Carlos Santana This article is more than 24 years oldReturn of the hippie
This article is more than 24 years oldThis time last year, Carlos Santana was a neglected relic of San Francisco's 70s scene. Now he's collaborating with the likes of Lauryn Hill and laden with Grammy nominations. He talks to Adam SweetingHave moustache, will travel: Santana through the ages
1947 Born in Mexico. Grows up in Tijuana before moving to San Francisco, where he forms the Santana Blues Band.
1968 Santana (as they're now known) play San Francisco's Fillmore ballroom for first time.
1969 Santana take their Latin-influenced music to the hippies at Woodstock. Debut album hits number four. Support Rolling Stones at infamous Altamont concert.
1970 First US hit single is a cover of Fleetwood Mac's Black Magic Woman. Plays Albert Hall and Bath Festival. Abraxas album sells 1m copies.
1971 Santana III top US chart.
1973 Carlos marries Urmila, follower of guru Sri Chinmoy, and makes album with like-minded John McLaughlin. Adds name Devadip.
1976 Plays on Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder revue and benefit for Hurricane Carter.
1977 Cover of the Zombies' She's Not There is only UK hit.
1985 Band appear on Live Aid in Philadelphia.
1991 Arrested for cannabis possession in Houston. Gets six-month deferred sentence.
1998 Plays on multi-award winning album The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill as Latin revival hots up.
1999 Releases album Supernatural. Five million copies sold to date
When the American record industry dishes out its annual awards later this month, all eyes at LA's Staples Center will be on Carlos Santana, the 52-year-old guitarist who's been nominated for no fewer than 10 Grammys. That would be a remarkable achievement in any circumstances, but only a year ago Santana was thought of as a 70s throwback with nothing to say to today's listeners. When, that is, he was thought of at all.
The album that has reignited his career is Supernatural, a laid-back stew of fashionable Latin rhythms pulled together by Carlos's own distinctive guitar tones. What helped to push it into pop-crossover territory is its list of guest artists. Lauryn Hill wrote and rapped on Do You Like the Way, while Wyclef Jean co-wrote and co-produced Maria Maria. Eagle-Eye Cherry and the Dust Brothers feature on the blues-shuffle Wishing it Was. Writing and vocal contributions from Rob Thomas (of Matchbox 20) helped to lodge Smooth at number one in the singles chart for 12 weeks. Throw in a guest spot from Dave Matthews and an Eric Clapton duet, and you have a recipe that has shifted 5m copies of the album since its release last June.
So why has all this happened now? "That's a good question," Carlos says, during a brief visit to Britain. "I've been saying that most people are not happy unless they're miserable, but when an individual pulls himself out of that zone, he's able to embrace a new dimension of thinking. Most people think life is crap and they have to scream, so they're paranoid. That's why kids in America get guns and shoot each other. But when you realise you have a chance to change the frequency, you start attracting what I'm attracting right now, which is enormous possibilities and opportunities."
That's not the sort of speech you get from most rock stars, but you can't separate Carlos Santana the musician from Carlos Santana the spiritual being spreading global good vibes. Rock critic Joel Selvin described the Santana of 1970 as "a guarded personality who tried to exert control through more devious ways", but today his calm, lilting tones and Tibetan-style skull cap give him the air of an itinerant mystic. He appears to have reached a place where everything is in harmony and nothing happens without a reason. He even saw the creation of Supernatural as a predestined experience, commenting that "all the people on the album said they had heard my music before I called them, or that I appeared in their dreams, or something".
The downside is that Carlos tends to lapse into beatific hyperbole, notably on Supernatural's sleeve, where he thanks his collaborators a little too profusely. "Lauryn Hill - To my dearest sister of light. My heart's gratitude for your soul's vision and your heart's music." "Eric Clapton - Dearest brother-friend Eric, you are truly an archangel of the highest order". And so forth.
But Santana has managed to survive the long haul from the Haight-Ashbury dawn of late-60s San Francisco: he is renewing himself when most of his contemporaries are dead or burnt out. If he's found what works for him, who's arguing? "People have been swinging with this pendulum of good and evil, beautiful or ugly," Carlos says. "Why don't we try this other one that goes like this: beauty, grace, excellence, peace, light, love, joy, quality, harmony. I'm really bored with the last 1,000 years of blaming the devil or blaming this or that for some shit that each person should take responsibility for. On Supernatural the music is working with grandparents, parents, teenagers and kids. It's inviting people to celebrate the divine side of yourself, to validate the existence of something that is paranormal, but is with us all of the time." And you thought it was just a pop album.
Growing up in the rough-and-tumble Mexican border town of Tijuana, the adolescent Carlos found himself playing the blues in clubs into the early hours, sharing the bill with hookers and strippers. It was probably just as well that his father, also a professional musician, moved the family to San Francisco's Spanish-speaking Mission district in 1961.
Carlos was sucked into the creative ferment of the 60s, where the psychedelic underground and anti-Vietnam war protest collided with the new musical directions being pioneered on the West Coast. He was soon rubbing shoulders with local musicians like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and hooked up with organist Gregg Rolie to assemble the first Santana band. With encouragement from San Francisco's influential promoter and entrepreneur Bill Graham, who booked the band at his Fillmore West concert hall and became their unofficial manager, Santana became one of the hottest acts in the Bay area.
"Bill Graham made it possible for the hippies to be educated," Carlos says now. "He said, 'You wanna listen to the Grateful Dead? First hear Miles Davis. If you wanna listen to Santana, first listen to Roland Kirk.' He believed in a balanced meal - salad, vegetables, main course, dessert. He always said that people like Bruce Springsteen and the Police and the Rolling Stones were the steak."
The bullying, abrasive Graham acted as a self-appointed critic to the artists he booked. He scared a lot of people, but Santana remembers him with fondness. "What I miss about him is that he took notes at every concert, on everybody - Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Dylan, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix. He would show the notes to you at the end of the concert. He would say, 'OK, the first song was excellent, the second really sucked, and the third one was too long.' How many promoters would have the cojones to tell you that? The problem is, you knew he was right. He wasn't into being a promoter or impresario or whatever; he was into the music."
An appearance at the 1969 Woodstock festival broke Santana nationwide. Maybe the fact that Carlos was tripping on mescaline gave them an extra edge, but the band were one of the major hits of the festival.
Carlos's earliest musical idols had been bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush, but he began to listen to a more diverse palette of sounds. To the basic rock and blues base, Santana added Latin rhythms and the freer shapes of modern jazz, absorbed from records like John Coltrane's My Favourite Things and Miles Davis's rock-jazz fusion, Bitches Brew.
"Miles used to call at my house and he was funnier than anyone I ever heard, man," Carlos reminisces. "He had a tremendous sense of humour. A lot of people saw him as a different kind of angry Black Panther, but with me he was a real sweetheart. On the musical side, he changed the course of music seven times. Stravinsky only did it one time. Even John Coltrane, who's my musician of the century, said, 'Everything I'm discovering, Miles played it already'."
Santana's first albums - up to and including the fourth, the complex, jazz-inflected Caravanserai of 1972 - were some of the most original and powerful of their time. Carlos's version of his band's history tends to gloss over the power struggles and drug abuse which grew worse with success, until the conflicts drove Carlos to embrace the Hindu teachings of Sri Chinmoy. Between 1973 and 1981 he was known as Devadip Carlos Santana, and embarked on a string of collaborations with similarly spiritual jazz musicians, including John McLaughlin, Stanley Clarke, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock.
In the 80s he gradually moved back to his original brew of rock, Latin and blues. "Jazz is an ocean," says Carlos. "Rock'n'roll is a swimming pool. I hang out on a lake." He continued to work regularly, but younger audiences stayed away, and the Santana name began to seem little more than a historical curiosity.
Much credit is due, then, to Arista boss Clive Davis, who offered Santana their first recording deal when he was at Columbia in 1968, and laid the groundwork for Carlos's comeback when he offered him a new contract in 1995. Davis asked Carlos what his artistic aspirations were, and was apparently satisfied with the reply: "I want to unify the molecules with the light through music."
"I give everybody all the credit," Carlos says. "I give my wife all the credit, I give Lauryn Hill all the credit for inviting me to appear with her at the Grammys, I give Eric Clapton all the credit for being so gracious and dignified and elegant. I don't need credit, man. I'm into progress, not success. Success is one beautiful cake. You cut it and you eat it yourself, and you choke on it. Progress, you cut it and you feed people with it, and hopefully you save a little piece for yourself. That's where I'm coming from." Maybe there's a little of that 1969 flower child left, at that.
The Grammys are on February 23. For details and the live webcast, go to www.grammy.com Supernatural is out on Arista.
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