Santana: "Yours Is The Light" live 1973

By way of further comparison, here's a live rendition of "Yours Is The Light."  This was recorded on the 1973 Japan tour and included on the Lotus album.  Which is definitely a must-have album, both as a Santana document and as an objet d'art, if you can get hold of either the original Japanese vinyl or one of the deluxe CD editions that reproduces all the Yokoo Tadanori artwork. 

Flora didn't join the band on the tour, and maybe for that reason Carlos turns this number into a guitar showcase.  It's all guitar, all over, start to finish.  That's the case with most everything on this album, actually:  as retiring and team-oriented as Santana was in the studio during this period, on stage (if Lotus is fair evidence) Carlos was most definitely the center of attention.  On the live record this is accentuated by the mix, which puts Santana's guitar unbelievably far out in front, just dwarfing the rest of the band.  It doesn't help that the overall recording is pretty tinny, as if everything was overamplified in order to bring out some of the percussion and keyboard detail that would otherwise have been lost in the arenas they were playing.

It's a nice rendition, though:  the above makes it sound like I'm disliking it because Carlos has turned it into "just" a guitar showcase, but in fact it's a nice guitar showcase, with very tasteful playing.  But it's true that I think it's a lesser achievement than the perfectly-poised studio recording. 

Lotus does have its good points, though.  My favorite moments are two:  the opener, "A-1 Funk," and the later "Mantra."  (I can't find the latter to link to on youtube:  there's a studio version, but it's not as hot.)  Both reveal Santana doing some heavy-psychedelic brain-surgery guitar stuff that I've never heard on any of his studio albums.  There's an evilness (in a good way) that shows he was listening more receptively to all of Bitches Brew than Caravanserai and Welcome had suggested.

Santana, "Yours Is The Light" (1973)

Here's what I mean when I noted that Santana was holding back on "Stone Flower."  On the band's next album, Welcome, he included another bossa nova number, and here he cuts loose.

"Yours Is The Light" is an original by two members of the band, keyboardist Tom Kermode and drummer Mike Shrieve.  Maybe that let Santana feel he could approach the track with less reverence than he could one by the high priest of the new trend, or maybe it was just that, with "Stone Flower" under his belt, he felt more confident in working his own San Franciscan fire into the Brazilian waters.

Either way, the band is just as bossa-nova cool and airy as you could wish for on this track, with flutes, brushy percussion, and acoustic piano like the trickling of a sylvan spring, and with guest vocalist Flora Purim doing her trademark angel thing on top of it all.  But this time, when it all builds up to a guitar break, Santana actually takes one.  Rips off a beautiful solo, with all the passion he's known for. 

And it's perfectly in-context, too - note how, as singing as it gets, he frequently interrupts his sustain, shuts it all down, to observe the tricky syncopation of the rhythm section.  He's not shredding, he's dancing. 

But it's definitely cathartic - especially because this is the last track on the first side of the record, and the first time he really cuts loose on the whole album.  It's a band album (and a wonderful one), not a guitar-hero one.

Santana, "Stone Flower"

It's from Caravanserai, the 1972 album on which Santana switched gears drastically from highly-accessible Afro-Latin jam-rock to rather arcane Afro-Latin jazz-rock.  He lost a lot of his audience with this record, and the two in the same vein that followed it, and while I have a lot of love for Welcome and Borboletta, I've never quite warmed to Caravanserai.  I think it's because there are two or three too many atmospheric waves-of-sound tracks to wade through before you get to the rhythmical stuff.

But the rhythmical stuff is there, and some of it's amazing.  Take for example Santana's take on Tom Jobim's "Stone Flower."  Here's Jobim's version for comparison. 

What's apparent here is how hard Santana is trying not to rock this up.  He'd loosen up a bit on the following two albums, allowing his band to mix the new jazz aspirations with enough soul and pop indulgences to make the whole thing sound natural, but on this album it's apparent that Santana is trying very hard to be taken seriously as a jazzer, and is reining in any tendencies toward rock overkill.  Whether that's the right decision for the lp as a whole is where I'm undecided, but on "Stone Flower" it produces a wonderful sense of restraint, of abandon held carefully in check, that really makes the record.

Santana has a whole army playing on this track:  two guitarists, an acoustic bassist, organ, piano, Rhodes, not to mention vocals and a phalanx of percussionists, both rock and Latin.  It could easily have overwhelmed Jobim's fragile bossa melody, which often happens when big bands get their hands on his tunes.  That doesn't happen here:  everybody knows his or her place and plays in it, carefully, intricately, and with great deference to each other and the song. 

Listen to Mike Shrieve's characteristically busy, inventive drum work, and how subtly it submits to its role in the overall percussion framework of the track.  Listen to Tom Rutley's acoustic bass, how it leaps into almost a lead-instrument role here and there, and consider how many times you've heard that happen in a predominantly electric setting. 

But most of all check out Carlos's playing.  (Or is that Neal Schon?  I confess I have a hard time telling them apart when they're both on a track.  But I think this is Carlos.)  He's got a beautiful melodic line to himself, and he plays it with blood and sweat, but not too much.  Just when you think he's about to cut loose he drops out and the band goes into that little laughing break.  When Carlos comes back in he's back to that melodic line.  The emotional energy goes, not into some cathartic run, but into the bite with which he plays the notes he's given, and the organ-sounding distortion on his guitar (I don't know what precisely he's doing, but it comes out sounding a bit like when Clapton played through a Leslie.)

The result is a rich, lush, intricate sound that conveys a lot of energy without ever losing the cool.  Very nice.

Santana (1969) and associated tracks

It's amazing to me that the first Santana album was recorded mere months after replacing the percussion section.  Marcus Malone and Bob Livingston were out, and Mike Carabello, José Areas, and Mike Shrieve were in, and that made all the difference.  They locked with David Brown and the chassis was fixed:  the ride went from shaky to smooooooth.

And that first album, the first eponymous one.  It hardly even needs to be described, it's so ubiquitous.  It doesn't have quite the amount of ear-candy on it that Abraxas does, but if you've listened to the radio in the last forty-three years you've heard "Evil Ways," and probably "Persuasion."  It's all so familiar that it can be hard to appreciate what a daring and inventive thing it was, this Santana music.

They combined at least two strains of '60s jazz, the kind "played with Verve":  the Jimmy Smith organ-combo sound and the Willie Bobo late-Latin boogaloo sound.  Already that's a wicked blend;  to these they added an Albert King-style coruscating blues guitar, but it was playing trumpet lines as often as not.  All of that was then filtered through the San Francisco ballroom aesthetic:  jam, get weird, let the dancers work it out, amp up the colors in the emotions. 

That it all sounds so simple and obvious on the record is a tribute to how well the band knew their brief, but make no mistake, this is complex music.  The Santana musicians were probably, collectively, the best musicians on the whole scene.  I mean, Gregg Rolie should have been quaking in his boots to go up against Jimmy Smith, but he holds his own.  Mike Shrieve - Mike Shrieve was all of 20 when this record was made, but he sounds like a veteran.  Carabello and Chepito - they're the key to it all.  Most bands that have extra percussionists, they're just color;  these guys were the core.  Without them, there was no Santana.

And Carlos himself?  Well, he just basically invented his own style.  His attack, his phrasing, his very sound, though you could hear his influences, was just wholly and completely his own, and just bigger, more intense, more ballsy than anything else in town.  I really think that in '69 he was the only guitarist who could have stood on the same stage as Jimi and held his head up.  And of course Carlos would only get better from here (just wait 'til we get to 1972).

So, yeah, the first album is essential.  But which version to get?

Like the third album, it's gone through a few permutations.  In 1998 there was a single-disc remaster that added a modicum of extra tracks, from Woodstock.  This has been totally superseded, but that's the last easy decision there is to make.

In 2004 there was a two-disc reissue that looks, at first glance, like the shit.  It has two alternate takes and a studio jam from the album sessions;  it also has the first-draft sessions with the previous lineup (discussed here);  and it also has most - but, crucially, not quite all of the band's performance at Woodstock.  It's missing "Evil Ways," which the liner notes say was not performed at Woodstock, but which actually was.

In 2009, as part of the Woodstock 40th anniversary push, the complete - for reals this time - Woodstock set was released, but only as part of another 2-disc reissue of the debut album, as part of something called The Woodstock Experience.  Great, right?  Except that this edition removes all the other bonus tracks.

What's worth having?  As much Woodstock as possible, for one thing.  It's true, their performance of "Evil Ways" is pretty tentative - it's the weak spot in their set, for sure.  But come on, this is immortal stuff, history in the making - seldom has a single show done so much for an act.

On the other hand, some of the studio outtakes on the 2004 edition are eminently worth hearing.  The "Studio Jam" is my favorite:  it's an up-tempo number with Rolie on acoustic piano, kind of like seven minutes of the middle section of "Treat."  Which itself is a highlight of the album, so.

Basically, you have to get both editions.  But even then you're not, because the best single track associated with Santana '69 is the version of "Soul Sacrifice" that shows up on the original Woodstock album.  Not any of the subsequent box sets, but the original Music From The Original Soundtrack And More triple-lp, or straight CD reissues thereof.  It's edited down - 8 minutes as opposed to 11 in the complete version.  And it's spliced together with rainstorm sounds and the "Crowd Rain Chant".  This is a lie - the rains and Santana fell on different days.  But it's one of those lies that reveals a greater truth.  This is the essence of what Santana were up to in 1969:  earth, sky, water, flesh, sinew, bone, voice, and sound, all the primal elements in a tribal moment of celebratory, worshipful frenzy that somehow resolves itself into music.  It's this version of "Soul Sacrifice" that is the cornerstone of even the most modest Santana collection.

Santana (1971)

Santana's third album, like their first, was called simply Santana. As a practical matter, people called it Santana III, and this nickname was formalized with the 2006 reissue, which had Santana III printed on the spine (the 1998 reissue had Santana III printed on a sticker pasted onto the jewel case, but not on the spine). It's a practical move, but it obscures what the repeated eponymity was presumably meant to emphasize: that this was the debut of a new band, just like the first Santana had been.

That's hard to recognize now, because the personnel changes that came after Santana III were so much more drastic than those that came before it, and particularly because they were accompanied by musical changes, which wasn't the case with Santana III. In other words, while this album can claim to be the first by the New Santana Band, it's musically much more appropriate to hear it as the last album by the Woodstock-era Santana band. Which is how it's generally thought of.

The new. For the 1971 album the lineup was augmented by a second guitarist, teenage phenom Neal Schon. This was the age of dual-lead-guitar lineups - Derek & the Dominoes and the Allman Brothers were the obvious precedents here. But Neal wasn't the only addition. Timbalero José Chepito Areas had temporarily left the band due to a brain aneurysm; he recovered in time to play on the album, but in his absence* the band had already recruited a new third percussionist, Coke Escovedo. On the album he's just listed as a session player, but by all accounts he was a member of the band (giving them, count 'em, four percussionists: Escovedo, Areas, Mike Carabello, and Michael Shrieve). (And dig this: Coke's niece is Sheila E., and his brother Alejandro played with Rank and File.)

Add to that significant guest shots by Luis Gasca and the Tower of Power horn section, and you have a significantly expanded Santana on display here. It's most obvious in the expanded instrumental palette. The greasy R&B muscle of "Everybody's Everything" was not what you would have expected from Santana, but once you wrap your head around it, it really works, due as much to the horns as to the explosive guitar work - which is Schon's, not Carlos's.

(That's the one disconcerting thing about the expanded lineup. It's very easy not to notice the difference between Neal's and Carlos's playing. They're using very similar guitar tones (Neal's is a little fuzzier), and Neal is playing very much in Carlos's style, so it can be maddening to try to tell them apart. Listening to live work from the period (see below), it's apparent that they're really not that similar - Carlos has a lot more soul, for lack of a better word, while Neal has more aggression - but on the album they're pretty close.)

The album didn't really have the hits the first two did. Supposedly "No One To Depend On" went Top 20, but you never hear it today. "Everybody's Everything" and "Everything's Coming Our Way" were on the band's first greatest-hits album, the one with the iconic dove cover, but they're so untypical of the band's sound that they didn't make me, for one, curious to hear the album.

All three of those almost-hits are great songs, though. "Everything's Coming Our Way" is shockingly light and poppy at first, but notice how careful the dynamics are, how solid the percussion underpinnings are - it's positively graceful, considering how much energy it contains. "No One To Depend On," meanwhile, is a worthy if neglected successor to "Evil Ways" and "Black Magic Woman" - it's mostly copped from Willie Bobo's "Spanish Grease" (and what little they didn't use in the one song they put into their own "Guajira") but with Santana's by-then-trademark acid-blues sensibility to transform it. It's that sensibility that's still intact on this album, and that would change radically immediately thereafter; that's what makes this the last of a trilogy.

And what a final statement. Finally a studio version of "Toussaint L'Overture," which was in their repertoire long before Neal Schon joined, and which stands as one of their definitive moments. From that samba-battery opening to Carlos's furious opening statement to the way Gregg Rolie's organ interlocks so beautifully with the multiple percussionists. This is the original Santana getting right down to the heart of the matter, the blood and bone of liberation.

That all applies to the album as originally released in 1971. It's been reissued in two different formats since. In 1998 it was remastered and reissued with slightly jejune liner notes by Ben Fong-Torres, and three live tracks from 7/4/71 at the Fillmore West, the fabled Closing of the Fillmore. What the liner notes didn't mention was that two other tracks from that show had been released on Fillmore - The Last Days way back when, and that those weren't included here. It was typical Sony miserliness.

This was rectified in 2006 when they came out with a two-disc reissue. The second disc contained the full (at least that's what they say) 7/4/71 show. This is worth getting even if you already have the 1998 reissue (raises hand). Partly because it's a great show, and includes a very interesting and evidently unique take on Miles Davis's "In A Silent Way," pointing straight at where Santana would head in 1972. And partly because the live recording, unlike the album, keeps Neal consistently in the left channel and Carlos in the right, allowing you to compare their styles.

The 2006 also includes three studio outtakes: "Gumbo," an instrumental very similar to "Jungle Strut" and "Toussaint L'Overture" and a couple of others that made the album (it's also on the live disc); "Folsom Street - One," a one-off studio jam, bluesy and seductive; and "Banbeye," a long percussion-and-chanting number with a little guitar at the very end. It sounds like they might have been planning to add more later, or maybe they were trying to keep it sparse and hypnotic. It has some nice flute, which the reissue fails to credit - kind of like they failed to credit Marcus Malone for existing on the reissue of the first album.

That kind of shoddiness marks all of Sony's treatments of Santana's back catalogue, as far as I can tell. The '98 reissues were decent, but no more, with fairly elementary liner notes and the bare minimum of bonus tracks. The 2006 reissue of III, meanwhile, gets all the tracks right, but includes truly atrocious liner notes by Jim McCarthy, whose prose suffers from the verbal equivalent of roid rage. Most of his sentences simply don't make sense. Like, he has "their inspired music standing the test of time by remaining timeless." Yeah.

*After losing Areas, but before gaining Escovedo, they had none other than Willie Bobo himself (responsible for their first hit, "Evil Ways") sit in on timbales. Watch here. They really ought to have given him a writing credit on "No One To Depend On."

Very early Santana

Santana is a band, not a man, or so goes the theory: in practice, most of Carlos Santana's solo work is pretty indistinguishable from his eponymous band's output, but it is true that his music is always more than just him and some sidemen. And if only because he doesn't sing, Carlos doesn't tend to dominate his bands the way, say, Clapton does his. Santana, when billed as such, is a band.

Of course for most of us there's only one Santana band, the first one. The one that gave us the only three Santana albums that matter*: Santana, Abraxas, and Santana III. The Santana that slew everybody at Woodstock.

But it turns out that this wasn't the first Santana band. It was the second. The first one consisted of Carlos on guitar, Gregg Rolie on keyboards and vocals, David Brown on bass, Marcus Malone on congas, and Bob "Doc" Livingston on drums. The first three, of course, were the instrumental core of the Woodstock-era band, but the two percussions were replaced for the first album.

Is this ur-Santana worth checking out? Surprisingly enough, it is. Where can you check it out? Three places.

First you'll want to track down the 1988 compilation Viva Santana! Hokey name, but worth getting if you're a Santana collector, because it has a ton of rarities. The one that concerns us here is "Ballin'," a demo recorded in late 1967 by this original lineup. A demo, it's called, but it was clearly professionally recorded, and it shows, in six and half minutes of instrumental fire, the musical conception of the classic Santana band already fully-formed. Hot crying guitar, cool caressing Hammond organ, seductive multi-percussionist rhythms. If this is the earliest Santana available, it's a magnificent overture for the man's career.

You'll also want to get the 2004 reissue of the eponymous debut album, the two-disc "Legacy Edition." This is a problematic release; it claimed to include, among its goodies, the complete Woodstock set, but in fact it's missing one song - which later came out on a two-disc set that includes the first album, the complete Woodstock set (for reals this time), but not the other bonus tracks from the Legacy Edition. Typical Sony/Columbia chain-jerking. Anyway, among those bonus tracks are six studio recordings from early 1969 that constitute the band's first attempt at recording their debut album. And although the liner notes to this edition very ungraciously fail to name-check Malone and Livingston, they are in fact the percussionists on these sessions.

Now, these tracks - early drafts of "Soul Sacrifice," "Persuasion," "Treat," "Shades Of Time," and "Jingo," plus a studio take of "Fried Neckbones And Some Home Fries" - are mostly disappointing, just like you'll read in any number of discussions of the classic album. They really are unfocused, slightly dead-sounding jams; particularly disappointing after the excitement of "Ballin'." I'm not sure I can even recommend checking them out, although "Shades Of Time" is interesting because it's not on the live album, so this is the only way to (legitly) check out the early stage in this song's evolution. ...It's worth noting that the liner notes to the live album (see below) mention that the first album was originally going to be called Freeway Jam, after a song by that name recorded during the sessions. But it's not here (although it shows up on the live disc). The notes to the Legacy Edition say this is the complete unreleased album, but is it? Or are we going to get yet another reissue someday with "Freeway" on it? This is Columbia/Sony: of course we are.

The live album. In 1997 Sony, who can do some things almost right, released a two-disc live document called Live At The Fillmore 1968, which features the original lineup. Drawn from shows at the Fillmore West on December 19, 20, 21, and 22, 1968, it was an odd move, coming at a time when the classic Woodstock lineup still hadn't been featured on a full-length live album. But never mind: we're glad we have it. And while we're never minding, let's try to forget about the fact that each disc in the set is under an hour long, while bootlegs from the era suggest that the band had more songs in their repertoire than are represented on this release. We're still glad we have it.

Because it's fantastic music. Carlos, Rolie, and the underappreciated Brown are just tearing it up on these nights, while Malone and Livingston hold their own: they're not Shrieve, Carabello, and Areas, but they hold their own.

The set includes four of the tunes that would eventually make up the first album. "Jingo" and "Soul Sacrifice" are pleasant, but definitely pale in comparison with what they'd become. "Persuasion" has yet to be tightened up into a by-gum-that's-a-pop-song; here it starts out with a shaggy fusion vamp before settling into the song portion. You can see why they stripped it down for the final version, but you can also tell that the earlier arrangement was more fun to play live, and maybe even to hear live. Lots of nuance and drama to this arrangement. But the prize of the familiar numbers is "Treat," stretched out to twice its album length here. Still follows the same basic pattern, but Rolie's piano work benefits from the room to stretch out. This is the Santana band as classic jazzers, a role they pull off with astonishing conviction. They had the goods.

The balance of the album consists of numbers that would never show up on an official album. The Willie Bobo number "Fried Neckbones," Chico Hamilton's "Conquistadore Rides Again," and Albert King's "As The Years Go Passing By," plus the originals "Chunk A Funk" and "Freeway."

Quite simply, these should have been the band's first album, and Santana the second. "Fried Neckbones" and "Conquistadore" are as funky and catchy as anything the classic band ever did, with that confident, at-home looseness that only the Fillmore could breed. "As The Years Go Passing By" is maybe the most assured blues performance to come out of San Francisco that year, and is a welcome representation of the straight-blues side of the band, a side that was fully assimilated into the Latin melange by the time the first album was recorded, but which in the beginning was raw enough that they called themselves the Santana Blues Band.

"Freeway," meanwhile, is...I'd love to hear a studio version of this someday. Live, it's a half hour long, and it almost justifies its length: it's their "Who Do You Love," their "Dark Star," their "Bear Melt": lots of solos all around. I don't mind this kind of thing, obviously; there are some who think this kind of thing was self-indulgent, but (a) what's the point of rock if you're not going to indulge, and (b) you have to understand that these jams were meant for dancing, and as a dancer as well as a musician, when you're in the groove, you don't want it to end, and the whole point of the SF scene was to ask, well, why should it have to end? "Freeway" has a great riffy first seven or eight minutes, before all the solos start, and that's why I'd love to hear a proper studio version: what did they consider the essential part of the song? Live, a lot of it is taken up by a percussion duet, and it's here that the inferiority of the Malone/Livingston battery to the Shrieve/Carabello/Areas team becomes glaringly apparent. But in the last six or so minutes the rest of the band comes back in, and all is forgiven.

An essential listen, made all the more so by the fact that it documents a band that is otherwise all but lost to history.

*For the record, I don't buy this line. I think Caravanserai is interesting, and Welcome and Borboletta are damn near essential albums. I haven't gone beyond them yet.