Santana Tour Report #17

We are in Chandler, Arizona. The choice for lunch was: Denny’s or Marie Callender’s…yum… – so now i’m reading the new book “Idoru” by William Gibson and i like it so far… and there is nothing else to do here besides reading, practising guitar and making phone calls… there is not even a bar to get in trouble in tonight, but at least our crew is enjoying themselves, sitting by the pool and drinking beer… after all it is almost happy hour somewhere in the ocean east of New York City right now… i’ll get back to reading…

Santana Tour Report #16

The Blockbuster Pavillion in San Bernadino, CA… great audience… almost all standing after our short set… a nice warm night with a fat full moon… i heard that Carlos feels that our in-ear monitors are like having phone-sex instead of the real thing – his band has about 15 monitors and 2 huge side fills blasting sound onto his stage… but then again my flamenco guitar sounds great in the auditorium while his acoustic guitar sounds absolutely horrific… oh, and i still have all my hearing left… hm, and i really don’t like phone-sex anyway…

Santana Tour Report #15

another day off… we stay in L.A. and will leave for San Bernadino tomorrow afternoon… i have a meeting with EPIC Records regarding doing a bi-weekly internet radio show with them… i would record these shows (lotsa music from EVERY category, noises, and interviews with friends and stuff) and send tapes for them to play on the EPIC Internet Radio… when the time comes we will create a button that will let you connect from our site to the exact location of EPIC Internet Radio…

Santana Tour Report #14

The Greek Theater: we come back for our 3rd and last show… all of them have been sold-out… it would be wonderful to come here with the new 9-piece Rhumba band next summer… meanwhile we are still looking for the proper name for that band… something that suggests dancing and upbeat fun… Carl suggested “RHUMBASTILZKEN”, but nobody liked that… “OTTMAR LIEBERT’S FLAMENC-O-MATIC RHUMBABAND”… well, we still have some time to figure this one out…

Santana Tour Report #13

The Greek Theater: everything went very well last night, so imagine our surprise when we hear loads of feedback erupting in the beginning of our second to last song… we fight with it for a few minutes and then i give up, unplug my guitar and walk off the stage… later we are told that NOBODY could figure out what and who was responsible, but that it would never happen again… strange, huh? well, at least i’m sure it didn’t happen on purpose, since Santana’s people have been a very supportive and genuinly nice bunch, but somebody flipped a switch connected to a microphone and it didn’t happen at our mixing board… but, by the time Santana went on everything was OK and our duets went very well… in fact i had quite a bit of anger in my belly because of the feedback and the abruptly ended show, and played better because of it… i just kind of attacked my guitar passionately…