CARLOS SANTANA likes five things in his
music: soul, heart, mind, body and cojones.
On his new album Brothers, written and
recorded with his brother Jorge Santana
and his nephew Carlos Hernandez, Santana
lets it sing with powerful and luminous
melodies that ring with his trademark wail.
Hanging out at his practice pad in San Rafael,
California, Santana explained how a good
note can really drive it home. -Brian Brannon
How does music convey such emotion?
It's all about getting the right tone. The tone
is the key to opening people's hearts. Even
rednecks, man, when a certain note hits them,
even their mind cannot deny it, because it goes
all the way to their souls, and they can't justify
their ignorance. The tone is the key to people's
hearts. That's just what it is.
How do you feel at this point in your life?
I'm just really grateful, man, that I'm forty-
eight years old, forty-seven, whatever, and I
feel like a kid who senses that I have a lot of
passion to wake up tomorrow morning, and I'm
drooling. I guess you'd call it spiritually horny
for music, and it's okay to be that. It's bad
when you're flat, spiritually or horny flat. When
there's no passion, when there's no momen-
tum, you should just find something else. But
for me, I'm grateful for this house, my children,
my wife, all of it, but I'm grateful that I still
have that passion to get to the next note and
get chills and give chills. Because that's what's
important. All the people that I ever hung out
with, from Bill Graham to Miles Davis and John
Lee Hooker, I have never seen those guys
bored. They're always looking
at life, whether it's nice
legs or whatever,
or the moon
or the stars or clouds, but they're always look-
ing with the same passion, and I think that
that's what we have to guard that we don't
lose. Because once you lose that, man, you
can't buy it with money. You won't be able to
arouse yourself anymore. Once your mind con
vinces you that you've seen it and done it all,
shit, you should just die then. There's nothing
else left. The passion that I have besides music,
with Thrasher or whatever, is to let the young
people know: Don't be fooled by the system.
Look at things from your heart, and that way
they won't fool you. They won't give you that
superiority or inferiority complex. That way,
everywhere you go, you won't be wrong, and
you don't have to change your walk, and you
have peace. I can go to anywhere in Africa and
I know the people are going to share whatever
they have to eat with me because I'm not a
tourist in Africa. People trust my heart's con-
tention and they know what I'm about. I hope
that the younger people today won't be pro-
grammed to go to Vietnam or Iran anymore to
fight for a so-called Uncle Sam, you know what
I'm saying? And that's real important for
Thrasher. We can talk about shoes, or we can
talk about tutti-frutti and this and that, but this
is what's important, to empower the young
people who have all this, because it comes
down to energy and how to balance it.
I was noticing that the name of your record
company, Guts and Grace, embodies the
same things a skater appreciates in good
skateboarding, somebody that can do some-
thing really crazy, but still do it gracefully.
Yeah, there's a certain peace in being crazy..
When you're crazy, you have more latitude.
Just looking at Thrasher, I can see that
these cats, they're not conventional
kids, they don't want to go with the
same mold, the same cookie cutter.
They want to get their own personality and
whatever it takes, whether it's skating or what-
ever. The most beautiful thing that the Creator
gave all of us is uniqueness and individuality.
And I know that this magazine probably caters
to a lot of young folks, and young folks are
very raw. When you get older, you get more
refined. Hopefully, you won't lose your raw-
ness, you'll just refine your rawness, you'll still
keep your rawness like John Lee Hooker. You
lose it when you go to the army and you just
start saying, "No, sir," and "Yes, sir." I don't
take authority from just anybody. You have to
convince me to my soul that this is what I need
to be doing. I always question a lot of people,
even my mom, and I used to get in trouble a
lot. I still get in trouble. But now I'm paying for
it because my kids ask me the same things. But
it's okay. There's something beautiful about
standing up for what you believe in and not
just accepting the truth from somebody else
giving it to you. I took my mom to London one
time, and I took her to King's Road where they
had a lot of guys with big ol' platform shoes
and the big mohawks and spikes, and my mom
was really cool. She said, "You know, those
guys, I really admire them." I go, "You do,
mom?" She goes, "Yeah, because not one of
them has the same hairstyle or the same color,
they're all unique." And I looked at her and
said, "Wow, I'm really surprised with you,
mom. But she was right, and I never looked
at that. To me, they were just a whole bunch
of punks trying to make a statement or get
even with their parents or whatever the hell
they were trying to do. But what she picked up
on, it was really valid. She said, "Each one, if
you look at them, has their own thing happen-
ing." The tattoos or the rings in their noses,
not one had the same style for hair, and that
made me respect them even more.
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Santana