Garcia and Carlos Santana made a bit of small talk when suddenly Garcia offered Santana some mescaline. Santana didn’t hesitate. The band wasn’t supposed to go on until the evening. Plenty of time to get high and come back down.
Or so he thought.
Because of the traffic situation, some of the bands scheduled to play were missing. In response, the organizers of the concert had to frantically figure out how to rearrange the schedule. They needed a band to fill the next slot. There was a panic. Then suddenly it dawned on them.
Santana. Santana would go on next.
Carlos and the rest of the band were approached by the organizers. They were told that if they didn’t get onstage immediately to play that they would lose their spot in the festival.
It was now or never. And Carlos Santana was only beginning his mescaline trip.....
This was unlike anything the Woodstock crowd had heard before. The Latin-tinged percussion. The groove-heavy bass. The hypnotic organ ringing out above the crowd.
And then the guitar. That tone. The inflection. A melodicism unlike any other.
Meanwhile, Santana was literally praying that the Lord would keep him in tune as he began to hallucinate. He watched as his Red Gibson SG morphed into a slithering snake in his hands. Yet his hands magically kept performing, as if through divine intervention or pure hypnotism.
