(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Wed 31 December 2025 20:30, UK
There are two sides to Carlos Santana’s career.
For the layman and 1990s nostalgic, the Mexican-American guitar maestro will always be defined by his flirtation with Supernatural’s radio-friendly pop, the mammoth-selling ‘Smooth’ and ‘Maria Maria’ destined to inspire one half of the audience at any given show to start boogying along while the old-time fans clear out for a beer break.
Perhaps Supernatural’s presence in Santana’s oeuvre has ebbed since, but any newcomers to his work would have discovered a rich mine of spiritual psychedelia dunked in buckets of LSD charged with a passionate chase of some higher power. Laced with Latin sunbake and African rhythmic trance, Santana nurtured a uniquely personal and divine relationship with the 1960s’ rock lysergia, wielding his soaring guitar like a siren dwelling in the psychotropic without ever feeling overtly druggy.
Let’s be clear, however, drugs were an essential part of Santana’s creative process. A keen consumer of hallucinogens, Santana found himself in good company when arriving in New York state for his Woodstock Festival slot, greeted by equal tripper fiend Jerry Garcia. Supposedly, the Grateful Dead captain had breezily told Santana and his band they had a good 12 hours before taking the stage, and handed out some mescaline to make the wait a little more interesting.
Woodstock was many things: a cultural landmark, a totem of rock and pop mythology, but organised it wasn’t. 12 hours turned into two, and a tripped-out Santana still managed to play an electric set to nearly half a million while perceiving his guitar to writhe like a snake.
Only a psychonaut pro can tackle serpent transformations in front of a gargantuan crowd the way Santana deftly handled, although not without some pained urgency, as documented on the Woodstock concert film’s ‘Soul Sacrifice’ segment. Fact is, the ever mischievous Garcia had already dosed the guitarist the previous year, paying close attention to his Coca-Cola can when supporting the Grateful Dead in Las Vegas.
“What I didn’t know is, they knew how to put a syringe in the soda can,” Santana recalled to The New York Times in 2019. “So we played our set and left, and on the way from the airport to the plane, the hall kept getting longer and longer. The colours in the carpet and in the wall started oozing like lava. I said, ‘Uh oh, they got me.’ When I sat down on the plane, I looked out the window as we were taking off, and the Vegas lights looked like Aztec hieroglyphics. [Laughs] I said, ‘This is going to be intense.’”
Garcia rivalled even the acid-soaked Santana in lysergic stripes. Debuting his Grateful Dead live at Ken Kesey’s infamous Acid Test parties, LSD seemed to hit the young Garcia as fiercely as rock and roll or Beatlemania, a kaleidoscopic unveiling of the limitless jam sessions he and his band would win fame for.
At the very least, Garcia’s chemical freebies gave Santana the otherworldly fuel for his electric Woodstock performance, and a cosmic bond between the two, even in soda-can spiking jest.
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