Carlos Santana Played a Student Guitar in a London Pub the Night Before Wembley — Nobody Was Ready

Carlos Santana Played a Student Guitar in a London Pub the Night Before Wembley — Nobody Was Ready

Carlos Santana and David Gilmore met for a drink in a London pub the evening before Santana’s Wembley Arena show. And what happened when someone handed Santana a guitar at the bar left 30 people in that room completely unable to speak. It was the evening of Tuesday, July 21st, 1992, and London was carrying the specific warmth of a good English summer.

 Warm enough to leave a jacket at the hotel. cool enough by 9:00 that the pub had become genuinely pleasant in the way that only British pubs become pleasant on the handful of evenings per year when the temperature justifies it. The George on Great Portland Street had been hosting musicians, industry people, and the adjacent human traffic of the BBC’s nearby recording studios for long enough that unusual customers were simply part of its texture.

 Nobody who worked there was easily surprised. Carlos Santana had arrived in London two days earlier with his touring band as part of the European leg of the Milabro tour. Wembley Arena was sold out for the following night. 17,000 tickets gone in under two hours when they went on sale the previous March, a fact that still seemed mildly implausible to the venue’s production manager, who had been booking shows there for 11 years and had learned not to predict which tours would sell that way.

 Santana at this point in his career occupied a particular position in the landscape of British music fandom. Not the commercial peak he would reach again later in the decade, but the deep specific reverence that occurs to musicians who are understood to have contributed something genuinely irreplaceable to the vocabulary of their instrument.

He had been in London before many times, and he had his own private geography of the city. The restaurant in Soho, where the lamb was always right. The record shop on Wardor Street, whose owner pulled things from the back for him that he couldn’t find elsewhere, and certain pubs, where the atmosphere was right for the particular kind of pre-show evening he preferred, which was not loud or celebratory, but quiet and grounding.

The George on Great Portland Street was one of those pubs. He had first been brought there in 1976 by a promoter who knew that it kept decent hours and didn’t make a fuss. And he had come back on subsequent visits without needing to be brought. David Gilmore was not there on any official capacity.

 He was there because he and Santana had known each other since the late 1960s when both were navigating the specific social world of musicians who found themselves through the accelerating commercial machinery of rock music in each other’s orbit with increasing frequency despite having almost nothing in common stylistically.

 Gilmore’s approach to the guitar was English in the way that weather is English, atmospheric, patient, built around the sustain of a held note and the specific quality of silence around it. Santana’s approach was something entirely different. A synthesis of Afrouban rhythm, Chicago blues, and a modal sensibility drawn from John Col Train that produced a sound so personal it was immediately identifiable to anyone who had heard it once.

 They were not influences on each other. They were two people who had taken the same basic instrument in directions so different that the instrument itself sometimes seemed like a coincidence rather than a common ground. And yet they got on. They always had. There was a mutual respect between them that had nothing to do with stylistic similarity and everything to do with a shared seriousness about what they were each trying to do.

 Gilmore had told an interviewer once that Santana was one of the few guitarists he had ever heard whose tone was entirely his own. Not assembled from influences, but arrived at through some interior process that nobody else had access to. Santana had said something similar about Gilmore in different words in a different interview in a different year.

 Gilmore arrived at the George at 8. Santana was already there in a corner booth with two members of his road crew and a glass of water. They greeted each other with the specific ease of people who see each other infrequently enough that the reunion is always slightly felt, but frequently enough over the decades that no particular ceremony attaches to it.

They ordered drinks, Gilmore a pint of bitter, Santana another water, and talked. What they talked about for the first hour would not have been remarkable to anyone listening. They talked about the Wembley show, about the set Santana was planning to play, about certain songs he was considering including, and certain songs he decided to leave out and why.

 They talked about recording. Santana had been in the studio in San Francisco earlier that year, and Gilmore was beginning to think about what would eventually become the division bell. And both men had things to say about the experience of making records at the point in a career when the commercial expectations had accumulated enough weight to affect the creative process.

They talked about a guitarist they both knew who had recently died and whose passing had reminded them both of things they tried not to think about too often when they were working. The pub filled up as the evening progressed. The George on a Tuesday in summer attracted a particular mixture of people.

 A table of BBC producers who came in at 9ine and moved through several rounds with the practiced efficiency of people doing their entertaining on expenses. A group of music students from the Royal Academy two streets away who occupied the bar end and argued about things at the volume that music students occupy and argue.

 and the general ambient traffic of a neighborhood pub that was neither a tourist destination nor a local secret. Simply a good pub in a good location that had been there long enough to be trusted. Nobody in the pub recognized either of them for the first 90 minutes. This was not remarkable in 1992 in a way that it might be now.

 The mechanisms of instant public recognition were different, less ubiquitous, dependent on proximity to the specific celebrity culture that surrounded certain venues and certain moments, rather than the pervasive visual familiarity that social media later created. Gilmore was not a face that casual passers by would necessarily place without context.

Santana in a corner booth in a black shirt and dark jacket without the stage lighting and the instrument that accompanied his public image was simply a man in his mid-40s with distinctive cheekbones and quiet eyes who happened to be having a drink with someone. The guitar arrived by accident in the way that guitars sometimes arrive in pubs near music venues.

 One of the music students at the bar end had brought an acoustic guitar, a battered Yamaha FG-180 that had been played through several years of student accommodation and had developed in that process the specific character of instruments that are used constantly by people who care about the music more than the instrument.

 The student, a 22-year-old named Michael Ashworth, who was studying jazz composition and who had brought the guitar because his flatmate had asked him to play at a birthday gathering somewhere else that evening before he ended up at the George. Had been playing quietly at the bar for the better part of half an hour. Folk songs, jazz standards, the kind of quiet picking that blends into pub ambience without demanding attention.

 One of Santana’s road crew had noticed the guitar 20 minutes earlier and mentioned it. Santana had looked over and looked back and said nothing. Then somewhere around 10:00, he said to Gilmore, “Do you think he’d let me have a look?” Gilmore went to the bar and spoke to Michael Ashworth for approximately 45 seconds.

 Ashworth later said in the account that eventually made its way into music circles through the decades that followed that he had agreed immediately and had not yet understood what he was agreeing to. Gilmore had not introduced himself. He had simply said that his friend at the corner table played a bit and wondered if he might have a look at the guitar.

 Santana held the Yamaha for a moment in the specific way that experienced players hold unfamiliar instruments. learning its weight and balance, pressing his left thumb along the back of the neck to read its profile, plucking each string individually to hear its voice and the guitar’s response before forming any opinion about what it might offer. Then he began to play.

 What came out of that battered student guitar in the back corner of the George on Great Portland Street at approximately 10:15 on a Tuesday evening in July 1992 was the thing that the people present for the following 40 minutes would spend the rest of their lives trying to describe accurately to people who had not been there.

 It was not a performance. Santana was not playing for the room. He was playing in the specific mode that serious musicians sometimes enter when they have picked up an instrument in a relaxed context and have let themselves simply follow where the music wants to go, not toward any conclusion or display, but along whatever internal current the moment presents.

 The music began quietly and with the particular quality that comes when someone who has been talking for two hours finally stops talking and does the thing they actually are. There was a shift in the quality of Santana’s attention when he began his eyes closed or merely closed and his body settled in the way that bodies settle when they stop performing their relationship to the world and begin simply inhabiting it.

What came through his hands was not adapted to the instrument’s limitations. He played the Yamaha FG-180 the way he would have played any guitar, which is to say as though the only relevant conversation was the one happening between his hands and whatever music existed before the instrument was put in them. But it was Carlos Santana.

 And even in that private mode, the thing that came out of his hands was immediately, unmistakably his. the tone, that specific singing sustain, the VBR that seemed to breathe rather than oscillate. The particular way his phrasing created forward motion through rhythm rather than velocity, was present in full, even through the modest capacities of a student acoustic guitar that had never been designed to carry anything remotely like this.

 The people at the bar end had stopped talking within 30 seconds. The BBC producers had turned in their chairs by the time a minute had passed. The barman, who had been restocking glasses with the automatic efficiency of someone performing a task he has performed 10,000 times, had stopped restocking and was holding a glass in each hand while he listened.

 Gilmore sitting across the table listened with the expression of someone who has heard this music before and nevertheless finds it completely absorbing. At some point nobody who is present could say precisely when he picked up the guitar that Santana’s road crew member had quietly retrieved from the case by the table and began to play alongside.

 not leading, not following exactly, finding the space that Santana’s playing left available, and occupying it with the kind of melodic patience that was entirely his own. Long phrases, held notes, the particular Gilmore quality of making time feel slower than it is. The combination was not what you might expect from two guitar players with such different musical roots.

 There was no competition in it, no negotiation for territory, none of the complex social choreography that sometimes attends collaborations between musicians of equal stature who have not played together before. They had apparently found within the first few minutes a mode of interaction that was more like conversation than performance.

Call and response certainly, but also the thing that happens in good conversations where both people are genuinely listening rather than simply waiting for their turn. Santana played something that curved and spiraled upward, and Gilmore answered with something that descended to meet it. Gilmore held a note for so long that the room seemed to hold its breath alongside it, and Santana played a rhythm beneath it that made the sustained note feel rhythmic without disturbing its stillness.

People near the bar had turned their chairs to face the booth. The BBC producers at their table had gone completely quiet. A woman who had come in 10 minutes earlier for what was clearly intended to be a quick drink on her way elsewhere had sat down without removing her coat and was sitting with both hands wrapped around her glass, not drinking.

 For 35 minutes in a pub that held fewer than 50 people, Carlos Santana and David Gilmore played together. No amplification, no stage, no audience that had paid to hear them. Just a corner booth and a bar and two guitars, and the specific alchemy of two musicians with nothing to prove to each other, finding out what happened when they shared a musical space without the apparatus of professional performance around them.

 Michael Ashworth, the student whose guitar had started it, sat at the end of the bar throughout. He did not move. He did not take notes. He did not crucially attempt to record it on anything. Partly because recording devices in 1992 were not the pervasive pocket objects they later became. And partly because the atmosphere of the room had created the specific social understanding that recording this was not what you did.

 The way you do not photograph a private conversation even when you are present for it. when it ended when Santana set the guitar down on the seat beside him and said something to Gilmore in a low voice that nobody nearby caught. The George on Great Portland Street was quiet in the way that small spaces are quiet after something large has happened in them.

People were not quite ready to resume their previous activities. Several people at the bar had the expression of those who know they have been somewhere specific and are not yet sure how to re-enter the ordinary world that sits on the other side of the door. Santana and Gilmore finished their drinks and left together.

 They were due at Wembley the following evening. Santana to play it. Gilmore to watch from the wings at Santana’s invitation which he had extended at some point during the evening and which Gilmore had accepted. Michael Ashworth retrieved his guitar from the seat where Santana had left it, put it back in its case, and went to the birthday gathering an hour and a half late.

 He did not say much about why he was late. He was not sure at that particular moment that he had the words for it. If this story of Carlos Santana, David Gilmore, and the Tuesday evening in a London pub that 30 people have never quite been able to explain to anyone else moved you, subscribe and hit that thumbs up button. Share this with anyone who understands that the most extraordinary music sometimes happens in the smallest rooms for the smallest audiences with no plan and no record.

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