Showing posts with label Carlos Santana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carlos Santana. Show all posts

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Carlos Santana / This much I know / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’


Carlos Santana.
Photograph by Christopher Patey

Carlos Santana: ‘You can get high on what’s within you’


This much I know

The musician, 68, on Woodstock, being discriminated against at school and making people cry with one note


Ed Vulliamy
Saturday 16 July 2016 14.00 BST
Music is in my blood. My father was a mariachi musician. He played the old Tijuana sound. I started learning the violin when I was five and when we moved to Tijuana from Jalisco, I started listening to be-bop, rock’n’roll, T-Bone Walker, BB King and John Lee Hooker. Their music was an education for me.
After Woodstock, there was no turning back. I guess something happened in my head while I was in Tijuana because when I moved to California, it all fused together. After feeling discriminated against at high school, I had a flowering of creativity in San Francisco. I drew on my Latino roots, plus the roots of all the other music: the soul and jazz, the blues and funk.
You don’t need drugs to get high. Drugs are a distraction, an excuse. You can get high on what’s within you. However, LSD – and I’m not promoting it – when under the right supervision, can help you claim your light, in a tangible way.
I grew up in a poor area, with a lot of people telling me I was unworthy. But I had my dad, who was charismatic and everyone respected, and I grew up like my mother, questioning everything: “Why am I a sinner? What did I do wrong?” I don’t buy into all this judgment, guilt and fear. That’s not God, it’s Godzilla.
God is in everything and everything is potentially divine. I’m not talking about the specific God from the Bible but the universal spirituality. Look at the cherry blossom on the trees in Washington in the spring – when they are out, they are beautiful, they know how divine they are, and they please the divinity.
Reuniting with the original Santana band has been a joy. We went our separate ways in 1972, and it’s been such a long adventure since then. We know each other like we know ourselves, and each brings what they have learned to the table. You can hear all our different inspirations: Latino, soul, funk, blues… but you can also hear how much we’ve grown.
Music cuts right into your subconscious, it speaks right past your head and into your soul. It sublimates the whole process of communication like no other language. Why is it that you can play one note, and it can make people cry? I find it hard to talk about, but it’s the level I live on.
My mother knew how to pull God’s coat tails and get what she wanted. She didn’t do it for herself, she did it for the family. We didn’t get lost, we didn’t go to jail or get into any kind of trouble. We just learned to ask the right questions and be who we are.
It’s always been about conveying a feeling through the guitar. BB King told me before he died, “You have to keep playing, Carlos, you have to keep the flame alight.’”
Carlos Santana’s latest album, Santana IV, is out now


THIS MUCH I KNOW
Carlos Santana  / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’
Tom Jones  / I might have become a miner like my father 
Tom Jones / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’


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Sunday, April 11, 2004

Carlos Santana / This much I know / War is not the answer


Carlos Santana
Carlos Santana
"War is not the answer"

This much I know

Carlos Santana, musician, 56, San Francisco

Sanjiv Bhattacharya
Sunday 11 April 2004 02.08 BST
When you're late, traffic slows down. When you're early, everything speeds up.
Everybody's an artist, whether you plant potatoes or wash dishes or write poetry. An artist is someone who complements life, it's not just Picasso. Your family is a work of art. Your children are a masterpiece.
Ninety-nine per cent of life is God's grace and one per cent is personal effort. It's stupid to say, 'I Did It My Way.' Can you imagine dying and going to heaven and singing that song? The angels would leave you belly up.
If you have ever dipped yourself into a bath where the water's so perfect, you don't even feel hot or cold, it's perfect - that's what seeing angels is like. Then a voice tells you, 'Get paper and a pencil and write this thing down!' You get instructions: 'Be gracious, patient and grateful.'
I've been lucky to work with many shamans in my time: Wayne Shorter, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Jimi Hendrix, and many women, too. Who stands out? John Lee Hooker was very deep, very powerful. Raw like an egg. No phoniness at all.
Death isn't the end, it's like another classroom. You finish one semester and you move on. What did you learn back there? Did you utilise your energy to complement life or take away from life?
You are individually accountable for what you think, say and do. We can't always blame white people or governments or religion.
You are responsible for what you attract in your life. If you're a good person, things come to you.
At the time of Supernatural, I did a lot of interviews about the killings in schools like Columbine. The last one was in Santana High School. There hasn't been a massacre since. To me, that's not a coincidence.

Carlos Santana

You can't make love if you're on the phone; you've got to hang up. That's the way music should be made.
When I play a solo on my guitar on stage, I close my eyes and I feel like I'm a baby in the womb.
The old way of thinking is 'seeing is believing'. The new way is 'believing is seeing'. And that's how we're going to change the world - with faith. It's going to take 25 years of earth time to change the world to the new millennium, where peace, light, love, joy, beauty, elegance, excellence, grace, dignity, innocence and purity is the new law.
You should think with your heart, man, not your mind or your pee pee.
I wash my thoughts in light. I chant 'Om', 'I am that I am' or 'nam myoho renge kyo'. It don't matter what kind of soap you use, but use some soap!
Not all hippies are dirty and lazy and want free love and drugs. Some are reincarnated American Indians - rainbow warriors - and they have a big agenda, like Desmond Tutu. We want to make a new bridge like the Golden Gate that the whole world can cross and on the other side there's peace on earth. That's not Peter Pan, man, that's real. And we're doing it day and day.

 The Sixties did make a difference. We stopped Vietnam, we exposed Nixon, the Berlin Wall is down, Mandela is free and we have more 'Stop' signs in the street so children don't get killed.

It wasn't Ronald Reagan that brought the Berlin Wall down, it was Bob Marley. Reagan just took the credit. I mean this literally. Marley did a European tour in 1978 or 1979 and everywhere he went he drew about 70,000 people with no help from the press or radio or TV. Santana drew maybe 12,000, Led Zeppelin, 30,000, but Bob Marley, with no publicity at all - 70,000 strong. So that's why the Wall came down. The East Germans wanted to see Bob Marley.
Most of the time the government has the media in its pocket, and there's a lot of people in the press who are afraid to be unpopular. So the press takes things out in the editing room and gives you powdered milk. There's too much powdered milk, man, but where's the water and where's the real cow?
There is a one-world government right now: a government behind the government. Presidents don't have any power. When a president wants power, like Kennedy, they shoot him. George Bush doesn't even have the intelligence to read what they write for him.
Bush is not the solution. War is not the answer. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.
I'm not alone. There's a lot of beautiful people.



THIS MUCH I KNOW
Richard Dreyfuss / ‘When I die I want the chance to hit God in the face’ 
Miriam Margolyes / ‘I adore being Jewish but I’m not a believer in God’
Carlos Santana /  ‘War is not the answer’
Carlos Santana  / ‘You can get high on what’s within you’
Georgia May Jagger / ‘With modelling, sometimes you’re punky, other times girly and sweet’
Tom Jones  / I might have become a miner like my father 
Tom Jones / ‘Fame allows you to release things that were already in you. It’s like drink in that respect’





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