Today’s birthday boy is Carlos Santana, bandleader and lead
guitarist for the band named after him. And today’s song is the hit most
readily associated with Santana, even though it was written by Peter Green and
first recorded by Fleetwood Mac. Santana made it his band’s signature tune with
its release on the Abraxas album in
1970. That low key opening, the Latin percussion, that sinuous and insinuating
lead guitar line. It’s so smooth, so fluid. It belongs to late night radio, a
track for the deeper watches of the night, a hot, steamy night, somewhere south of the border.
Gregg Rolie is the voice singing the song—and it’s not a
vocal I have a great affection for, it’s simply the one that has become
inseparable from the song. In fact, I was never crazy about the vocals in
Santana’s band, and that’s probably the reason I was slow to pick up on the band.
I’m a lyrics and vocals guy first and foremost, and the reason I didn’t have
Santana albums is the same reason I didn’t have Allman Brothers albums. Their strength
was all in the music, not in the lyrics.
But there’s no denying that the string of Santana’s first
four albums are full of interesting musical textures and those trademark
Santana leads, backed with a kind of virtuoso interplay of musicians able to
work in blues, jazz, Latin, rock and make it all jell. Santana (1969), Abraxas
(1970), Santana III (1971), Caravanserai (1973)—all became
essential albums in my collection this century when I picked up remasters of
all of them on CD. The kind of nostalgia I was experiencing at that time led me
naturally to the music of the early Seventies—some of it music I’d had and then
neglected, some of it, like Santana, I’d never gotten around to.
So the immersion was that thing of making up for lost time, rediscovering something that had always been there. There wasn’t anything on Top
40 radio like Santana back then. And the way the band took Peter Green’s blues
tune and reconfigured it was a major statement. As though a salsa-rock hybrid
could be visited upon any tune and, presto!, it was Santana-ized.
The vocals are subdued, almost mumbled, except for a line
here and there—“I need you so bad!”—but it’s the musical lines that matter. It
took me awhile to be able to hear that sort of thing with the proper respect
for the overall sound. In fact, the best tracks on Santana albums tend to be
instrumentals—such as the hauntingly evocative “Samba Pa Ti” on Abraxas—or sung in Spanish, like “Oye
Como Va” and “Guajira.” The vocals tend to be part of the music and not really
a lead voice. Anyway, all that’s neither here nor there when you get to about 2:10 and
the guitar starts talking with the “voodoo that you do.”
It’s a song about a slinky “black magic” type, the kind that
puts a spell on you, and the guitar does that for about 45 seconds—45 seconds
forever etched into your brain. Then we come back around to vocal, and then we
segue into that sensuous Latin bit before the segue into a Hungarian tune by
Gábor Szabó called “Gyspy Queen”—much faster and full of a completely different
and more aggressive vibe. It’s a little
schizophrenic and is really two songs, but the segue is so smooth, the DJs
tended to play both parts, stretching it into a four+ minute track on Top 40.
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