Carlos Santana - Wikipedia

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that July 20 is the anniversary of the birth of Mexican and American guitarist and singer Carlos Santana who pioneered a fusion of rock and Latin American jazz.

He added the middle name of Devadip in March 1973, after joining the flock of an Indian guru.

Happy 71st birthday Carlos Santana.

Background from .rollingstone.com/music/music-news/the-epic-life-of-carlos-santana-89485/
"His meditation spot is in front of the fireplace. On Carlos Santana‘s property in San Rafael, California, about twenty minutes north of San Francisco, there are two buildings. The house closer to the water is where the family lives: Santana, his wife, Deborah, and their three children. The other house, a little higher up the hill, he calls the church. “Here’s where I hang out with Jimi and Miles and whoever, and play and meditate,” he explains. The rest of the family likes to be in bed by ten, but Santana is a night person, so he’ll come up here until two or three in the morning. A card with the word Metatron spelled out in intricately painted picture letters lies on the floor next to the fireplace. Metatron is an angel. Santana has been in regular contact with him since 1994. Carlos will sit here facing the wall, the candles lit. He has a yellow legal pad at one side, ready for the communications that will come. “It’s kind of like a fax machine,” he says. The largest candle, whose half-molten remnants are placed centrally, is in a charred tin that bears the logo of its previous, less spiritual use: Mermaid Butter Cookies.
We take the armchairs in the middle of the room. On the table between us sit an empty Seven-Up can, a cigar and some peanuts. He pulls from his pocket a sheet of yellow paper on which he made notes last night, in preparation for this interview. “If you carry joy in your heart, you can heal any moment,” he reads. “There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.” I can see that there are other things written on the paper, but he chooses not to say them aloud.
We talk of angels and the suchlike. There are few conversations with him that don’t lead to a discussion of angels, or of the spiritual radio through which music comes. Santana has been increasingly engaged by angels since the day in 1988 when he picked up a book on the subject at the Milwaukee airport. “It’s an enormous peace, the few times I have felt the presence in the room,” he says. “I feel lit up. I’m not Carlos anymore, I’m not bound to DNA anymore. It’s beyond sex, it’s beyond anything that this world could give you a buzz. It makes me feel like Jesus embraced me and I’m bathed in light.”
I am, by nature, probably more cynical than most, but all I can tell you is that when he talks about this stuff, it doesn’t seem kooky or unhinged or even that spacey. Likewise, in all the time I spend with Carlos Santana, I see no signs that he is unaware of life’s mundane realities. Rob Thomas – who sings “Smooth,” the Number One hit that has propelled Santana’s commercial rebirth – describes the experience of spending time with Santana accurately: “I don’t know any other way of saying it, but I always just felt a little bit better after being with Carlos.”

Nor does he proselytize. His attitude is: Now, in the wake of the success of his latest album, the 7 million-selling Supernatural, the world is interested in hearing him talk, and he is going to talk about the things he finds important. “What are you going to say?” he scoffs. “‘There’s no business like show business’?” Not in his case. “I don’t care, man, about what anybody thinks about my reality,” he says, “My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There’s an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o’clock in the morning, everything’s really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you’ve been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: Write this down. It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert.”
He tells me more about Metatron. “Metatron is the architect of physical life. Because of him, we can French-kiss, we can hug, we can get a hot dog, wiggle our toe.” He sees Metatron in his dreams and meditations. He looks a bit like Santa Claus – “white beard, and kind of this jolly fellow.” Metatron, who has been mentioned in mystical disciplines through the ages, also appears as the eye inside the triangle.
Santana credits Metatron with alerting him to the recent changes in his life. In the mid-Nineties, he met some people in a spiritual bookstore near his home, and they invited him to their afternoon meditations in Santa Cruz. The last time he was there, Metatron, delivered some important messages. “You will be inside the radio frequency,” Metatron told him, “for the purpose of connecting the molecules with the light.” Carlos Santana understood. He would make a new album and be on the radio again. And he would connect the molecules with the light: He would connect an audience with some of the spiritual information he now had. Metatron offered a further instruction: “Be patient, gracious and grateful,” Santana was told, and he resolved to do just that.
When he is here in his church and he is not meditating, often he is playing the guitar. Sometimes he’ll scrutinize records by his heroes – people such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bob Marley, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Ray Vaughan. (Today, Miles Davis bootlegs are scattered over the floor.) “There’s so much to learn on each person alone,” he says. “You really study. How do you get this note to sound like a baby crying in the middle of a nuclear bomb? First you imitate, like a parakeet, then you enter in.” Whenever he finds something special onstage, it is not just a happy accident. “The fingers remember,” he says. “People say, ‘You hit a note last night’ . . . ” – and he throws a hand around the room – “It started here.”
And now, casually, he picks up a guitar, flicks on the amplifier. “Sometimes words get in the way,” he says. “But when you go . . . ” – he plays some beautiful high, fluid notes – “Palestinian, Hebrew or Aborigine or Mexican or Chinese, this speaks really clearly.”
Ask a Rock Star: Carlos Santana
He puts down the guitar and shows me round. There is a photo of his wife taken in the Seventies in Philadelphia, holding a guitar the wrong way. (Her father, Saunders King, he notes, was one of the blues-guitar pioneers, played with Billie Holiday and, he says, “was B.B. King‘s inspiration.”) There is a prized picture of John Coltrane looking stern, thoughtful and dignified. Davis and Coltrane bootlegs burned onto CDs. A shelf of books about jazz. Photographs of his parents from around the time Carlos was born. On the second floor, I point, impressed, to the Spider-Man pinball machine. “Yeah, that’s from the early Eighties,” he says, dismissively. “I didn’t have any kids, so I am like a kid myself.” Spider-Man was always his favorite comic as a teenager. He could relate to Peter Parker: “He had teenage problems, teenage doubts and insecurities.”
It is at that moment he rushes downstairs, without explanation, leaving me there. He has seen one of his daughters coming up the path with the cable guy.
Santana’s business affairs are run from offices in an industrial park a few minutes’ drive from his house. Today, as he walks into the reception area (where his last Rolling Stone cover story is framed – from 1976, nearly half his life ago), six or seven staff are waiting for him.
“We’re Number One!” they chant. “We’re Number One! We’re Num–”
He accepts their congratulations, though he also looks a little embarrassed by the attention. Their jubilation marks the return of Santana’s Supernatural album to Number One on the charts in the wake of the announcement of his eleven Grammy nominations – just one more triumph in a career renaissance that is becoming bigger than the original career.
In the rehearsal room out back, he puts down his SANTANA fanny pack and lights up some incense, an Indian brand he was introduced to in 1972 by Alice Coltrane, John Coltrane’s widow. He wears sneakers with no socks and a shirt printed with golden angels of various sizes playing guitars. The brim of his brown hat is folded up at the front. As we settle in, he mentions that he recently started working out twice a week with his wife. It makes him less cranky. “As soon as I saw the CD enter the chart,” he explains, “I knew the old energy I had wasn’t going to make it.”
On this earth, Carlos Santana principally credits two people for what has happened. First, his wife, Deborah. “Spiritually, emotionally, financially, she’s a guiding light,” he says. In 1994 she restructured his business life: “I’d probably be a hobo if it wasn’t for her.” Second is Arista Records president Clive Davis, who signed him when other record companies were letting it be known they felt he was simply too old; “I’m not into kissing anybody’s behind, it’s just, I need to honor these people who stuck their neck out over and over for me.”
He had not made a new studio album since Milagro in 1992. He had been holding back on recording, trying to get out of his contract. And it was hard. “I felt I had a masterpiece of joy in my belly,” he says, explaining that he felt pregnant with a new record, just as he imagines Marvin Gaye felt before making What’s Going On or Bob Marley did before Exodus. His wife thought Clive Davis was the man to help him. It was Davis who first signed the Santana band to Columbia Records in 1968. In his meditations, Santana would think of Davis: “I chanted for Mr. Clive Davis twenty-seven times each day. I’d picture him coming out of a car or a limousine, and a cab passing by, playing my music. So wherever he goes, I want him to be connected with my music.”
They met in a Los Angeles hotel. As Santana tells it, Davis got really close to his face and said, “What does Carlos Santana want to do?”
“I’d like to reconnect the molecules with the light,” Carlos told him. (“And he wasn’t fazed,” Santana recalls. “He could have said, ‘Uh-oh, here’s a far-out hippie . . . . Whatever.'”)
“How do you propose to do that?” Davis asked, and Carlos talked about how Miles Davis played pop tunes in his later years. About how two things about Santana never go out of style – the spiritual and the sensual. About how Clive Davis was the man who could find him songs. (There was nothing new about Santana thriving on this kind of input. Their early manager, the late promoter Bill Graham, persuaded them to record their first hit, a Willie Bobo salsa song called “Evil Ways.” “This will get you airplay,” he informed them, and he was right.)
Santana wanted to reclaim a younger audience. “I’m not at all into becoming a twilight-zone jukebox prisoner of the Sixties,” he says. Davis got working. “I blueprinted the architectural plan for the album,” Davis says. “And that was having half the album be vintage Santana, in the spirit of ‘Oye Como Va,’ which he wanted for himself, and the other half I proposed was those organic collaborations that would not be a compromise of his integrity but also be calculated to serve him at radio, in the spirit of what he had said. I would look for what turned out to be the list of Lauryn Hilland Wyclef Jean and Everlast and Dave Matthews, etc.”
A Supernatural Night for 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.
José 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 Autlán 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,'” he counts out. “‘And-I’m-going-to-spank-you!’ You can cuss or you can pray with the guitar.”
Santana, ‘Spirits Dancing in the Flesh’
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.'"

Santana - Soul Sacrifice 1969 "Woodstock" Live Video HQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqZceAQSJvc

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. LTC Orlando Illi Maj Bill Smith, Ph.D. Maj William W. "Bill" Price CPT Jack Durish Capt Tom Brown CMSgt (Join to see) MSG Andrew White SFC William Farrell SGT (Join to see) Sgt Albert Castro SSG David Andrews Sgt Randy Wilber Sgt John H. SGT Charles H. Hawes SGT Mark Halmrast SPC Margaret Higgins PO1 William "Chip" Nagel

@Capt Marty - love playing his music. I played the drums to his music way back in 1975 with a band we formed in Fort Ord, CA called "Funk Inc!" Had a great time playing all month for "Balck History" month there and the retirement of my First Sergeant 1SG Howard V. Willis, Co C, 2nd of the 17th Infantry, 7th Infantry Division. Those were the days my friend.

He was an amazing guitarist