The Universal Tone: Bringing My Story to Light by Carlos Santana

Author:Carlos Santana [Santana, Carlos]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography & Autobiography / Composers & Musicians, Biography & Autobiography / Rich & Famous
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2014-11-04T00:00:00+00:00

By the end of 1970, Neal Schon had been hanging around for a while, jamming with us. Both Neal and I were playing Gibson Les Pauls, but we had different signatures—so that wasn’t a problem. I had a Les Paul to replace the red SG I had played at Woodstock and subsequently broken.

I liked Neal’s dexterity, and he brought a lot of fire for someone so young, yet in a humble way. We had some tunes he sounded good on, and we started thinking about where to put solos so we wouldn’t have two guitar solos in a row. When Gregg soloed I would comp something that would stimulate him, and Neal was able to do his own thing and find his way through it.

Neal’s playing next to mine made me think of bands I liked that had two guitarists and how they worked together—the Butterfield Blues Band had Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop. Fleetwood Mac had three guitar players back then—Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer, and Danny Kirwan. Eric Clapton had a new band, Derek and the Dominos, with Duane Allman on some of the tunes.

In November, Clapton came to San Francisco with the Dominos, and because Bill was the promoter he arranged a special get-together for all of us at Wally Heider Studios. We were all there with Neal, and when Eric showed up the only problem was that I was tripping and too out of it to jam. I said to myself, “You better sit this one out and just learn.” Eric had heard about us and was really gracious to come over and hang. We all had a good time, and I liked Eric—I was comfortable with him because I could tell we were coming from the same place.

The next thing we knew we were hearing that Clapton had asked Neal to join the Dominos, which made me think that if we wanted to keep Neal with us we only had one choice. It felt good to have another strong melodic voice in the band, and I wasn’t threatened by the idea—I wasn’t paranoid or too proud to have another guitarist with us. It was my decision to ask him to join us, after I spoke with the rest of the band. Neal said yes, and by December he was part of Santana.

I know a lot of people have their own perceptions about whether Santana needed another guitar player or not. I remember Miles had his own idea about it—expressed once again when we were at the CBS offices riding up the elevator one day. “Why did you do that? You don’t need him.” A few years after he said that, Miles had two guitars in his own band—Reggie Lucas and Pete Cosey, and then in the ’80s he had John Scofield and Mike Stern together. I’m just saying, you know?

Besides, Miles had no way to know that we had some new tunes we were doing, such as Gene Ammons’s “Jungle Strut,” that would be on the next album and that I wanted to play with two guitar players.

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