked up a guitar.

In the mid-fifties the family moved to the border boom town of Tijuana where Carlos seriously took up guitar, studying and emulating the sounds of B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, T. Bone Walker and other blues greats he heard on the crackling radio.

He had muso’ written all over him early on and was inspired by the early training he’d received from his father and the theory would benefit him with his guitar playing, but he wanted to play rock and roll. He was gigging at 13, already giving that deft touch to popular songs of the 1950s.

As he continued playing with different bands up and down the bustling ‘Tijuana Strip,’ Carlos Santana began to hone his considerable skills and invent his inimitable sound. In 1960 Carlos’ family moved to San Francisco, but Carlos wouldn’t go, instead staying on to gig in Tijuana. In 1961, he caved and made the move to San Fran.

This meant Carlos Santana was there with his guitar and his dreams as the enormously influential Bay Area music scene unfolded and then exploded. The Bay Area in the 1960s was a melting pot of cultural, political and artistic change and if that’s too “hey man” for you, it was simply about bloody good music.

In 1966, he was out there with the Santana Blues Band and a legend was in the making. Ironically, he wasn’t even the main member of the band, but union laws said a group had to have a name and someone had to be designated leader.

For the next two years, the group was swept up in a whirlwind of acclaim and popularity that carried them from the boards of legendary promoter Bill Graham’s Fillmore West auditorium in New York to the main stage at Woodstock, the ‘Peace, Love, Music’ event that might not have changed the world, but the world sure heard it! That was the gig - August 16, 1969 – that took Santana band’s Latin-flavoured rock to the biggest audience rock had seen.

The world muttered a collective ‘yeah man’ and realized over night what it all meant.
When you love blues music and know a tiny bit about it, enough to realise what a wonderous gift it has been to the world, it’s hard not to be star-struck by Carlos Santana.

“I know that the likes of Muddy Waters or BB King, all have had that one thing in common and it’s common in all music – whether its Gypsy or Pakistani or Hindi, all of it has feeling. It has to have the sense that it is from the centre of your heart,” he tells me.

“When you hit the centre of your heart you heal people and you heal yourself because everybody has a sickness. That sickness is that we think we’re separated from God then you have pain and you have fear. To me the blues is a medicine.”

Eric Clapton is on record as saying you have to experience pain to be an accomplished blues artist. The despair bleeds through the one note, 12-bar blues, according to Ol’ Slowhand. Yet I once put this question to the man Clapton considers to be the world’s best living guitarist, Buddy Guy.

Guy says you can be happy as they come and still play blues. It isn’t necessary to have blood stains on the frets.

Santana likes this question. His eyes light up like they do when he hits a note in an encore that no-one on earth should be able to pick.

“I’ll go with Buddy Guy. Excuse the expression, but some white people think you have to suffer like a black man to play like a black man, but Stevie Ray Vaughan didn’t play like a black man or a white man, his playing is like a living volcano.

“It’s a false perception that you think you have to suffer. No, you claim unity with a crying child that has been abandoned in India or an Apache. You can claim that pain but you don’t have to suffer. But you don’t have to shoot heroin or suffer or whatever. You don’t have to suffer to play the blues.”

Santana’s guitar gifts and prowess are among the world’s most distinctive. Fans delight in his humanitarian efforts, messages and spirituality. He has a sincere, gentle message that he never tires of communicating through his music. Whether he considers it water or whatever, when Santana takes the stage his licks move and touch everyone.

The Santana Band achieved double-platinum status their first time out with the 1969 debut album, Santana, featuring the hit single ‘Evil Ways’. They achieved quadruple-platinum with Abraxas, the classic 1970 follow-up which boasted among its tracks ‘Black Magic Woman’ and the delightful Tito Puente composition ‘Oye Como Va.’

A period of experimentation with fusion jazz and non-Latin world sounds began with the Middle Eastern-flavored album Caravensarai in 1972. Santana also collaborated with John McLaughlin, leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, one of the top fusion bands at the time.

The snarling, swearing punk rockers soon ripped up flower power at its roots, however, and Santana’s career suffered. Punk spit replaced Santana water. Santana’s record sales dwindled and he was without a contract for a while. It was the law of diminishing returns.
Then came ‘Supernatural’.

Santana bestrode the music world with this album which has sold 25 million copies. All told he has notched over 90 million sales.

The old psychedelic lead picker made the Annual Grammy Awards in 2000 his absolute own – winning in nine categories.

Remember this? In every category Santana, was nominated, it won, including album of the year (‘Supernatural’), record of the year (an award given to his single ‘Smooth’) and song of the year (‘Smooth’ again). There were nine awards for the album, equalling Michael Jackson’s 1983 record for the most Grammys won in a single year.

He didn’t get a look in for a Grammy when he was doing such fine work in the 1960s and 1970s. He had won a Grammy for best rock instrumental in 1988. That was it.

Supernatural, with its guest appearances from the likes of Lauryn Hill and Eric Clapton, did more than just rise to No.1, it became one of those albums like Dark Side of the Moon that comes along every generation.

Backstage, Santana dropped a neat quote that he was proud of: “To be able to demonstrate to the people that deepness and class can be as profitable as shallowness and crass. This validates the idea that quality and quantity can go together.’’

While many rockers big-note about how many disadvantaged people they help, Carlos Santana does a mountain of work and it’s never linked to photo ops. He has lent his talents to many charitable causes including Blues for Salvador, San Francisco Earthquake Relief, Tijuana Orphans, Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and education for Latin youth. He’s received numerous civic and humanitarian commendations over the years.

In 1998, Carlos Santana and his wife Deborah started the Milagro Foundation. Its mission is to help underprivileged youths. Carlos Santana pledged the profits of his 2003 Shaman tour to fight AIDS. The 23-show Shaman tour was estimated to bring in between $2.5-3 million to the cause.

He’s also involved in design and has his own line of women’s clothes. Indeed, he was travelling to New York City for a Conde Naste fashion gala when we did our interview.

But he’s a picker at the end of the day. With the gorgeous restraint that Santana gets from his playing I suggest he might look at a country album?

“You know, five years ago I’d have said ‘no way’ but I’d definitely consider it. I really like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard, for example. But it doesn’t matter what it is as long as it’s from the heart.”

Santana, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, will play Dubai next year and he’s really up for it, the first time he’ll have strummed a chord in the Middle East.

“I’m looking forward to Dubai, to meeting all my brothers and sisters.”

He touches his heart then mine and says, “take this love with you my brother, for your family too.”

From Santana, hey, who would knock that back?

You have to admire the old hippies, the ones that got through. They never die, their playing just gets tighter and tighter.

Carlos Santana will play Dubai on February 15, 2008, as part of the ‘Live you Light’ world tour. Dubai is the first concept of the Far East leg.