Duets with Flashes-in-the-Pan
[Part 3 of 4]
As he tells it, Santana’s rise back to the top of the pop music charts was fueled by a very human desire. After signing with Arista records in 1997 and being reunited with his friend and producer Clive Davis, he complained: “I’ve got three kids at home and they want to know why they never hear me on the radio.” Santana’s desire for popularity was fueled by more than just greed or vanity, however; he believed that Supernatural was in fact part of a larger spiritual movement to restore unity to a planet whose people had fallen badly out of sympathy with one another. Santana was visited in his dreams by an angel named Metatron, who counseled him, “We’re gonna help you get back into the ring, because we want you to utilize your sound and vibration and resonance to hook up with a lot of new people.” Certainly that prophecy was played out with Supernatural to a degree no one could have imagined.
A return to the radio, however, was something that Santana himself couldn’t engineer. He had never been known for his abilities as a songwriter; his early hits, like “Black Magic Woman,” “She’s Not There,” and “Oye Como Va,” were all penned by others. Clive Davis hit on the idea of assembling an album comprised of half “old-school” Santana tunes, with the same vibe as “Samba Pa Ti” and other early standards, and half new tunes, written and sung by some of most popular singer-songwriters of the nineties who had expressed admiration for Santana. The album’s collaborative tracks—”Smooth” (with Rob Thomas of Matchbox 20), “Maria Maria” (featuring Wyclef Jean—the next President of Haiti?!), “Do You Like the Way”(with Lauryn Hill and Cee-Lo), “Wishing It Was” (with Eagle-Eye Cherry), “Love of My Life” (with Dave Matthews), and “Put Your Lights On” (with Everlast, formerly frontman for House of Pain)—are all finely crafted pop songs, and each enjoyed a good deal of radio airplay. It’s a marketing strategy for late-career artists which was, strange to say, pioneered by Frank Sinatra, in his 1993 album Duets: that record, which pairs the solitary recorded vocal tracks of the Chairman of the Board with those of younger singers like Gloria Estefan, Anita Baker, and Carly Simon, began to forge a new generation of fans for Ol’ Blue Eyes, even though Sinatra had never met many of his duet partners (like U2′s Bono, who recorded his part in Dublin and mailed it in).
Unlike Sinatra, Santana did in fact spend time in the studio with all of his younger collaborators, and their reports of the experience are uniformly glowing. Supernatural helped to solidify Santana’s reputation with a younger generation of musicians, and with a new generation of fans, as well; indeed, he would seem to be the beneficiary of a quite new rock phenomenon: the baby boomers are now parents of teenagers themselves, and both parents and children are together screaming at his concerts. Almost like a Dylan show.
A decade on, it’s striking how many of those “hot” names with which Santana sought to align himself have fallen off the radar screen. While Santana’s still there.
