How Jerry Garcia almost ended Santana’s iconic Woodstock appearance
Carlos Santana is one of the greatest guitarists to grace the earth, and his Latin-influenced style of blues guitar set him apart from his contemporaries. Famously, Santana was just one of the legendary acts to perform at the iconic Woodstock festival in 1969, alongside Joan Baez, The Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, to name but a few. The festival would go down in folklore history for its celebration of the 1960s counterculture movement.
Santana once recalled the famous festival at which he took mescaline with the Grateful Dead leader, Jerry Garcia. Santana was told to go on to perform early, in the middle of his trip, and somehow pulled out a blistering set, even though he reportedly thought his guitar was a snake that he had to battle throughout the performance.
“When we first got there, around eleven in the morning, they told us we weren’t going on until eight,” Santana revealed. “So I said, ‘Hey, I think I’ll take some psychedelics, and by the time I’m coming down, it’ll be time to go on stage, and I’ll feel fine.’ But when I was peaking around two o’clock, somebody said, ‘If you don’t go right now, you’re not gonna go on.'”
He added: “What I thought is what my mom taught me, immediately hold on to God and trust that God – who makes everything all right already – would guide you through all this energy.”
Santana’s experience of having to go on before he was ready, during the midst of a serious psychedelic trip, will have surely been one of a combination of terror and intrigue. Having to perform whilst hallucinating must have an anxiety-inducing. However, Santana appears to be upbeat about the occasion, and it seems as though the mescaline may have contributed to his overall experience of the famous festival.
“Woodstock is about energy,” Santana said. “All those people are about energy. And more important than the mescaline or Jerry Garcia or Woodstock or the music is how those people were able to co-exist with unity and harmony like we humans did it in the year 2000.”
“My friend, Jerry Garcia, we used to do what we call therapeutic ‘inner baths,’ peeling layers of illusions. Because humans pick up all kinds of personas that are not really you, and if you don’t be careful, this persona can throw you into a ‘misery ditch’. So for me, it’s always important to be a person rather than a persona.”
