When Carlos Santana was dosed by Jerry Garcia before a flight: “the wall started oozing like lava”
Jerry Garcia might just be as synonymous with his drug use as he is for his long, rambling and meandering solos, both with the Grateful Dead and with his countless other side projects. With his warm, groovy and peaceful influence, he probably turned a whole generation of fans on to pot and acid in the late 1960s, but it wasn’t only his audience he was expanding – or corrupting, depending on your point of view – the minds of, either.
Speaking to Rob Tannenbaum of the New York Times in 2019, in a conversation to mark the 50th anniversary of the legendary Woodstock Music and Art Fair in 1969, guitarist Carlos Santana remembered his encounter with the head Dead-Head at the festival. He recalled, “When we landed, the first person I saw was my brother and friend Jerry Garcia. He looked like one of those yogis in a cave in the Himalayas. He had that beatific, everything is all right already look. For me, he was like assurance, confidence and a sanctuary.”
Adding, “They’d told us we were going on two bands after the Grateful Dead. He goes, ‘Well, man, you better get comfortable because apparently, we’re not going on until one o’clock in the morning. It’s a mess here. And by the way, would you like to take some of this?’ It was mescaline.”
Sooner than expected, though, Santana and his band were ordered onto the stage, and just in time for the mescaline to start kicking in. Though he managed to maintain his composure to pull off one of the most celebrated sets of the whole festival, Santana has described how, during the show, it felt like he was “wrestling with the guitar — not wrestling in conflict, but like a surfer, wrestling to maintain and sustain a balance”. On another occasion, he has explained how, in his hallucinatory state, he believed that he was holding—and therefore making all these shocking sounds with—a snake, not a guitar (and, in his own words, an “electric snake”, no less).
Perhaps he should have known better. He may have thought that the presence of Jerry Garcia was “like assurance” and “sanctuary”, but it was not the first time that the Dead axeman had dosed Santana at an inopportune moment.
In the year before Woodstock, the Santana Band were opening for the Grateful Dead. The Dead already had a reputation for spiking their support acts, so Santana took extra care to sanitise anything he came into contact with which they could be using to get him using. “I made sure to carefully wash this Coca-Cola can I was going to drink”, he told Tannenbaum.
Continuing, “But what I didn’t know is, they knew how to put a syringe in the soda can. So we played our set and left, and on the way from the airport to the plane, the hall kept getting longer and longer. The colours in the carpet and in the wall started oozing like lava. I said, ‘Uh oh, they got me.’ When I sat down on the plane, I looked out the window as we were taking off, and the Vegas lights looked like Aztec hieroglyphics. I said, ‘This is going to be intense’.”
50 years later, Santana remembered the event with good spirits, saying, “I’d been baptised into consciousness-expanding”. Some might call it that, while others would simply call getting stoned right before a flight “getting really high”.
