Carlos Santana: ‘If I send my abuser to hell, I’m going to hell with him’

“I’m pretty good at listening to my inner voice,” grins guitar legend Carlos Santana. At Woodstock in 1969, he says, this voice (sometimes in dialogue with God or an angel called Metatron) gave him the courage to deliver his breakout performance while so high on LSD that he thought his Gibson SG Special had “transformed into a snake”. Next, the voice promised the Mexican-born musician “experiences like you’ve never imagined, you’re going to be on the radio, you’re going to be globally recognised”.

Over four decades, the voice(s) made good and Santana’s distinctively sinuous sound coiled its way through hits from “Oye Como Va” and “Black Magic Woman” (1970) to “Smooth” (1999), sweeping nine awards at the 2000 Grammys for his Supernatural album. He’d work with music legends from Miles Davis to Michael Jackson, and find himself still on tour in 2025 while promoting a mellow new single – “Me Retiro” – with young, Grammy-winning Mexican band Group Frontero.

But “in return” for his success, Santana tells me that in 2013 his inner voices named their price. They said: “We want you to tell people what happened to you when you were a child.” Talking via video link from his home in Las Vegas, the 77-year-old takes a breath and shakes his head. “I was like, ‘Uh-ohhh.’ I was real uncomfortable with that because it’s so private and personal and almost… like… disgusting, y’know?”

Carlos Santana’s mellow new single ‘Me Retiro’ is a collaboration with young, Grammy-winning Mexican band Group Frontero (Photo: Hawk Publicity)

But in his 2014 memoir, The Universal Tone, he was frank about the sexual abuse he suffered at the hands of an American tourist in 1957. This “gringo… a cowboy from Burlington, Vermont” was visiting Tijuana and made repeated trips to see Santana’s father’s mariachi band perform, bringing presents for their 10-year-old son before offering to take little Carlos on his first trip across the American border to San Diego.

“What kid wouldn’t want to go?” he wrote. He and his siblings were “poor kids” who could see the “bright lights and nice buildings” of the US from their town and dreamed of a world they knew only from TV. So the boy got into the stranger’s car and once they had crossed the border the man began molesting him.

“I’m not sure how many times it happened,” he wrote in his memoir. “I remember it sometimes happened in a car and sometimes in a motel room. It was just so sudden – there was the surprise of it happening and an intense feeling of pleasure mixed with confusion, shame and guilt for letting it happen.”

Lacking the vocabulary to describe the crime, Santana stayed silent about the abuse (which continued until he was 12) until his mother overheard rumours about his abuser and furiously confronted her son in front of the entire family. His father said nothing. “That was the worst part of it,” he would later recall, “being angrier at my mom than at the guy who molested me. It was a negative emotional pattern that took a long time to shed.”

Although many celebrities are now open about past trauma, back in 2014, it was less common for a man of Santana’s generation – and from the more macho Mexican culture – to be so honest. But to Santana, “‘macho’ is just another word for fear”. He smiles softly, explaining that the anger that saw him estranged from his mother for a decade (he didn’t invite her to his first wedding in 1973) was also a mask for fear. “When I’m afraid I get angry,” he says. “It’s a form of protection, but now I don’t need to protect myself that way. Everyone is on this planet to graduate from the university of fear and insecurity.”

Carlos Santana began his career in the bars and strip joints of Tijuana, Mexico, aged 12, before his family relocated to San Francisco in the 60s, where he started the Santana Blues Band in 1966 (Photo: Robert Knight Archive/Redferns)

Such abstract hippy-ese has always made Santana seem a frustrating, enigmatic interviewee. Earlier this year, another British journalist compared trying to get a straight answer out of him to “trying to drive a nail through a sunbeam”. He’s also drawn ire for a 2023 onstage ramble that struck many as anti-trans (although he later apologised and tells me today he’s not anti-trans) and also for a claim this year that “hostile forces” were out to “destroy” Michael Jackson, defending him against accusations of the kind of child abuse of which he is a survivor.

I’m surprised to find spending time with him is oddly calming. There is softness in his dark eyes and fluid gestures, each gnomic pronouncement proffered with a gentle, childlike smile. I get the sense he’s more a Pollyanna-ish dreamer than a slippery evader. Never a singer, he’s always communicated via his famous fretwork, which he describes as having a “female” sound. Although he also identifies with snakes, famously using a snakeskin-covered amp and today quoting the bible verse about being “wise like a serpent” – “They represent transformation, shedding their skins. We can take poison or medicine from a snake,” he says.

When I try to push him on his defence of Jackson and ask how he squares the darker side of artists with their work, he counters with: “You can say that about anyone, from Sean Connery to Anthony Quinn to Miles Davis. Some of them didn’t have a good record of behaviour towards women.” He brings us back to a more personal experience. “My dad was an example of that as well. But they [his parents] were together for 60 years, so obviously the love they had for one another surpassed the differences.”

In the video for ‘Me Retiro’ you can see Santana’s unselfconscious passion for music is undimmed (Photo: Denise Truscello)

Born in Autlan de Navarro in 1947, Santana is the son of a charismatic, womanising musician and a fierce mother who defied her family to marry him. From his father, he learned that melodies hypnotised women, but with a mighty mother and five sisters he was raised to “respect the female” – he says his second, current wife (jazz/rock drummer Cindy Blackman Santana, who made her name with Lenny Kravitz’s band before joining Santana) will “kick your ass like a lion”.

One of seven children (he has five sisters and a brother), he recalls a childhood in which he witnessed his mother violently attacking one of his father’s lovers. At the age of five, his father taught him to play the violin, and at eight, he picked up the guitar – once he first heard that sound electrified, he was hooked. The first song he learned to play was “Apache” by English group The Shadows.

He began his career in the bars and strip joints of Tijuana, aged 12, before his family relocated to San Francisco in the 60s where he started the Santana Blues Band in 1966. The band’s trippy cocktail of rock, blues, jazz and Latin influences saw the band signed by Columbia records, who shortened its name to simply Santana and sent them into the studio to record their eponymous debut album seven months before Woodstock.

At Woodstock 1969 Santana performed while so high on LSD that he thought his Gibson SG Special had ‘transformed into a snake’ (Photo: Tucker Ranson/Archive Photos)

He can laugh, today, about taking hallucinogenic drugs (given to him by The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia) before his celebrated Woodstock performance. “I never regretted it,” he says. “I always felt it was a lesson for me. I had to say, ‘God, I cannot even do this right now,’” he mimes trying to touch his nose with his index finger, “’So, I really need you to take hold of my heart, my mind and my fingers and guide me through because I don’t want to do something embarrassing.’” He says that performance was only achieved because “I was determined and because I was in my heart. If I had been, for one second, in my mind, I would have been scared to death. I wouldn’t have been able to play.”

In the video for new song “Me Retiro”, you can see his unselfconscious passion for music is undimmed, throughout which he indulges in levels of “gee-tar” gurning, seldom seen since the 80s. His electric sound scorches through the sleepy, old-school Mexican like a long fuse as his mouth contorts. “When you are penetrating inside a note, you make a face that deals with ecstasy,” he says. It’s orgasmic? “Yes,” he nods, “that’s exactly what it is. I’m not an actor so [in the video] you see I am feeling it all the way to the centre of my heart. If you take a camera and you put it on a woman’s face when she’s having a baby, it’s the same. We are giving birth to sound, to music. The song becomes the child. A global child.”

He wrote of the “rape” of Mexico by America in his memoir but won’t be drawn on Trump’s views on the country nor on global politics more generally today. But, like a true hippy, he thinks love (and a good boogie) is the answer. “We need to have a global Woodstock in every city – Friday, Saturday and Sunday – with balloons, tacos, cotton candy and good music so we celebrate!” he insists.

“Cynical people will ask, ‘What are we celebrating?’ I say, we are celebrating two things. That we are divine and that we are a beam of light.’” Who should be on stage? Santana smiles as he mixes 60s stars with younger names. “I would choose Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Taylor Swift, Sting… Lauryn Hill, Beyoncé. I would specifically craft music that makes women brighter.”

Although he’s not into organised religion – “the church let everybody down,” he says – Santana sees his current tour as an evangelical mission spreading “kindness, compassion, mercy and forgiveness”. He tells me he has forgiven the man who abused him “because if I send him to hell, I’m going to go to hell with him. I saw him like a child with a light around him. I forgave him and I forgive myself, y’know?”

He gives me one last, sweet boyish smile. “Like a snake again, I got rid of that skin.”

Carlos Santana’s ‘Oneness’ world tour is in the UK from 18 June