Carlos Santana may have transcended guitar music and permeated pop culture, yet in his latest interview with Guitar World, the veteran musician reveals multiple brushes with the supernatural – including a “visitation” from Stevie Ray Vaughan.
“I get visitations from Miles Davis sometimes, as well as B.B. King. You don’t have to be dead to visit me. Sometimes a dream is not a dream; someone has come back to communicate with you,” he says matter-of-factly.
“It’s like that with Stevie Ray and Jaco Pastorius. I feel very honored that these people come to me. Sometimes I feel like I’m like [John F. Kennedy International Airport] and all these musicians are landing on me and sharing things. I have to figure out what it all means.”
As for what his dream with SRV meant, Santana is keen to elaborate. “He was saying, ‘Carlos, where I am, I don’t have any fingers; I am only spirit.’ He missed putting his fingers on a guitar and making the speakers push air. He told me to call his brother Jimmie [Vaughan] and ask him to lend me his amp, the #007 Dumble, and then play it with a Strat so he could feel it through me.
“You know that Ghost movie with Whoopi Goldberg? There’s a part where a ghost comes into her body so he can feel. That’s what Stevie was doing. He wanted to utilize my body and hands because he missed playing guitar.”
Safe to say that SRV's brother, Jimmie, wasn't sure at first, and it took some persuasion from Stevie’s tech, René Martinez, who also had the same dream and told him about it, for Santana to borrow the amplifier.
“The last person to borrow it was John Mayer. Let’s just say Jimmie doesn’t loan that thing out very easily.”
So, how did Stevie Ray Vaughan’s famed Dumble sound? According to Santana, it “sounded like everything I love about Peter Green when he played a certain kind of heavenly blues.
“My mom once asked me, ‘Mijo, do you like Whitney Houston?’ and I said, ‘Of course,’” he recounts. “She then told me that when Whitney sang, her voice would become a legion of angels. I think my mom knew what she was talking about. Sometimes when you play, you channel things.”
Santana has just released Sentient, a pared-down, 11-track retrospective of his career, featuring recordings unearthed from archives stored in his house.
For more from Santana, plus new interviews with Billy Corgan and Kiki Wong, and Al Jardine, pick up issue 595 of Guitar World from Magazines Direct.
