Stop the Week 28

As you may well know, Friday night is music night on BBC Four. Repeats have been doing the rounds, so there hasn’t been a lot on of late. But there was a fascinating documentary on Carlos Santana this Friday, followed by some in-concert footage.

Guitar heaven indeed

I hadn’t realised that Carlos’s dad was a musician in a Mariachi band and young Carlos first learned to play the violin – which perhaps partly explains the unique lachrymose sound he coaxed from his guitar as it took flight. Carlos stressed throughout the programme the need to ‘hold a melody’. His ability to do this and to hold individual notes without resorting to any fancy tremolo effects helped to transform the electric rock guitar into something supremely melodic. It’s surely no coincidence that he chose to cover ‘Black Magic Woman’, since Peter Green was probably his most lyrical British contemporary.

As a troubled teenager living in San Francisco (once the family had moved from Tijuana), Carlos used to go to a park where a blues/rock band, a Latin band and a Mariachi band would all be playing simultaneously. I might have found such a weird melange of styles a little perturbing, but it tripped a light bulb inside the young Santana’s head: this was the sound he wanted to create. And so the Santana Blues Band, or whatever they called themselves, was formed – and the rest, as they say, is history.

It’s a history, though, that has worn very well. Being a fan primarily of British ‘prog rock’ at the time, I somehow managed to miss Santana until the timeI swapped some Subbuteo players with a friend’s kid brother for his copy of Caravanserai. Being an acquisitive little collector even at that age, I promptly signed the inner sleeve ‘Mark Sampson from Ian Bamford 1974’. It’s been with me ever since. In fact, it’s one of the few vinyl albums I’ve duplicated in digital form – if only for the enhanced separation that the CD brings. Just to hear that magnificent percussion on tracks like ‘Every Step Of The Way’ coming at you in both ears!

Carlos was warned at the time of Caravanserai’s conception that the shift to a new jazzier plain represented commercial suicide. In the fashion of a restless creator, he apparently thought ‘Mmm, commercial suicide: that sounds interesting’. Like Frank Zappa with the Mothers of Invention, Santana pretty soon took over the band – which sounds suspiciously like a monstrous ego at work, until you reflect that, without the direction he imposed on it, Santana might have lasted no longer than his brother’s equally competent band, Malo. Because of their single-minded creative drive, both Frank and Carlos created a huge musical legacy to leave mankind. It makes you wonder really how come the Beatles managed to last as long as they did, driven by two such single-minded and sometimes antithetical creators as Lennon and McCartney.

However… the footage of Santana circa Woodstock, when the band dropped acid, expecting to come on much later in the day, and a concert replicating 1999’s Supernatural underlined what can happen along the way. Santana in its pomp was one hell of a band, with everyone playing in ferocious unison: from Greg Rollie’s integral beefy Hammond organ to Michael Shrieve’s relentless drums and, of course, Carlos’s sinuous guitar. But Carlos Santana plus special guests was as curiously unsatisfying as Supernatural itself. Great in parts, but overall rather wearisome. Although the great man, with his trademark curly locks tucked under a reversed trilby, could obviously still play his sunburst guitar, I was uncomfortably reminded of Liberace.

So these days, I go back to the early albums that I missed at the time and marvel at the way the band tackled numbers like Willie Bobo’s ‘Evil Ways’ and Tito Puente’s ‘Oye Como Va’ and, as the cliché goes, made them ‘their own’. And while I’ve long grown out of The Yes Album or Trespass or Pawn Hearts, Santana’s output from the same era still sounds as ‘fresh as the day your dentist fitted them’.

Otherwise, not many blips on the cultural radar screen during a week dominated by the visits of friends old enough to remember closing their eyes to let ‘Samba Pa Ti’ transport them to some far-off heavenly plain. However, I should mention the Australian ‘claymation’ film, Mary and Max, about two of life’s lonely outcasts who become the unlikeliest pair of pen-friends ever portrayed on a cinema screen. It’s a little gem that should by rights last as long as Caravanserai.