Here I am, wandering around YouTube listening in a fairly random manner, and having things leap at me. I’ve mentioned, in some of my doll pix, that Dance has a guitar modeled after one owned by Carlos Santana. Looking at vids, to my eye Carlos’ tiger-maple guitar looks reddish orange. Dance’s scale copy is much more yellow.
That’s all right.
It goes with his eyes.
I don’t even know all of Santana’s work.
Dance told me the man speaks on a level that makes a guitarist’s guitarist weep.
As Wikipedia notes, Rolling Stone also named Santana number 15 on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time in 2003. He’s all about the technique.
There’s a couple of aspects to Santana that make me wonder about Dance.
The way Santana reacts to women singers and dancers is always interesting to watch in the vids. The music about women is not coming from a place of indifference, mmmkay? In some of the vids he looks rather like he’s playing to a Grouch Marx image with the whole wiggly leering eyebrow. Which makes for an interesting role-model.
Also, he is probably one of the most compulsive performers I’ve ever had the patience to watch.
Edited to add: Ah hah! A live version! The vocalist is Everlast.
Why yes, I be Old Fart, Y U Ask?
No, I don’t know rap’s history, though I’m willing to be eddicatd by folks whut knows more.
(Dance mutters something about classical stick-in-the-muds.)
So yeah, I don’t recognize the names that they list on Wikipedia as people he’s collaborated with.
From Wkipedia:
…Erik Schrody (born August 18, 1969, in Valley Stream, New York), better known by his stage name Everlast, is an Irish-American rapper and singer-songwriter, best known for his hit “What It’s Like”, and for his genre-crossing mix of hip-hop and acoustic-based rock music. He was the frontman for rap group House of Pain until 1996. In 2000, he won a Grammy for best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal with latin rock musician Carlos Santana performing Put Your Lights On on Santana’s 1999 album Supernatural (see 1999 in music)…
The rest of his bio mostly involves a feud with Eminem, until you hit this:
…In 2007, Everlast was chosen to do the theme song for the TV show Saving Grace. The song plays during the show’s main title sequence, and was released to digital outlets only
I think I like this version even better.
Here’s a nice live version of one of the classics, Black Magic Woman. It’s a little odd to hear it being sung by a guy who looks like Drin, but he does well. And then about 4:40 in this one, you see Santana just goes off into Star Wars land. I didn’t know you could make those noises on a guitar. I knew they must have made ’em somewhere, but not that this was one way it could be done. Further into it, you get to see the rhythm section go berserk.
However, you may notice some compulsively experimental aspects in solos by Santana that go off into live-performance trance territory. “You had to be there,” type of stuff. If I’m not immersed in it fully, if I have distractions, the repetition becomes annoying to me. That makes me less fond of extended versions. He’s halfway a drummer, honestly.
The musicians in the audience are stretching their ears, and the rest of us just have our eyes crossed. Wikipedia entry goes into interesting details and suggests that he’s had a lot of turnover in band members–but he’s been actively playing since he was 13, and he’s at least 61 now, so that’s a lot of road wear and tear. He’s been warned in serious professional tones by industry people to tone down the percussive jazz fascination and percussion solos, write the songs tighter.
Dance says that what makes you that good is starting out being a total obsessive compulsive wanker who finds a soundproof bunker to play in until you’ve done it about two years, day and night. Then you go out into the world and get your ass stomped on in total dives and maybe you find some good audiences here and there, until you learn how to manage them.
He says it doesn’t go well with trying to have a life.
I ask about classical violinists, and he says that’s even worse.
But he thinks this guy has managed to have a life. A great big life. You can check Wiki on him, easy. You can see how many younger artists he’s worked with just from his YouTUbe clips. He was working with all kinds of vocalists to do comebacks. He speaks with his guitar.
This version is one of the most purely and weirdly happy vids I’ve ever seen. Well, maybe I haven’t seen enough.
This is a live version of “Smooth” with Rob Thomas, who did the official MTV version. He’s got an interesting voice. You can hear that his voice must have been processed in places for the official recording, thinned out, to suit the MTV version that’s also available on YouTube. Those make the lyrics clearer, it fits the tone of the vid, soudns like a cheap radio in a ghetto window. I like the live one better. It’s a little harder to make out the words down in his growl, but I like the sound better. You also get the obsessive improv aspect.
I’m afraid that you also find some really sad versions by amateurs on all these songs. Also, hearing various of Santana’s vocalists carry on performing the same song with a different backup band is often equally sad.
One doesn’t realize what sort of cojones it takes to stroll out and perform some of these and cary it off smoothly, knowing, as one of the foremost card-carrying Monks of Cool, that anything you decide to do with your performance is, automatically, cool. By definition.
It also helps to have the rhythm section of God’s Own Choir behind you.