Price paid: £3 (Rat Records, Camberwell)

I can’t say for sure readers, but I’m guessing that if you too enjoy browsing in second hand record shops, you’ll be used to seeing this album pop up like a bad penny on a fairly regular basis.

On at least 147 separate occasions, I have seen it in the racks for a fairly low price, and thought: “Wow, what the heck is that? Looks pretty far out!”

Due to the cover design and the record company’s infuriating refusal to actually acknowledge that this is a Santana record, it generally takes me at least thirty seconds of squinting at the text on the spine before I realise that it is, in fact, a fucking Santana record. At which point I tend to think, “ugh! A fucking Santana record,” and send it back from whence it came, my hopes of a crazy psychedelic bargain dashed, and a crucial minute or so of browsing lost.

When I fell into this trap once again on a visit to Camberwell’s estimable Rat Records earlier this year (most varied and unpredictable stock (& pricing) in London, guaranteed) I thought, y’know what, I’m sick of this – I’m actually going to just BUY the damned thing and settle the matter once and for all.

Thinking back further, I’m not really sure when my instinctive dislike of Carlos Santana first originated. I’m pretty sure that I recall hearing ‘Black Magic Woman’ on the radio as a teenager, and feeling as if my ears were folding up and trying to tunnel their way back inside my head from sheer embarrassment. So, there’s that. I also remember (and, I should stress, quite possibly MISREMEMBER) reading an interview quote from him somewhere in which he was carrying on like a right chauvinist arsehole, boasting about “balling chicks” in some back street brothel or something. So I was all like, man, fuck this bloke and his holier-than-thou cosmic bodhisattva bullshit.

Although the idea of fusing psychedelic rock with Latin rhythms ostensibly sounds like an admirable project to undertake, the bits and pieces of Santana music I’ve subsequently encountered over the years have similarly failed to impress. Heard in passing, his / their stuff just comes across as bland and slightly cheesy, with an unappealing ‘cabaret crooner’ vibe to it, and a whiff of smug, hippie entitlement so stifling it makes The Eagles sounds like Discharge by comparison. Is that fair? I dunno. Just my fleeting first impressions.

In recent years however, I’ve vaguely begun to consider the possibility that I might have written old Carlos off unjustly. After all, I love forward-thinking, jazz-inflected ’60s rock, I love twiddley guitar-playing and I love pseudo-mystical psychedelic hoo-hah. There’s got to be at least something here for me, right? I mean, a guy who was friends with Alice Coltrane surely can’t be all bad, and think I recall reading an interview with Nick Mitchell from the excellent Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, in which he stated that he liked nothing better of an evening than to pour a big glass of red and jam along with some Santana albums [again, could be a total misquote – I should check]. (1)

Contemplating the copy of ‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ as it sat before me in the shop, I figured that, well, if he’s going to be doing cool, psychedelic stuff anywhere, it must surely be on this mysterioso, spirituality themed gatefold LP with a never-ending rank of gigantic, alien Buddha statues disappearing into the eternal horizon on the front, right…?

So I paid my £3 and took my choice.

This ostensibly being a music review, you’ll naturally want to know what I thought about it.

So, let’s get to that, shall we?

Ok.

‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ is terrible.

Well alright – it’s mostly terrible. It does have its moments, which I will outline below, but the bad far outweighs the good, so far as I'm concerned.

Taken as a whole, this album speaks of how completely lost the hippie / new age generation had become by the dread year 1979. Almost every creative decision on it feels like a blunder, a bad move, an awkward “ooh, sorry guys – not sure about that” moment. I can’t speak for their earlier work, but by this point I’d venture to suggest, Santana and his pals were up an aesthetic shit creek sans paddle. Even taken as pure kitsch though, it’s difficult to find much to enjoy here.

Overall, feels like a relic of some *other* 1979 that our parents and cultural guardians tried to protect us from. They probably thought it had been taken out the back and shot long ago by some gaggle of NME / Village Voice writers, but here I am, all these years later, senselessly subjecting myself to it for the sake of three small pound coins.

Actually, I was disappointed right from the outset when I realised that this record is made up of lots of little bits and pieces, immediately nixing my hopes for some meditational / long-jammin’ kind of stuff, but I’ll at least admit that the first part of side one – recorded live in Osaka! - is fairly ok.

There are some bells, some keyboard that sounds like the accompaniment to an ice-skating demonstration, and some slick, Mahavishnu-style fusion jamming – great drumming and super lively bass, and there are a few nods to ‘Bitches Brew’ here and there, but the overall feel is disappointingly bland. Carlos’s tone just sounds horrible here, as if he were playing through some kind of cheap midi guitar emulator or something, and his up-and-down-the-scales type chops ain’t exactly knocking me out either.

Thereafter, the same performance briefly takes a sharp left turn toward what I can only describe as a kind of Copacabana supper club cod-calypso vibe, as the big S duels with a jaunty boogie-woogie pianist and the dungeons & dragons keyboards continue to work their dubious magic in the background. Ye gods.

You’ll appreciate that I speak as someone whose tastes have shifted primarily toward the appreciation of pre-1975 music and modern derivations thereof when I say: THIS is why punk had to happen – these few minutes, right here. It’s almost enough to make me cry ‘uncle’ and go back to glowering away with my Au Pairs and PiL records for the rest of eternity, like all those journalists said I should.

After some “atmospheric interlude on a Dio album” bombast, our tour through the darkest realms of bad taste continues with ‘Silver Dreams & Golden Smiles’, a vocal ballad – Greg Walker on the mic, ladies & gents – so monumentally awful it frankly beggars belief that anyone would think to present it as part of a suite of purportedly spiritual, consciousness-expanding type material. It’s cocktail hour at the Holiday Inn, folks!

Thankfully, ‘Oneness’, which opens side two, is actually pretty great – a gentle organ drone, layered over the sound of waves lapping at the shore, over which Carlos drops some smouldering, controlled licks, gradually building up into a convincingly impassioned, over-driven wig-out, followed by a startling interjection from some wailing, fire-alarm-on-venus synths. Definitely the album’s highlight, and very much worth a punt, if you can find a way to enjoy it in isolation.

Perhaps buoyed by this, I also quite enjoyed the next track, ‘Life is Just a Passing Parade’, another vocal song with a muscular, Stevie Wonder pastiche funk arrangement. It’s a bit of the OTT side, with all kinds of gross, unnecessary flourishes from the players, but it’s lively and interesting enough for me to give it a pass. Ripping solo too. If Prince had recorded this a decade later, we’d all be worshiping at its feet, most probably.

Of course this upswing can’t last, and it doesn’t. Routine ‘Laguna Sunset’ acoustic meanderings, then we’re back to the Greg Walker cocktail hour for some overcooked, string-enhanced Latin vibes that feel about as authentic as a junior clerk in the CBS accounts department rocking a sombrero.

Next up, we have a reading of a poem composed by Santana’s guru, Sri Chinmoy, performed by a woman who sounds about as enthralled by this prospect as I am.

More jaunty, hi-fi demo fusion noodling follows. My god, will this thing never end?

Yes. Ok. It just ended. I feel as if I could have listened to ‘Double Nickels on the Dime’ about seventeen times in the time that took, but it’s finally over.

Jeez.

So ok – in retrospect, I’ll freely admit that it might well have been unfair of me to try to introduce myself to the work of a ‘60s era musician using an album that he recorded at the dawn of the 1980s, having changed his name whilst apparently in thrall to the teachings of Jamaica, N.Y. based spiritual leader.

I mean, let’s face it, there were precious few stars of Santana’s generation who were really keeping body & soul together and producing vital work at this point in time. Compare this thing to the sorry plight of some of his contemporaries in fact, and his fans might at least have taken heart from the fact that their hero was apparently living clean, feeling happy, and playing painstakingly accomplished virtuoso noodling to beat the band. CSNY fans should be so lucky.

At the time of writing, I’m kind of torn as to whether or not I can really afford the two centimetres of shelf space that this LP will take up in my collection, or whether it goes straight to the charity shop bag. If any readers would like to point me in the direction of some Santana stuff that I might actually like however, or to generally make a case for his defence, or whatever else – the floor is yours, friends. Comments box below.

For the time being though:

 ‘Oneness: Silver Dreams, Golden Reality’ by Devadip Carlos Santana gets a THUMBS DOWN.



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(1) The interview I was thinking of is here. Mitchell says, “Santana's early groups have been a big tower of joy for me,” but he does not explicitly say the glass of red n’ jamming thing I wrote above. Not sure where I got that from. Apologies, anyway.

Labels: album reviews, Carlos Santana, old LPs