Though Santana were a major draw in their San Francisco hometown and had become favorites of influential impresario Bill Graham, they were virtual unknowns outside their city when they began playing the Woodstock Music & Art Fair at 2 p.m. on Saturday, August 16, 1969. By the end of their 45-minute set, they were on their way to being superstars. The energy and focus of their performance, so loose and funky and also precise, is still palpable, and Carlos Santana, the band’s leader and guitarist, appears to be inhabiting another plane (in a sense he was, due to an ill-timed dose of a hallucinogen). The band’s self-titled debut album, released a few weeks later, was an instant hit.
Watch and listen to the film of them onstage at Woodstock: the flurry of percussion, all the metal and wood and rawhide and human hands, is where the ear goes first. Carlos, then 22, became enamored with Afro-Cuban music after he’d been playing for quite a while. He grew up in Mexico, first in the small town of Autlán and later in Tijuana, where his father supported his family playing violin in mariachi bands. Money was tight, and José Santana would be gone from his family for months at a time. He taught Carlos to play violin, and the boy eventually turned to guitar, falling in love with blues players like B.B. King, Jimmy Reed, and Muddy Waters.
No score yet, be the first to add.
This grounding in blues would serve Carlos well when his family relocated to San Francisco. They settled in the Mission district, where he attended high school, washed dishes in a local restaurant, and paid close attention to the city’s rapidly developing rock sounds. At the same time, the Mission was a West Coast outpost for new developments in Latin music, and the young guitarist was a sponge. He’d encountered a wide range of Latin styles while living in Tijuana but didn’t fully embrace it, and remained suspicious. “If you said ‘Latin’ to me at that time, I would think about what I saw on TV—Desi Arnaz and ‘Babalu’ and guys in puffy sleeves shaking maracas—and I knew I didn’t want to go there,” he writes of his teenage years in his memoir, The Universal Tone. But immersion in the sounds of Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, and Ray Barretto on the radio and in San Francisco clubs changed all that.
Carlos formed the Santana Blues Band and started gigging around town—congas and timbales entered the mix via percussionists Michael Carabello (in 1967) and José Areas (in 1969), which helped set them apart in one of America’s great rock scenes. Most of the local groups competing for slots at the Fillmore played a mix of blues, rock’n’roll, and R&B, and many, like the Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, were steeped in American folk. Santana essentially swapped the jug-band and bluegrass roots for Afro-Cuban elements.
This emphasis on rhythm would serve the band well as they expanded their sound across their first three albums—Abraxas followed in 1970, and Santana III in 1971—each was a massive seller, and they twice covered tunes by Puente. Carlos’ guitar playing took a leap—he wasn’t a god-tier technician like Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck, but the warmth of his touch and clarion tone were instantly identifiable. On tracks like “Samba Pa Ti” from Abraxas, his melodic imagination put him in league with Beck and Duane Allman, and his leads have the fine-grained expressivity of the human voice. “I had to find my way to become Aretha, Etta James, Tina Turner, Nina Simone, with that kind of Miles-ish phrasing, in all this rush of feeling,” is how he later put it in his memoir.
