The guitarist who inspired Carlos Santana: “He was the sun”
The psychedelic rock scene around San Francisco in the late 1960s was incredibly tight-knit. Largely forming around Jefferson Airplane and their command of The Matrix club on Fillmore Street, groups like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Quicksilver Messenger Service, and The New Riders of the Purple Sage were all friendly with each other. Although they formed at the tail end of the movement, Santana also found themselves integrated within that group of bands.
Personally championed and managed by concert promoter Bill Graham, Santana were virtually unknown outside of San Francisco when they performed at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival in 1969. A week after their blistering performance, the band released their self-titled debut album, creating a unique blend of Latin music, jazz, and psychedelic rock. But for Carlos Santana, it all started with the blues.
Originally called the Santana Blues Band, Santana had only adopted a pronounced Latin feel toward the end of the 1960s. Carlos Santana himself had to be exposed to a number of different styles and approaches before he was able to create his own sound. One guitarist who inspired Santana to move away from traditional blues licks was Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia.
“Most people who play the blues are very conservative,” Santana once wrote of Garcia in a feature for Rolling Stone. “They stay a certain way. Jerry Garcia was painting outside the frame. He played blues but mixed it with bluegrass and Ravi Shankar. He had country and Spanish in there.”
“There was a lot of Chet Atkins in him – going up and down the frets. But you could always hear a theme in his playing,” he continued. “It’s like putting beads on a string, instead of throwing them around a room. Jerry had a tremendous sense of purpose. When you take a solo, decide what to say, get there and give it to the next guy. That’s how Jerry worked in the Dead.”
Santana claimed that it was the Dead’s LSD that got him astronomically high at Woodstock. Over the years, Santana would occasionally sit in with the Dead, mostly during the 1980s and 1990s. Santana and Garcia would also jam separately from the Dead, with Garcia plugging into his jazz knowledge and diversifying his playing style while trading licks with Santana.
“Jerry was the Sun of the Grateful Dead – the music they played was like planets orbiting around him,” Santana added. “He wasn’t a superficial guy at all. It was a lot of fun to play with him because he was very accommodating. He’d go up and down; I’d go left and right. And I could tell he enjoyed it because the Dead always invited me back.”
Watch Santana sit in with the Grateful Dead for ‘Bird Song’ in 1991 down below.
