Santana

It was in August 1969 amid the chaos of Woodstock, armed with his Gibson and surrounded by tons of instruments and roadies, that Carlos Santana's legend began. With a black sleeveless jacket over his bare torso, his curly hair, little goatee and contorted facial expressions, the Mexican-born guitarist (naturalised as an American citizen in 1965) who had taken mescaline before the concert, captivated the tens of thousands of hippies tripping in the New York State countryside. With his blues scales set to the driving rhythms of his colleagues (particularly the Nicaraguan percussionist José "Chepito" Areas), Santana introduced a whole generation to a fusion between rock and Latin music. Prior to the festival, his band had been touring around San Francisco nightclubs for a few years and had not yet released an album, having only started studio recordings a few months earlier. Three covers appeared on the setlist of this legendary concert; two tracks by Latin jazz king Willie Bobo, Evil Ways and Fried Neck Bone and Some Home Fries, as well as Jin-go-lo-ba, by Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji. Though the highlight of the show was undoubtedly the salsa-rock crossover Soul Sacrifice, featuring Michael Shrieve's legendary drum solo, which ensured the group a prominent place in Michael Wadleigh's 1970 film Woodstock and therefore allowed future generations to share the experience.

Carlos Santana was the son of a mariachi violinist. At 22, his childhood dreams started to become a reality as he began to follow in his father’s footsteps. “My first memory of my father is watching him playing music and watching what it did to people – he was the darling of our town. I wanted that charisma that he had.” In the 50s, the Santana family lived in Tijuana in the Colonia Libertad district, located to the north of the city and bordered by a wall separating it from the American city of San Diego. At the age of 5, Carlos already knew how to play the violin. By 8, he had mastered guitar, while selling chewing gum with his little brother Jorge on the corner of the street to help his parents pay rent. As a teenager, he hung out in the clubs on Revolution Avenue, where he gave his first concerts on guitar and bass guitar. Fascinated by Ritchie Valens, who wrote La Bamba, one of the first Latin mega-hits in the United States (and who died in the same plane as Buddy Holly and Big Bopper, on February 3, 1959), Santana finally crossed the border a few years later to settle in San Francisco and form his group, which he simply named Santana.

Concert producer Bill Graham, the man behind the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, quickly scouted out this talented group of young men. It was Graham who pulled the strings to get the band booked at Woodstock and two weeks after the festival, the label Columbia released the group’s debut album, entitled Santana. It was also Graham who pushed for a cover of Willie Bobo's Evil Ways to be released as a single. “This track will get you airplay,” he promised. Bingo! The album, which sounds like it should be the soundtrack to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty's trip to Mexico City, climbed up to 4th place in the American albums charts.

A year later, in September 1970, the group continued with Abraxas, an album that was also jam-packed with Afro-Cuban percussion and rhythms, as well as more covers that became hits: Black Magic Woman, written two years earlier by Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, which had enjoyed limited success; and Oye Como Va by the Puerto Rican Tito Puente, written in 1962. Being more of an arranger than a composer, Santana's genius consisted of bringing together original compositions and adding a wild and ecstatic dimension to them, creating a trippy atmosphere on stage with long instrumentals. Moving away from the lo-fi blues original, Black Magic Woman was transformed into a shamanic anthem.

Abraxas was largely influenced by Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and just like Davis’ record, the psychedelic album cover was designed by Mati Klarwein. The record spent six weeks at number one and didn’t leave the charts for 88 weeks, going quadruple platinum. “I would turn on the radio and Abraxas would be on every station, just about”, Carlos Santana recalls. “I found myself more and more depressed, and I’d find myself crying. 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 things that happened to most bands. It was basically too much too soon: excess, big egos, myself included.”