Linda, you're mobbing me!!!! OK OK OK!!!! I'll listen to it more often; I know you were Airto's student (duuude, awesome) and can't blame you for sewing a scarlet letter on me...
Jeez, doncha know NEVER to argue with the Quad Goddess :kitty: ?!? Are you mad, man ?!?
Ed, I wish you were a doctor so I could go with your prescription to the pharmacy and get a discount for beer and Tullemore D.E.W.!!!! Excellent recommendation , doctor....Caravanserai was a Top Ten LP? I agree with you , it's a "hermetic" LP...Thanks for putting it into perspective....
Anytime, my good fellow...:brew
To put things in perspective, my belief is that Santana seized their opportunity to truly experiment and indulge where others (think Chicago) actually, with time and success, regressed and basked in having hits and #1 albums (and of course it later happened to Carlos, since later albums and perhaps most of all SUPERNATURAL were very successful as 'comebacks' of sorts, but little but a shadow of past work and an attempt, with that one, to be 'modern,' ugh...). Also remember that Santana was a serious signing by Columbia, which placed a lot of ads early in the wake of "Jingo" which was released just in advance of their debut album. Their appearance at Woodstock was one of the few by a 'new' act (Bert Sommer and Sha Na Na also fit into that rubric for 1969) and it turned out to be an important showcase for them, though the success of SANTANA was primarily due to word-of-mouth by fans and critics telling of its quality and vibrance (and it holds up today as timeless in a way that Creedence also was but that ABBEY ROAD is not). Publicity and getting a hit out of an edited "Evil Ways" didn't hurt, either; nor did the success of SANTANA ABRAXAS and III and their respective Top 40 singles. That was an early key: this was an exciting yet commercially oriented band that might have first seemed a novelty due to the latin influence of their percussion unit but was keyed by a natural urge to rock and Carlos' love of the blues. As time went on, it was obvious that at least some within the band loved Miles, too; or at least Miles' sense of doing-my-own-thing stubborness and authority. CARAVANSERAI was made, IMO, in that spirit, a band beginning to make music strictly for itself and, if they got a hit out of it, fine; if not, that was fine too. And so it went with many albums to come, starting with WELCOME. This might not have been what their record company wanted but, in the Miles' fashion, a past track record and a certain prestige became attached to Santana, and the intricacy and imagination of their music, IMO, actually got better and beyond the obvious. But like Miles and Trane, that also often required more intent and repeated listening on our part; I know it did for me, since I was used to the hits and a more blatantly commercial sound. Trust me (and Linda) when I say that just relaxing and drinking in this set of albums--and then going back to them a bit later, perhaps--should do the trick. If they were lesser works we wouldn't be discussing them at such length, but then, there was a time when Trane's Impulse! classics were regarded not necessarily as works of genius (as they were later), but as simply exploratory and eclectic from a man considered committed to finding his own sound and connection to God and unconcerned about what anyone else thought. I think Santana's albums from this period, while not great, meet the test of the recording aesthetic of Miles and Trane (any other assumption would then presume that the band and Columbia believed that this
was commercial pop/rock material and that the public would embrace it as it did CARAVANSERAI, which is absurd as a premise. Everyone involved must have known they were not only challenging themselves to new musical directions).
So just sit back and enjoy, ignore everything I just wrote....
ED