Santana Tour Report #22

A day off in Dallas… the Meridien hotel, the funny hotel with the ice-rink in the middle… a phone-interview with L.A.Times regarding our TV Special… then i find out that E.T. scheduled the piece about our TV Special for next Saturday… i change strings on my Flamenco guitar… i’m getting a little cabinfever… i might have to get into trouble tonight…

Santana Tour Report #21

El Paso: i wake up with the bus standing still, parked in front of the UTEP Center in El Paso… i make myself an espresso with the machine and the Illy beans i picked up at home yesterday…hm…and another… today is the 3rd aniversary of the death of Miles Davis… it is still unbelievable to me that we opened a show for him and his band at the Paramount Theater in Seattle in the Spring of 1990… we were so nervous… somewhere at home i have the ad from the Seattle newspaper that reads: “Miles Davis – with special guest Ottmar Liebert”… when we leave for Dallas at 10pm, we play “Sketches of Spain” on the bus in honour of Miles…

Santana Tour Report #20

I sleep from midnight until 2am, and then i am wide awake with antissipation… from 4am on i sit in the buslounge and watch New Mexico pass by… the silvery moon light on the blooming chamisa, the dark dots of pinon and juniper… shortly before 7am the bus drops me off at the Albuquerque airport… it is surprisingly cold – i pick up a rental car and drive to Santa Fe… i arrive at my house shortly after 8am… the leaves on my cherry trees are bright red, and the aspens are beginning to turn colour… the chamisa is yellow with blooms and the wildflowers next those are purple – and it is quiet, no bus engine, no generator… i drink from this landscape and soundscape… the Huevos Rancheros Christmas (Santa Fe term for ordering both green chile and red chile with your meal) at Tecalote Cafe is still as wonderful as i remember it… At 2pm i drive back to Albuquerque… Tingley looks pretty frightening – like a hockey arena or a tractor pull location with big neon advertisements for beer and beef… the amount of concrete promises lots of slap-back echoes all over the place… our show at Tingley is the closest we have ever come to the taste of the Rock & Roll experience… when the lights go out and we walk on, the crowd roars in anticipation… there is a huge pit for people with general admission tickets and they holler and move… and we love every second of it… the reverberation in the big hall does sound like a propeller plane circling above or like a herd of cattle stampeding… it starts with the first note and ends half a minute after the last… we have a good time though, ’cause the audience is into the music… we go through the set smiling… it’s time: next year we have to do a big show in Santa Fe with our 9-piece FLAMENC-O-MATIC, RHUMBA-PHONIC, LUNA NEGRA XL… oh yeah, and there was a bomb threat at 9pm as Santana was supposed to go on… but, since no bomb went off at 9:15pm as threatened, the Santana show started at 9:20pm… the 2 songs we play with Carlos sounded good and rounded off the Tingley experience nicely… oh, and i almost got a ticket from a state police officer, but that’s an entirely different story…

Santana Tour Report #19

Tucson, Arizona: last night in Chandler/Phoenix Carlos asks me wether we would record our show there… when i tell him that we are not, he asks wether we would let him record it and i say of course, knowing that Carlos has a huge collection of bootleg tapes: lots of Hendrix, Bob Marley etc… Carlos thinks the lunar eclipse might bring some special music out of all of us… and it is indeed incredibly special: when we start our set a little bit after 7pm, the moon is a shrinking sliver and during our second song it turns black… we all stare at the moon, which is right above the audience in front of us, while we are playing… La Luna Negra in Arizona… this may have been the only chance in our lifetime that we are performing on a stage that faces the moon during a lunar eclipse… a special moment with our namesake… then, after our 2 songs with Santana, we drive to a hotel in Tucson, an unscheduled stop that became necessary because the airconditioning of the bus broke… during the drive to Tucson four of us finish a new bottle of Absolute Citron, listen to Indian Raga music, and discuss the hearing-loss we are getting from just the 2 songs we are doing with Santana… today, Friday, the AC will get fixed or we will get a new bus… in the morning Jon and i walk around the city and find a cafe and some pretty bad coffee… then we discover a huge musicstore that looks like second-hand heaven… lots of trashy guitars and drums and bargain keyboards… an incredible disarray, quite amazing actually…

Santana Tour Report #18

Chandler, AZ: yesterday i read “Idoru” by William Gibson – what a let down. “Neuromancer” was brilliant, “Mona Lisa Overdrive” was still pretty good… now he has been swallowed by time… Gibson had a vision, a glimpse, a taste of the future, and then time, like a slowmoving gel or soft plasma, caught up with him and engulfed him and swallowed him… not a single new idea here, just the fulfillment of a contract to write another book…

At 10pm last night Jon and i tried to find a bar or a liquor store – nada!!! even the bar of the sligtly fancier Windham hotel, where Santana’s band stays (we all stay in the Fairfield Inn, the crew hotel) was already empty and closing… we have reached a new tea + coffee low at this hotel… Santana’s guitar tech walked several miles down the highway for a cappuccino yesterday, but there is nothing nearby and the coffee in the hotel tastes like dishwater… Tonight we will have a lunar eclipse, a “BLACK MOON” or “LUNA NEGRA”… the Earth’s shadow will appear on the moon at 6:30pm and will grow until the moon is completely covered…