Text © 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 Nin

Santana, Carlos

Santana: starter kit
If you have, by some incredible and lamentable cosmic accident, never, ever heard of anything Santana created, I suggest the album Summer Dreams (1996) to begin with. It's a compilation by Sony Music Entertainment/Columbia, comprised of Santana's best ballads from 1969 to 1995, with an introductory essay by Thomas Steinberg.

Summer Dreams songs:
1. Samba Pa Ti, 2. Europa, 3. I Love You Much Too Much, 4. Black Magic Woman, 5. Love is You, 6. Full Moon, 7. Gypsy Woman, 8. Moonflower, 9. Life is A Lady, 10. She Can't Let Go, 11. The River, 12. Bella, 13. Give Me Love, 14. Aqua Marine, 15. Meditation, 16. One With You, 17. Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)

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PICTURE GALLERIES

Santana always has a huge number of fans in Indonesia since 1970's. At least, nobody's going to give you the 'duh' look if you mention him in conversations. Around my jerkwaterish homesite, in the middle of rice fields and rivers and other such rural inconvenience, there is a leathersmith whose company's name is 'Santana', a video rental named 'Santana', a grocery that called itself 'Santana', and two music studios for rent whose frequent clients play songs from Supernatural. This is paradise for a lifelong fan like me.

Carlos Santana was born in 1947 in the Mexican border town Tijuana -- not an alien name for Indonesians in general, whose TV stations have always been in the habit of re-running bad movies about the D.E.A. He grew up in a family of (ouch!) 12. What happens to any such non-contraceptives-minded flock happened to him, unavoidably; day by day little Carlos inhaled poverty. His dad, a solo violinist who made a living from one coffee-house to another, couldn't give his kids anything they might wanted. But Carlos got his music lesson from him since he was 5 year old, until he discovered B.B. King and switched to guitars. In early 1960's he'd already made a little money playing guitar in his hometown bars.

But even the most backwaterish Asian knows you ain't gonna make it unless you get yout butts into a greyhound and reappear in California. This Santana did, too. The whole family moved to San Francisco, and Santana was lucky to have caught the eye of the impresario Bill Graham, and his Santana Blues Band got gigs that way in the new land. 1968 was Santana's major breakthru. The Woodstock Festival in New York brought him an all-American audience. He signed up with the CBS, and sold the first album Jingo (released on August 1969) over a million copies. The next album, Abraxas (October 1970) gave him international audience. After which he -- almost as a matter of course those days for musical celebrities -- became a junkie. He never woke up until the deaths of Janis Joplin and The Doors' Jim Morrison. Still the enlightenment he got was typical of celebs in his time; he looked to the East and followed an 'ascetic' guru -- something we in Asia always laughed about, since the John Lennon-George Harrison unreasonable, superficial infatuation with some similar stuff. However, maybe it worked. At least it fished Santana out of drugs and back into some sort of music. His holy teacher had no ear for 'wordly music', so Santana faithfully only jerked out 'esoteric sounds' if you can imagine what 'music of the gods' is like. Fortunately he got back on the ground afterwards and gave us sensible outcomes like Moonflower and She's Not There.

Santana's music is, actually, not the way I most of the time categorize it, not rock.

He draws a lot from traditional Latin music, jazz (started from the album Caravanserei), classic blues, the one-penny pop and jukebox stuff, and God knows what else. He can't be neatly put into any of the available genres. This line is soooo typical and has been rendered meaningless by endless repetition by all and any 'open-minded music' aspirant for ages, but this is Santana nonetheless, so listen: "I need the lot -- blues, Brazilian music, jazz, even Russian folk music or a pretty waltz. One-sidedness is not my style."

By far, anyway, he made it.

About how I came to know Santana ( in the first 5 years of my life) and why I love him most among the world's guitarists, see Stringwhangers.

Plus, he seems to release an album in every significant year of my life. Just an example, Abraxas was launched in October 1970 -- just a few days before I was born -- and the ingredients such as Samba Pa Ti and Black Magic Woman are just as fresh today as they were when I couldn't even distinguish Santana's music from my Mom's rap.

Sentaro

A cover of Piku Piku Sentaro manga book [upper pic] & the real Sentaro [below this line]. Thanks to Watanabe Tomoe.

Footnote:
It is so ****** [unprintable] hard to get anything meaningful about this manga and its creator online, although the books have been translated (thereby distributed) into several languages, including Indonesian. A usually credible search engine even prompted this on my screen once: "Did you mean Piu Piu Centaury?". Hoooboy.

Probably this sort of fate would never befall erotic manga, whose devotees keep cracking up new sites every other minute, plus maybe because Sentaro's fans are mostly unrepairably underage and their moms and dads are too busy minding their erotic manga sites to help them do anything about Sentaro. I have searched far and wide only to find a few deceased homepages, unclickable roadsigns and an unpleasant Australian geek. It doesn't help that the Japanese launch thousands of manga every year, and 'Sentaro' is a rather common name to use for characters, so getting lost in the labyrinth of irrelevant Sentaros is pardonable albeit maddening.

The site I link thru' Sentaro's thumbnail [yes, it is clickable] is the only one I could find whose content is some useful info and scanned book pages. If it is 'only' for more and larger pics, click the icon below -- it would take you to them.

I have never, and I mean never, found an "animal book" this good, and I mean good.

This one doesn't take any animal as a humanoid, doesn't give them anything out of their characters -- cats miauw still and birds just fly chirping and no caterpillar is a philosopher.

Yes, it is Japanese. Yes, it is a comic book. Yes, it goes on and on and on to Number Many. But this is the only title that clicks with the non-human-companion-keeper in me.

It is called Piku Piku Sentaro, written and drawn by a man named Tsubasa Nunoura, published by Kodansha Ltd., Tokyo, since the last years of the '90's.

Sentaro is a pet rabbit -- I really have no clue what kind is it, just as small as my 2 weeks-old kitten, lives with a young, single, long-haired comic-book writer (aha!) named Baku Kosawa, in an old rented house. Kosawa rarely goes out, never do what we dub "hanging out", and even if he does step out of the door it is likely to be a "family outing" with Sentaro, or simply to turn in work, get the groceries, and what to most caucasian eyes I know would look like "aimless walks" and such -- staying all night in an open field and do nothing but looking at the stars, strolling along a river, standing at bridges, walking through a forest-like park. Sometimes they do this with a female kitten and a little girl, Kosawa's fellow-animal-lover.

And that is all.

It tells of days they have together with occasional peace-disturbers such as a passionate big tom that fell in love with Sentaro, the owner of the house, one or two friends (never more than one at a time), and Kosawa's agent or publisher.

That is what living with animal(s) is all about.

So roughly the plots would be, like, "When The Lights Were Out Due To Storm", "When The Roof Leaked", and, of course, mentions of getting up at noon are everywhere.

I've been sort of collecting storybooks about animals (I mean mammals) as related to our species (which is the same as theirs), but never before I stumbled into such a realistic account. If you have been living with cats for 30 years, you would know what I mean -- people can't even draw or paint cats, for God's sake, correctly! Let alone tell anything about them! Well, this one is a rabbit or whatever the name is, but it really, actually, shows that the writer knows for sure what he is talking about and ink-stains his fingers for. It is an effortless dialogue with the initiated.

Nunoura Tsubasa, whose rarity of self-fluttered photographs has left no choice for desperate fans than to try to make up for that researching inconvenience. This is Nunoura according to a 16 year-old Uchikawa Jo from Osaka.

There is another Japanese artist, a woman named Takashi Takako, a sculptor, that lives that kind of life for real -- with her cat Nyamii. She makes less-than-small dolls and makes up stories about them -- I have no idea why these characters are unmistakably caucasians, and from such a distant era too (you know, kind of like the Victorian attires), but what the heck, she loves them.

I don't have to say what a dream their lives are, Kosawa's and Takashi's! (Well.....To you, that is, I guess. To me, sort of. I can't live without you-know-who, too, so he got to be inserted there. The fictional Kosawa and the real Takashi don't include such a thing.)

I bet your niece would not like this tale at all.

The S & M concert in 2000

Picture shows James Hetfield
during the concert.
Thanks to John Lee.

I'm a Metallica fan since 1988. I grew up with them; I even got their And Justice For All temporarily-tattooed on my left arm. They were almost nothing but loud, those days, yet time finally pushed those guys -- James Hetfield (vocals, rhythm guitars), Kirk Hammet (lead guitars), Lars Ulrich (drums), and Jason Newsted (bass) to quit banging at the instruments and start to make music. Otherwise I'd probably have turned to Andy Williams as I seem to catch up now with Mom's age.

In 2000 they held this concert with conductor Michael Kamen's San Francisco Symphony -- that's why it's called S & M. It was just another rock concert -- only they needed a larger stage for all those orchestral guys. The piercing lead guitar was still the way it should be. Yet, everything became more melodious, mellower, cooler, smoother, like slipping on a perfectly still lily ice.

So far it's the best of such a hybrid gig. Other aspirants couldn't transmit the same level of excellence -- more often than not, in such an attempt, the original melody-weavers got lost in the maze of the massive symphonic jungle, and/or the orchestra got itself castrated into something a little better than a jukebox for the band to play not with but simply in front of.

Maybe the feeling was only imaginary. Probably I didn't really get whatever it was to understand, if any. Perhaps the strong notion that I, within the music, taken to fly by it, was as real as some haze Billy Clinton 'never inhaled' twenty years ago.

But those matter not.

That music never stops anywhere, that there is a start to it but no end, that it is always a creation that is ever-evolving, seemed like enough.

Precisely because I don't know what it was, it came as a dream bait and, as such, an enrichment.

Stringwhangers

Stringwhangers are represented here
by Metallica's Kirk Hammet (left)
with soloist Joe Satriani (right)

I'm almost a pagan at the feet of guitar players. This is a disease I contracted when my uncle spent his weekends at our house in early seventies. He rode an old (well, at the time of course it wasn't) Yamaha bike 220 miles eastward every dusk of Fridays, and with him Carlos Santana in creaky tapes - result of too-frequent listening. The spillover got into my ears and wouldn't get out ever again.

I have to summon all of my tolerance to say I love everything within Santana's earliest albums, but I think he's the best of the lot still, no matter how worse than himself he plays. It looks so easy, so much inducing joy, his way with the strings. I always believe that a talent means it be you - no fuss, no need to attach importance, no sweat, nothing but yourself, because you make the sound, the guitar doesn't. Santana is that.

Then came Ritchie Blackmore. If I were the Queen Sheba, I'd barter the entire nation's wealth for knowing how he uses his fingers there on the strings. Santana always looks like enjoying the thing; he plays with it. But Blackmore was a serious stoned guy when I first saw him in early eighties - he played as if he was in pain, as if by whanging the strings then it would subside. His entire being was there. He dragged his listeners into himself, he built and shattered castles of air. His way is, to me, the most poetic guitar-playing.

Joe Satriani and Yngwie Malmsteen are the next rock guitarists I pay real money for. Malmsteen might be disturbing - he was typical of the eighties' glam rock, and sometimes I worried that he inhaled too much fumes of his own illusions, or too much drugs, or booze, or his mascara would bleed to blur his eyes - his obsession with gothic grandeur was in the way. But most of his songs are good. And he is good. In the era of mediocre guitarists of the nineties, looking back at him would give you a god to whom the age is not worthy a fart. Joe Satriani is a better guitarist. He plays meticulously, carefully, maybe the term 'craftmanship' can fit there. He mastered the guitar. It must do what he wants it to, correctly.

A dozen of late eighties' guitar players were virtually Satriani's 'pupils' - Steve Vai, for instance. Compared to the likes of Eddie Van Halen he rides higher waves to higher havens. I think now you know why I put them beneath Blackmore - both Malmsteen and Satriani are at a distance away from their guitars; they are a team.

The nineties have been rather arid. 'Guitar clinics' have been taking Asia over, alright -- in Jakarta, Yogya and the rock city Surabaya sessions of them are held in short intervals. But no god descends. Just someone from bands in a coma (like, Great White) come here to teach Indonesian guitarists some tricks they already knew. 1990's doesn't produce gods - paganism is to be extinct. But amidst the available stock of admittedly lesser masters of the game I single out Kirk Hammet (currently Metallica's). By the dawn of exactly 1990 he was already, to some, a god - though couldn't fulfill older shoes left onstage. Hammet is a team player, his personality (i.e. him the guitarist) is asserted enough to be recognized, but it never stands on its own, and there is a possibility that if deprived of the whole band it will perish to noiselessness. This worry is unthinkable when it comes to Santana and Blackmore, and to some degree both Satriani and Malmsteen. But Hammet is no ordinary guitarist either. He's certainly way better than most of his contemporaries.

No stringwhangers can be mentioned among the bands of this so-called new millennium. The year 2000 onward remind us of the first half of the 1980's -- it's technology that comes to play, not really the musicians in the orthodox sense of it -- which I subscribe to. And the grief in the minds of people my age (gosh!) is that the bands don't entertain; they don't even bother to wear the showy, useless unwearables like their predecessors; their principle is they must wear something worse than the sweating, over-exciting, unhealthily turned-on concert-goers. So I guess I'm not into the 21st century's rock. But among the newer bands I like Linkin Park. 'Mr. Hahn' (deejay and electronic stuff) and Mike Shinoda (rapper/emcee) who give the band its motor rely on tech like their peers, yet their first splash Hybrid Theory is an undeniably good album. Chester Bennington gives them the melodious tint in the vocal dept.

In jazz, I have no god to worship. No one meets the requirements. This view is partly built by my inability to even tolerate 'heavy jazz' - 'real jazz', some say - my ears only tune in to smooth jazz and fusion.

There in the so to speak lesser jungle is Lee Ritenour, Indonesian jazz lovers' favorite (partly because he loves us, held concerts so often here, wrote songs here, and so forth, with the band Fourplay). Ritenour isn't great, but he is more than good. His way is a bit like Satriani's - 'clinical', 'academic'. His music is so light it flys like fairies, threading on our senses - never penetrates us, just dances there and so a little distance away from us. It doesn't distract us from anything else, it accompanies us rather than conquering the air.

Peter White is the next in my list of jazz whangers. Unlike Ritenour, he weaves sounds in the brightest, loudest, colors (I don't mean 'loud' as in noises). His tunes are a little heavier that way - decorated sometimes pretty lavishly, it acquires weight Ritenour's songs don't have. This can be good and can be bad. But White is, like Ritenour, more than good. Ritenour's melody is sparkling while White's is shining. A stadium's spotlight compared to a perhaps distant star.

I also can name a couple of singers in this era of depravity of faith, who, both of them, play (rhythm) guitars. It's Everlast, who belongs to rock, and Dave Matthews, rather hard to classify but at times bordering on to real jazz.

Everlast is about power. His voice and lyrics are responsible for this impression. Maybe (oh, I admit that) I am carried away here mostly by the halo of machismo in him and his music, but even so it is hard to dismiss Everlast as nothing in particular today. Everlast might still have a long road to travel on, I guess with what he has now after the rather silly House of Pain episode of his career he can go far and secure a definite place in our future.

Dave Matthews is a more experienced player, and if I am to describe the magic in him that enlist me as a fan I probably would have to say that his voice and sound is sexy. A blasphemy to his usual fans, I know! But there is no other word that I can employ. If given the exact same theme with Everlast's - say, social injustice, problems between races, economic mess - Matthews would spin a lighter-hearted verse and wave us closer, ask us to view it from afar and while putting it into our conscience he still is going to make it a little bit bearable. "That's how it is," he might have said; "You know, we got to see it. That's the first step." Everlast, on the other hand, would grab our neck and force us to recognize how heavy the load is that would one day sink this life in the abyss. "It's our mess," he might as well have said; "Now who's gonna clean it up?" I also like Mark Knopfler that way.

Then there is Chad Kroeger. Like Matthews and Everlast, he's also the songwriter for his band (Nickelback). He's the singer, too, and the guitar player. He's not so commanding in presence like Everlast -- he's slim and easy. Matthews look like he's the manager of the show, Kroeger doesn't give any such aura of authority. I think he isn't as great as the previous two in composing lyrics, either; his are just the usual thoughts and feelings of ordinary stuff in simple English. The songs themselves are, according to some, "just the good ol' rock". But his voice is something else. I've never found any rocker so audibly sexy. He might have gotten mad hearing this, but what the heck -- it is what it is! I love him.

And there is one P.S. in this long note - Craig Chaquico is not one hell of a jazz guitarist (Earl Klugh is a bit better, according to my ears), but look at him. If it is all up to me I'd let him play anything and without even enjoying it I'd still clap my hands like insane. Sometimes.

Now my 'coda':

I was a zealous concert-goer all through the eighties and a few earlier years of the nineties. But those concerts were not some result; they were tools. Social adhesive. I had never considered those as musical experiences. When you spoke of 'the atmosphere' of a Dave Koz concert, that was what I mean: where was Dave Koz that night? You got the blinding lights, the brimming enthusiasm of the people around you, the mass anticipation of getting entertained, the vest that Koz wore, the small talk he made you roar on - undoubtedly that was a wow sort of experience, but I sever it from experiencing music. In music, Dave Koz himself has to evaporate. Once, Confucius listened to a musician in his time, so much absorbed that he couldn't tell what was it that he was eating. This, to me, is how we should use our ears. Not controlling them. They know what they're doing. My ideal kind of meeting with music is far away from the crowd and beer-stained air; exceeding 'just the two of us' - I must not exist. Like my wish when it comes to a book, a prayer, a lover, it is music that should be whenever we meet; no longer me, no longer the string-whanger, but music.

Someone told me guitar-players are loners. Maybe. Spike certainly is; so are several friends I know. But the reverse is also true.

Guitars were social stuff in my semi-slum neighborhood when I was a teenage dirtbag (or so if you asked the girl across the street). The poor kampung was winding up as the sun went down; at cross-paths and on concrete public seatees young men sat down, smoking and singing -- usually only one acoustic guitar for approximately 10 or even more persons, and the instrument was a communal property, being too expensive for them.

No need to say that what they produced was closer to the description of what noise is like, rather than sounds. My grandmother hated the guys for that. But, even though her ear was correct, I love remembering the activity (I told you I was with a band and didn't hang out with these men). They were mostly unemployed, just got out of jail, or 7-to-5 workers tired from overwork -- all in one spot, singing one song, though never in unison.

Until today, anywhere in Indonesia, if you got an acoustic guitar with you and sit somewhere, anywhere, playing it, young men would come to you like moths to the street lamp.

It doesn't matter that you might be a total stranger to them.

The strings really do weave some magic, man.

Postscript: Indonesian cities consider 'penny guitarists' an eyesore for the city management and earache for car drivers. Every traffic-light means the site for the guys (men and/or women and/or kids) to 'sell' their songs for 5 cents each time -- they just approach the cars halted by the red light and sing until they get the dime. Another m.o. is, they walk all day around homesites, singing and playing guitars from door to door to get about the same sum of money -- or nothing at all -- or dogs at their heels.

Stringwhangers © 2001 NIN, modified in 2002.

Thomas, Rob

Picture shows Thomas in Smooth
videoclip, 1999.
Thanks to Torong.

Examples of (sort of) listenable Matchbox Twenty songs are Back To Good and If You're Gone.

I don't care a straw about Matchbox 20. Really. Not even if I were 20 myself. It's an ordeal enough, having Sugar Ray all day -- flooding in from the next room in the house -- whatever sin I have committed in other lives, I don't think I deserve more punishment.

But!

Rob Thomas is another thing.

That Carlos Santana pulled him into the Supernatural project is a blessed coincidence.

The MTV-addicts outside this room have been subjecting me to such inferno like Korn's video clips -- but MTV also drags in Matchbox 20's, and these never actually failed in one matter: I've never seen anybody sings like Thomas does.

For real; I don't care whether it was a clever feat or something that springs from chemistry -- Thomas looks like giving his all whenever he opens his mouth and croons. The whole being is poured out and into even the unlistenables within Matchbox 20's newest album; the songs themselves could be anything, and I don't even talk about the voice itself -- to me what has been truly impressive is the appearance of a total Thomas when he sings.

That he gives life even into stupid songs is something. That he gives his all to it is something. I expect nothing less from any artist -- and any being.

White's studio

Picture shows Peter White (left)
with Craig Chaquico (in black tee) and Marc Antoine (sitting).

I don't know how to describe it, actually -- of course it would probably feel weird if you get into a studio while you don't have anything to do with anything there, but still I think you'd better get some firsthand experience somewhere.

My rock band, away back in the '80's, had its own studio that was rented by some amateurish bands whenever it's not occupied. As long as I can remember, we always lingered there, so honestly I don't know if our manager really got any extra cash from renting it to other bands. The jazz band I also joined around the same time did its rehearsals during the day in a joint owned by the drummer's dad. My (still) other band, all girls, didn't have anything -- we rented a studio for rehearsals. I was playing drums for this one, but too poor to afford the instruments at home -- one day, the keyboardist's dad bought the drums and we rehearsed at her house since.

So how did it feel, being in a studio?

Well, any studio I have ever entered and worked in was certainly not Peter White's nor Matchbox 20's nor Nirvana's here -- but I guess it's bound to be sort of the same kind of feeling anywhere.

It's not cool, you know.

A studio isn't a hangout; it's a workplace.

The walls were soundproof, the temperature was set to a certain degree Celcius, there were electrical cords all over the place, and other scary-looking equipments, only a certain person among us was able to make sense out of them, it was a highly specialized job for each, though this doesn't mean we couldn't swap stuff just for fun. But when it was a rehearsal then it was work. Tiring, boring, and so on. When it was somebody else's song, all we got to do was appropriating it, i.e. messing up with it, raping it or marrying it (depends on the unreliable thing called 'mood'). This took quite a time. When it was our own song, the process from writing it into the final presentable stuff was driving everybody nuts.

But the strange thing here is: in the end it was always worth the sweat and curses and repeated suicide threats.

In Jakarta, lately, there have been dozens of new studios for rent in virtually any sort of location. Most of them are barely decent, cheap enough for anyone (an hour could only costs £ 1.20). There are semi-shanty inner-city compounds with studios that are never vacant.

I live in the middle of nowhere. Rice fields are the area's most prominent feature. But here are not one but two music studios for rent; one of them is even a recording studio.

So new bands have been born this way -- teenagers that don't feel like getting into gangfights or political protests save their change to rent one of these on Sundays.

Of course the demerit of such a thing is obvious -- it could costs us too much in the form of large checks written for the ear-fixers.

But I'm among the ones who cherish this development. Whatever it might bring, even if it doesn't deliver, itself is worth a smile.