Adam Sweeting
When the American record industry dishes out its annual awards this month, all eyes will be on Carlos Santana, the 52- year-old guitarist who has been nominated for 10 Grammys. That would be a remarkable achievement in any circumstances, but only a year ago Santana was thought of as a 1970s 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 Santana’s distinctive guitar tones. What helped to push it into pop-crossover territory are its guest artists: Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Eagle-Eye Cherry, the Dust Brothers and Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20. Smooth stayed at number one in the United States singles chart for 12Eweeks. Throw in a guest spot from Dave Matthews and an Eric Clapton duet, and you have an album that has sold five million copies since last June.
So why has all this happened now? “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,” Santana says.
That’s not the sort of speech you get from most rock stars, but Santana 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: “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.”
But Santana has survived the long haul from the Haight-Ashbury of the late 1960s and is renewing himself when most of his contemporaries are dead or burnt out. If he has found what works for him, who’s arguing?
“I’m really bored with the last 1E000 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.” And you thought it was just a pop album.
Growing up in the 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 in 1961.
Santana was sucked into the creative ferment of the 1960s, when the psychedelic underground and anti-Vietnam War protest collided with the new musical directions being pioneered on the West Coast. He was soon mixing with the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Moby Grape. 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.
An appearance at Woodstock in 1969 broke Santana nationwide. Maybe the fact that Carlos was tripping on mescaline gave them an edge, but the band was one of the hits of the festival. By now Santana was beginning to listen to more diverse sounds.
To the rock and blues base he added Latin rhythms and the freer shapes of modern jazz.
“Miles [Davis] used to call at my house, and he was funnier than anyone I ever heard, man. 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 sweetheartE… 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 continued to work through the 1980s and 1990s, but younger audiences stayed away. Arista boss Clive Davis, who gave the band their first recording deal when he was at Columbia in 1968, laid the groundwork for Carlos’s comeback when he offered him a new contract in 1995. Davis asked what his artistic aspirations were, and seemed satisfied with the reply: “I want to unify the molecules with the light through music.”
“I don’t need credit, man,”Santana explains. “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.”