That’s Me in the Corner–Not the Spotlight
[Part 2 of 4]
The name “Santana” points always in two directions: both to the band originally called the Santana Blues Band (shortened to Santana by the release of their first album), as well as the band’s founder and lead guitarist. The ambivalence captured in that name—is Santana a band or a man?—registers something rather unique about the band’s early configuration, poised between ensemble writing and playing on the one hand and virtuoso performance on the other, which was the source of a palpable energy in the bands records and especially in their live performances, but also of great tension between members of the band, and great confusion to their fans. The late sixties and early seventies was a time of flamboyant lead performers and supergroups: Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison of the Doors symbolizing the former, and bands like Cream and Led Zeppelin, the latter. Santana, the band, was neither: Carlos was clearly the virtuoso player of the group, but it was a group which really did, at least for its first three albums, function as a tightly integrated whole, and Carlos Santana was uncomfortable being thrust into the spotlight as the band’s obligatory “guitar god” (though not, perhaps, quite as uncomfortable as his bandmates). Santana was for many years a victim of his own success—lionized as a guitar god, a high priest in “the church of the sonic guitar.” Think, if you’re able, of Eric Clapton walking down the aisle in the Church of Marilyn in Ken Russell’s campy film version of the Who’s Tommy.In a storyline made familiar by VH1′s “Behind the Music” docu-dramas, internal squabbles broke up the band, and while Carlos Santana continued to make music that interested and impressed the critics, he lost the large popular following his first band had enjoyed, and lost, as well, any easily marketable musical identity. With the death of Jimi Hendrix in 1970, the rock world was ripe for a new guitar hero (a hunger memorialized in David Bowie’s 1973 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars); given both a technical virtuosity and an “ethnic” identity akin to Hendrix’s (born in the small village of Autlán de Navarro, Mexico, Santana didn’t move to the United States until he was 16), the crown should have been Santana’s for the taking.
But he didn’t take it: instead, he pulled back from the spotlight, as indeed Hendrix had hoped to do, choosing to make music that interested and challenged him, and collaborating with artists whom he admired. This retreat from the limelight coincided, to a large degree, with a personal spiritual journey, which took him from the Catholicism of his birth family through the Buddhism of guru Sri Chimnoy, through a flirtation with Judaism, into a kind of New Age-inflected Christianity. Santana is, finally, a profoundly spiritual man who hews to no formal creed: he is as eclectic in spiritual matters as he is in musical ones. And much though we profess to admire such eclecticism, in the marketplace of contemporary popular music (unlike the marketplace of self-help books and motivational tapes), it doesn’t tend to sell. Meanwhile, those looking for a new guitar hero to worship turned elsewhere: to the fleet fingers of heavy-metal players like Jimmy Page and, later, epigones like Eddie Van Halen; to propulsive rhythmic playing of jazz fusion guitarists like Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, and Paco DeLuca; in the eighties, to the soaring lines of alternative and college-rock guitarists like the Edge (U2) and Johnny Marr (the Smiths); and, throughout the decades, to Clapton, always to Clapton. Santana seemed, for the time, happy enough out of the public eye.
