Santana

A Reflection on Resilience

This young San Francisco band had not released an album. Their manager, the impresario Bill Graham, thought they should be exposed to a larger audience than he could afford them at his Fillmore West auditorium. Graham put them on the bill at Woodstock in exchange for his agreeing to promote the event. The rest, as they say, is history. After the concert documentary movie was released a year later, Santana became superstars based on a single song performance captured beautifully in full daylight.

The song was “Soul Sacrifice,” an instrumental performed at high velocity by an ethnically mixed group of young men, in lockstep. Led by Carlos Santana on lead guitar, he was supported by a wall of percussion provided by Michael Shrieve (twenty years old at the time), José “Chepito” Areas, and Michael Carabello. The song would appear on their debut album, Santana, released just weeks after their August 1969 performance at Woodstock. Rounding out the band were keyboardist Gregg Rolie and bassist David Brown.

I couldn’t get enough of this band. I probably attended the documentary 3 or 4 times just to see their performance of “Soul Sacrifice” (and Sly, of course). I drove my friends crazy begging them to join me at the movie again and again.

Then, once more, timing became Santana’s friend. In April 1970, just when the Woodstock movie was released to theaters, the band entered the studio to record their second album, Abraxas. It was released in September that year, just after kids like me had binged on the movie that summer. Their single, “Black Magic Woman,” a cover of an early Fleetwood Mac song penned by Peter Green, drove the album to #1 on the US Billboard 200.

The band was young and instantly successful. Their blend of Latin rhythms, soulful vocals, and soaring guitar leads was refreshingly new and different at the time. Recently on XM’s Deep Tracks, former Rolling Stone writer David Fricke interviewed Carlos Santana. He talked about the vision behind their debut follow-up: “Abraxas is about life and reproduction… sex is a gift from god for procreation.” While recording the album, Carlos was reading the book ‘Demian’ by Herman Hesse. He was taken by one passage: “We questioned the painting, berated it, made love to it, prayed to it: We called it mother, called it whore and slut, called it our beloved, called it Abraxas….” He now had the album’s name, but what about the cover art? Santana then came across the painting ‘Annunciation’ by Abdul Mati Klarwein (from 1961 – an artist inspired by Salvador Dali’s work) in an art magazine. He instantly knew that this would be the cover.

Like many rock bands of the late 60s and early 70s, early success would be their undoing. Santana III would be released one year after Abraxas, more highly produced, but created amid band member infighting and the firing of their manager, Bill Graham.

By 1972, with three successful albums under their belts since their appearance at Woodstock, they went into the studio with a new idea. Carlos has cited many influences over the years – Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, and Miles Davis, among others. Santana’s fourth album would be influenced by the jazz fusion of Davis and John Coltrane, with the percussive sensibilities of Tito Puente. Carlos and Drummer Shrieve were instrumental in its creation. But it ushered in the breakup of the original lineup. Caravanserai was such a radical departure for Santana that their record company told them it was “career suicide” to release it. (For a deeper dive into Caravanserai, check out my Substack on its 50^th anniversary)

Since those early heady days of the 70s, Carlos Santana has continued to reinvent himself. With a revolving group of musicians to support him, he has released 29 albums, including his latest release, Sentient, in 2025. They have been prolific enough to get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Often, when musicians are inducted into the Hall, they are no longer relevant. But just one year following Santana’s induction in 1998, they released Supernatural. It was their first number one album since Santana III. (Guinness claims it’s the longest gap ever between #1 records). On the strength of the single, “Smooth,” Supernatural won 8 Grammy awards, including Album of the Year.

The story behind Supernatural began in 1991 when Santana’s record deal with Columbia came to an end. While shopping for a new label, Carlos felt most record companies considered him too old. Around this time, Carlos participated in a documentary about Clive Davis, who originally signed him to Columbia (the same man who called Caravanserai “career suicide”). Carlos’s wife thought he should approach his old boss, who now ran Arista Records. Davis was receptive and offered him a record deal if he could have some creative input. Carlos agreed, and the unique mix of the traditional Santana sound, along with superstar collaborations like Rob Thomas on “Smooth,” made the album a huge success. But it was a slow takeoff, as Davis recalled: “There’s something unique about this. It’s affecting millions of people in this country. It’s broken all kinds of barriers. The record has word-of-mouth and critical acclaim, not at the expense of emotional or commercial impact. On every level, it’s special and unique.”

In Fricke’s recent interview with Carlos, following the release of Sentient, he was asked about collaborating with his wife, drummer Cindy Blackman. He called her the perfect mix of “dedication, devotion, determination, and diet.”

The definition of sentient is “having sense perception; conscious.” Carlos calls it an invitation to life: “If you stay in your heart, you will always be inspired, and if you are inspired, you will always be enthusiastic. There is nothing more contagious on this planet as enthusiasm.”

At the age of 78, Carlos will bring his inspiration and enthusiasm to a residency at the House of Blues in Las Vegas in 2026.

References:

https://poppodiumboerderij.nl/en/nieuws/verhaal-achter-de-platenhoes-abraxis-1970-santana/

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1467051220781648

https://www.azquotes.com/author/12974-Carlos_Santana

https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Supernatural-Power-Santana-s-collaborative-2896470.php

Sirius XM Interview with David Fricke