by John Glatt
From early childhood, José groomed Carlos to carry on the Santana family’s long musical tradition.
“He was eight when I started teaching him [violin],” recalled José, “and we both used to sit down and study together.”
Carlos grew up in Autlán de Novarro, a tiny mountainous town between Puerto Vallarta and Guadalajara. It was a throwback to the past, with donkeys and chickens running wild on dirt tracks. The houses were made of stone and dried mud, and there was no electricity or running water.
One of Carlos’s earliest memories is making little paper boats during the rainy season, and then sailing them down the flooded main street.
Carlos and his six siblings grew up in a mud-brick house with music everywhere.
“My father supported [us] with his music,” said Carlos. “There’s something about Mexican families; they’re big and they don’t have any TVs or stuff in the countryside. So music was a big diversion.”
From early childhood, Carlos always felt a special connection to his father, who would take him on the back of his bicycle to watch his performances in church.
“My father infected me with the virus of music,” said Carlos. “I saw how the people were looking at him. All I ever wanted was to be adored the way people adored my father in this little town.”
José was often away traveling with his orchestra, and little Carlos missed him terribly. On his return the father would always tell his son stories about his colorful adventures while he was traveling.
“He knew how to create tension,” Carlos explained. “[It’s] where I learned to build a guitar solo. Got to tell a story, man.”
In 1954 José went north to Tijuana to play mariachi for American tourists. He promised Josefina that he would send for the family when he had saved enough money. But when he didn’t do so after a year, Carlos’s mother suspected that he was cheating on her. So she persuaded one of José’s friends to drive her and her six children to Tijuana, promising that José would pay him when they got there. Then Josefina sold all their furniture to raise gas money for the 1,500-mile journey.
Upon their arrival in Tijuana, they went to an address José had used on one of his few letters home. Then as Carlos and his siblings waited in the car, Josefina knocked on the front door. At first there was no answer, but on the third knock a young woman opened the door. When Josefina announced she was José’s wife and had come for him, the woman said there was no one by that name living there and closed the door.
As Josefina sadly walked back to the car, an old man who had been sitting on the sidewalk watching everything asked who she was looking for.
“José Santana,” replied Josefina.
“Yeah, he’s inside. Are you guys his family?” said the man. “Knock again. He’ll come out.”3
So Josephina walked back to the front door and knocked again.
“The lady came out,” Carlos would recall, “screaming ‘What do you want? I told you he’s not there!’ ”
At that point José sheepishly poked his head out of the door, seeing his wife at the door and their seven children in the car outside.
“My dad’s face became like the NBC peacock rainbow,” said Carlos, “turning all the different colors of surprise, frustration, anger, fear—everything.”
Then he started screaming at his wife for daring to bring the children to Tijuana without his permission. When he finally calmed down, he drove them to one of the town’s worst slums, dropping them off at a house without any windows or a roof. Then he drove off, leaving them there to fend for themselves.
For the next two months, Josefina and the children struggled to survive in the tough border town. Twice a week José would suddenly appear with two bags of groceries for his family, before disappearing again.
“That was the hardest time,” recalled Carlos, “poverty-wise.”
Eventually there was a reconciliation and José left his mistress and moved back in with his family. Then he sent Carlos and his younger brother Jorge out to hustle the tourists on Tijuana’s main drag, Avenida Revolucion. Dressed in colorful mariachi suits, the two small boys would perform old Mexican folk songs, such as “Mexicali Rose” and “La Paloma.”
“ ‘Song, Mister?—fifty cents a song,’—that was my mantra,” Carlos remembered.
Their father also had them selling snacks and spearmint gum to the tourists.
“My father bought us this box of Chiclets and just cracked it in half,” said Carlos. “He gave half to my brother [and] half to me. He says, ‘Don’t come back till you sell it.’”
In July 1955, José Santana moved his family into a better Tijuana neighborhood, enrolling Carlos in the Miguel F. Martinez Primary School. Every night he attended a school of music, where his teachers wanted him to learn clarinet. Carlos refused, sticking to the violin instead.
“We always played music,” said Carlos’s younger brother Jorge. “We had musicians in the household, so we were exposed to music all the time.”4
At the age of ten, Carlos joined his father’s mariachi band, Los Cardinales. They played in some of the seediest bars and clubs on the backstreets of Tijuana, as well as bordellos.
“It smelt like piss and puke,” said Carlos. “Being a kid I’d rather go play hide-and-seek . . . but instead I was in this place.”5
Little Carlos was exposed to the crude, drunken behavior of the customers toward the prostitutes, who would mother him. And he came to hate the mariachi music he played with his father.
“I don’t really relate to it,” Carlos explained. “I don’t like any kind of music that deals with lyrics about being drunk and being betrayed.”
One day the little boy met an American tourist, who lured him over the border into San Diego for sex. Throughout the next two years, Carlos was repeatedly molested, and it would scar him for life. It was a deep, dark secret that he would carry for more than forty years.
“I was molested at a very young age,” Carlos finally admitted in 2000. “I was seduced by toys, and I was seduced by being brought to America with all kinds of gifts and stuff.”
The pedophile, who said he was from Vermont, would bring Carlos over the border two or three times a week, buying him meals, clothes, and toys and sexually abusing him.
“This person seduced a child by giving him cowboy boots and guns and a bunch of toys,” said Carlos, “when I was living in the ghetto in Tijuana. And my mom couldn’t figure it out?”
The abuse finally stopped in 1959 when the man became jealous when Carlos developed a crush on a girl his own age.
“And he slapped me,” said Carlos. “And I woke up.”
In 1960, José Santana took off and left his family again. This time he moved to San Francisco, where the earnings were higher for a mariachi musician. With his father gone, Carlos stopped going to music school, as he disliked practicing violin. Then his perceptive mother decided to show Carlos that there were other kinds of music besides mariachi.
One Sunday morning she took him to the Palacio de Municipal Park in the middle of Tijuana, where the local musicians hung out and played. Carlos was walking into the park when he first heard the sound of an electric blues guitar.
“That’s when everything just changed in my life,” he said. “It was like somebody kicked me in the balls, man. It was like bang.”
The blues musician playing was a sharply dressed sixteen-year-old named Javier Batiz, who had an Elvis Presley pompadour haircut, leather jacket, and razor-pressed khaki pants. And he played the latest hits by Chuck Berry, B.B. King, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and Freddy King.
Later that day Josefina took Carlos to Batiz’s home and asked Batiz if he would teach her son to play electric blues guitar. When Batiz asked Carlos if he played another instrument, he took out his violin and played a tune.
“And it was so cute,” said Batiz. “He was just a little kid.”
; Before they left, Batiz showed Carlos a few chords and runs on the guitar, and by the next day Carlos had mastered them all.6
“His Mama said, ‘Carlos didn’t sleep last night, he was studying,’ ” Batiz recalled. “I taught him one movement and the day after that he brought about ten movements, different movements. And I went, ‘Wow,’ because he was so hungry to learn the blues guitar.”
On Friday nights, Carlos started going to see Javier Batiz and his band the T.J.’s play at the Latino-Americano club to soak up the music. He now had little interest in his Catholic parochial school, as he was getting his musical education on the streets of Tijuana.
“I still wasn’t playing,” he said. “I was just sucking up the music and learning.”
The first song Carlos learned was the Shadows’ hit instrumental “Apache,” followed by “Walk on the Wild Side” by Jimmy Smith and “Peppermint Twist” by Joey Dee and the Starliters.
When Josefina wrote José that Carlos was learning guitar, he mailed his son an old beat-up Gibson L-5 guitar, along with one pick, from San Francisco. Carlos was so delighted that he put on nylon strings, not realizing he needed metal ones since his father had not sent an amplifier.
In 1961, Josefina Santana filed US immigration papers for the family to move to San Francisco, where José was now making a good living playing mariachi. She did not want her children to spend the rest of their lives in the mean streets of Tijuana.
“My mother wanted a better life for all of us,” said Jorge Santana, “by bringing us here to the United States. She was old-school in her upbringing, discipline, education, and work.”
When José returned to help the family move to America, he expected Carlos to play the mariachi clubs with him again. But thirteen-year-old Carlos now had his own gig, playing blues and Top Forty songs with Javier Batiz in the rundown strip clubs of Avenida Revolucion.
“It was a conflict,” recalled Carlos, “because I was already working . . . playing some real low-life stinky places where the prostitutes would be on the corner. And I didn’t want to play that folk music anymore.”
But when Carlos refused to play mariachi, his father was furious.
“And he says, ‘Well what do you want to do?’ ” said Carlos. “‘Do you want to play that pachuco rock ’n’ roll crap music?’ I said, ‘Well, how can that music be worse than where I am?’ ”
“It was the first time I stood up to my dad. So he said, ‘OK, pack up your [guitar]. You’re just like your mother. You always have to have the last word. Get out of here.’ ”7
Just barely a teenager, Carlos Santana was fast gaining a reputation as one of the hottest young blues guitarist in Tijuana. Some friends had a stack of B.B. King albums, and Carlos started copying them note for note. Then he started learning John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters songs to play at the strip clubs.
“They call it ‘cut and shoot music,’ ” said Carlos, “because if they don’t like it they cut and shoot you.”
Carlos joined a five-piece band called The Strangers, who were rivals of the T.J’s. He was the youngest member, playing a Kent electric bass and calling himself “El Apache.” The Strangers played dances and small shows, but Carlos was soon fired for playing too many notes on the bass.
He was then invited to join the house band on guitar at El Convoy, one of the biggest strip clubs on Avenida Revolucion. He jumped at the chance, especially since the club provided him with a Fender Stratocaster to play, along with $9 a week.
“I would start at four o’clock in the afternoon and end at six o’clock in the morning,” said Carlos, “playing one hour and then watching the hookers strip for another hour. Six hookers would strip, and then we’d play for an hour. But you learn a lot, man.”
Then every Sunday morning he went to church and played “Ave Maria” on the violin.
“So I got my education really, really quick,” he said, “about the spiritual and sensual being as one.”
Playing at the El Convoy also provided a unique musical education for the young teenager, as the band incorporated their music into the girls’ stripping routine.
“The music helps a woman to walk when she’s onstage,” explained Carlos, “otherwise she can look stupid. The drummer would roll whenever she was going to roll those little tassels on her breasts. I learned a lot about music and expression from places like that.”8
Carlos was now learning from the many American black musicians, who also played the Tijuana clubs. They introduced him to soul music, including Junior Walker and The Impressions. But Carlos’s favorite was James Brown, who was then inventing funk music. 9
Consumed with music, Carlos never went to school, spending his days on the beach, reading Mad and hot-rod magazines.
In the summer of 1962, the Santana family’s US immigration papers finally came through. José and Josefina were preparing to move the family to San Francisco’s Mission District when Carlos suddenly announced he was not going.
He was now earning good money at El Convoy, and he felt going to junior high school in San Francisco seemed a big step back.
“I’m hanging around with a bunch of older guys and prostitutes,” he said, “eat when I want, sleep when I want . . . to hang out with a bunch of little kids talking about bullshit stuff? No way.”
During the long drive north to San Francisco, Carlos sulked, refusing to communicate with anybody.
“He was mad,” said his father “He did not even say a single word during the whole trip.”
And when they arrived at the family’s new home in the Mission District, Carlos locked himself in his bedroom and refused to eat.
“All he did was cry, cry and cry,” said his father. “He was always mad.”
Finally, after three months, Josefina handed Carlos a $20 bill for a bus ticket back to Tijuana, kissing him good-bye at the bus station. It would be the last time Carlos would see his family for more than a year.
It was the night of Halloween when Carlos Santana arrived at the Tijuana bus station after a thirteen-hour ride. The streets were already full of drunken revelers dressed in skeleton costumes, celebrating the Day of the Dead.
As he left the bus station with his guitar and small suitcase of clothes, Carlos had only a couple of dollars in his pocket. With nowhere to spend the night and knowing no one, he walked to the Cathedral of the Virgin of Guadalupe, on the corner of Second Street and Avenue Niños Heroes. He had decided to pray to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is the patron saint of Mexico, for guidance.
The huge cathedral was empty, and Carlos walked up to the front of the tabernacle, with its sacred statue of the Madonna.
“Virgin Mother,” he said out loud. “I was here almost two years ago.”10
Carlos then told her how he and his brother Tony had been there once before to do penance. While Tony had asked her for something, he had not.
“So I figure you owe me one,” Carlos told the Madonna. “I just ask that you take care of my [family] who have all left Mexico to live in California. And I ask that you give me a gig tonight in this town so I can survive on my own.”11
After leaving the cathedral, Carlos went straight to the El Convoy strip club to try to get his old job back. He walked in to find the house band playing with a new guitarist and went up to the bar. Then he handed the manager a note from his mother, giving her blessing for him to play there, although he was a minor. The note was crucial, for the club knew that the Santana family had moved to San Francisco, and the manager would not want Josefina complaining to the police about her underage son working there.
The manager told Carlos to leave, but just as he was shooing him out of the door, the owner spotted his favorite guitarist. After reading Josefina’s letter he smiled and walked up to the stage, telling the new guitarist to go home.
“Carlos is going to take over,” said the owner.
With nowhere to stay, Car
los was put up by the El Convoy drummer at his aunt’s hotel, until they were both thrown out. Then a family friend came to Carlos’s rescue, renting him a room in his old neighborhood.
During the next year, Carlos had a great time in Tijuana, making good money with his nightly gig at El Convoy.
“It was a lot of fun,” he’d later explain. “Checking people, doing grown-up stuff.”
The musician crowd he ran with smoked marijuana in the dark alleys of Tijuana, but Carlos claims he did not start smoking until several years later in San Francisco. The tall, darkly handsome teenager had the pick of the pretty woman working the Avenida Revolucion, becoming close friends with many of them. He was empathetic to the strippers and prostitutes, seeing how tough their lives were.
“There’s a certain dignity there,” Carlos later explained. “They don’t choose it because they like it. They do it because they have kids they need to feed.”
When Javier Batiz offered Carlos a place in the new band that he was taking to Mexico City to try to make it big, Carlos preferred to stay in Tijuana.
“I thought I was already making it just playing Revolution Street and being fed,” said Carlos. “I’m watching prostitutes undress for an hour. I’m a man of the world.”
In early November 1963, Josefina Santana wanted Carlos back in San Francisco, feeling Tijuana was too dangerous for him. So she and her oldest son, Tony, turned up at El Convoy Club one night unannounced.
“She just kidnapped me,” said Carlos. “She knew I didn’t want to go, so my older brother, who was really strong, just grabbed me and said, ‘Your Mama’s here.’ ”
Carlos tried to run away, but his far bigger brother forced him into the car. Then his mother drove him back to San Francisco, where he would remain.
CHAPTER THREE
Finding Direction
In early 1963, after a year of bumming around Europe, Bill Graham settled down in San Francisco. He found a job as regional manager for the Allis-Chalmers company, which manufactured heavy industrial equipment, and was responsible for the states of California, Washington, and Colorado.