You should know this much, for starters, and maybe you already do: Carlos Santana in no way considers himself a rock star.
"I've never been one," he declares over the phone. "I'm a musician who plays live. All the rock stars I ever saw — they smell funny, first of all. They smell like wine or piss. They don't change their clothes that much. All the rock stars I really, really saw didn't look happy. They looked spent, looked like they had to do coke because they were tired. They just became really predictable. Me, I enjoy being around musicians."
And here Carlos Santana launches into an extended name-check ("Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Buddy Guy, Bob Dylan, Curtis Mayfield") that is very much a conversational trademark. During a 25-minute interview, he cites the names of 30 artists, ranging from bygone pop star Gloria Estefan to the late blues pianist Otis Spann. (Miles, Shorter, Coltrane and B.B. King enjoy multiple mentions.)
Santana does this, I think, in part because he is more comfortable praising others and gushing platitudes about the sacredness of music than he is offering hard data about his life and artistry. The guitarist/bandleader, 60, also seems a genuinely humble man who feels blessed by the Creator to "be able to play a piece of wood with strings and touch people's hearts."
He's been doing so on a major scale for nearly four decades. The son of a mariachi violinist, he was born in a small Mexican village and then moved to the wild and woolly border town of Tijuana at age 9. Carlos started on fiddle but switched to guitar after hearing American blues wafting from radio stations north of the border. When Carlos was in his early teens, his family moved to San Francisco, a city destined to become the nexus of 1960s hippie culture. Santana didn't need an invitation. He formed the Santana Blues Band and played jam-intensive sets around the city and Northern California.
At some point in the '60s, Santana found his sound. He's not a lead singer, not a prolific songwriter, not even a particularly inventive guitar improviser — he's played various permutations of the same solo for 40 years — but he does have a guitar tone that woos people: full and round, sweet but with just enough bite and possessing the kind of wailing sustain that well serves the high, long notes he so favors.
That sound is what has enabled him, in the latest phase of his career, to effectively become a sideman on his own albums — especially 1999's Supernatural, which included singing and songwriting contributions by Rob Thomas, Dave Matthews, Lauryn Hill and others, and moved a staggering 15 million units in the U.S. alone.
"I do see myself as a sideman," Santana says. "I never see myself as a frontman. I see myself as someone who wants to complement, like a maître-d' — make sure the water is pure, the flowers are fresh, the smile is sincere, the apron is clean. 'I hope you're hungry, man, 'cause we're gonna give you some really good food.'"
As the Santana Blues Band was developing its regional rep, it earned an important ally in rock impresario Bill Graham, owner of the famed Fillmore rock venues. He agreed to act as a consultant to the organizers of the Woodstock festival if they would promise to put the relatively unknown Santana band on the bill.
Carlos and company tore it up, especially on the instrumental "Soul Sacrifice." Built on a roil of Latin percussion and a fat rock riff, the performance sparked the kind of communal euphoria that would become a hallmark of Santana concerts. A guitar hero was born.
In the early '70s, Santana was, by any objective measure, a rock star — no matter what he smelled like. His Abraxas album was a multimillion seller that made Latin rhythms palatable to mass American tastes; its hit single "Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen" — a canny cover of a Peter Green song capped with an explosive slice of a tune by Gypsy jazzman Gabor Szabo — has become a classic-rock fixture.
But Santana had higher aims. He had fallen under the spell of jazz titan John Coltrane (who died in '67), and followed his idol's seeker mentality, placing paramount importance on the spiritual connection to music. Santana became friends with Miles Davis, a jazzman enamored with rock and funk. "The reason I love them is that they can play the blues on top of all that knowledge," he says. By the mid-'70s, Santana had thrust himself into the jazz-fusion movement, collaborating with the likes of John McLaughlin and Jeff Beck.
His rock stardom waned. He routinely returned to pop projects, but they grew unfocused or overly formulaic, and sold poorly as a rule. Santana became a disciple of meditation guru Sri Chinmoy (leaving the fold in '82) and generally set himself up as a glowing high priest of rock guitar and world music.
As a recording artist, Santana stumbled badly in the '90s, although on tour he managed to draw solid crowds at medium-sized venues. By late in the decade, he found himself without a record label. That's when he signed with Clive Davis of Arista Records, a man known for building and resurrecting careers.
"A lot of people, when I went to Clive Davis, they said, 'Aren't you afraid, afraid to lose [artistic] control?'" Santana says. "Even Prince called me up. 'Aren't you afraid?'
'Look, man, Clive Davis just gave me about 10-15 menus to choose from. What is to be afraid of? That I might lose the 50 fans that I have and I might get 50 million? What are you, out of your mind?' We all trusted each other and everybody benefited from it [on Supernatural]. For me, it was the point of being grateful that Lauryn Hill, Rob Thomas, Dave Matthews, Wyclef went out of their way to write a song for me. I removed the fear and replaced it with gratitude, being mindful that they were doing me a favor."
In the decade hence, Santana has not duplicated the commercial success of Supernatural, although his subsequent studio albums, the double-platinum Shaman ('02) and All That I Am ('05), kept to the all-star format. He has remained a tireless performer who still draws good crowds to big venues on tours that never seem to end.
As a result, Santana has some money and clout to pursue his altruism. He made eyes roll recently when he appeared in a Macy's commercial with Mariah Carey, shilling for a line of women's shoes called Carlos by Carlos. But it's not what it looks like: The money raised from the many products that bear Santana's image and name go to his Milagro Foundation, which helps needy children around the world.
"[People] need to understand that I made a conscious decision that, even though I'm a hippie and would never be caught dead with certain people, it wasn't about Carlos," he says. "It was about all those children who need opportunities, possibilities to develop their own future, whether it's education, food or clothes. People contact us with requests for grants to help children. That's what [the funds] are for, totally."
But why women's footwear? (He's not involved in the design.)
"Santana, for some reason, is very connected to mothers, daughters, sisters, wives," he says, and then you can just about hear a mischievous smile creep onto his face. "It's important to make women happy, and nothing makes women happier than music and shoes."
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2008.