Carlos Santana

Carlos Santana took the Woodstock stage completely high on mescaline. He believed his guitar's neck was a live snake trying to bite his hand. So he gritted his teeth and played so he wouldn't be devoured.

Director Michael Wadleigh's cameras captured that trance in the 1970 documentary Woodstock and sealed the birth of a legend without asking permission.

He was twenty-two years old.

Before reaching New York, he washed dishes in a San Francisco restaurant and picked up the tricks of the trade in Tijuana brothels. His father played mariachi violin and wanted the kid to carry on the family tradition, but the young man preferred to copy B.B. King's records note for note.

Hallucinations in Sixteen Millimeter

In San Francisco, he formed the Santana Blues Band, mixing congas with amplifiers cranked to the limit. Promoter Bill Graham made his presence felt at that outdoor festival even before the band released its first studio album, simply titled Santana in 1969.

It was a perfectly calculated boardroom move. The mix of Afro-Cuban percussion and electric blues blew up the sales charts, thanks to the rhythmic editing Wadleigh put into movie theaters across half the planet.

In 1970 they released Abraxas, and the band sold more than five million copies in twelve months in the U.S. market. Songs like their version of Peter Green's track pulled rock out of its Anglo-Saxon comfort zone, fueled by Latin sweat.

The Mystical Walkout and the Slow Years

In 1972, he broke with his original lineup to record Caravanserai, an album dominated by instrumental jazz that left Columbia executives stunned. Santana dressed in pristine white and took the name Devadip under the spiritual guidance of Sri Chinmoy.

Nobody at the record label understood a thing.

He recorded with John McLaughlin on Love Devotion Surrender in 1973 and played alongside jazz greats like Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. That creative escape cost him fifteen years outside the mainstream commercial circuit, far from the easy money of stadium tours.

During the 1980s, the record industry began pushing him aside. He survived on European tours and his film work, as he did in 1987, when he adapted traditional music for Luis Valdez's film La Bamba.

Film became his lifeline when the radio shut its doors on him.

Clive Davis's Payday

In the late 1990s, he seemed like a relic for nostalgia lovers. Producer Clive Davis signed him to his new label and designed a collaboration album with pop and hip-hop stars.

The result was Supernatural in 1999. The album sold more than thirty million copies worldwide and racked up nine Grammy Awards in a single night in 2000.

And the hit machine was back in full swing.

In 2017, he served as executive producer of the documentary feature Dolores, directed by Peter Bratt and centered on farmworker leader Dolores Huerta. Years later, in 2023, director Rudy Valdez released the biographical documentary Carlos in theaters, backed by Brian Grazer and Ron Howard.

During that shoot in 2023, the crew had to clean up seven hundred hours of homemade footage on Super 8 and magnetic tapes stored in shoeboxes. Restoring that audiovisual archive cost four hundred thousand dollars before the first minute of footage could be edited.