The birth of the movement. Latin Rock remains one of my favorite subgenres of music, and I owe a ton of gratitude to a one Carlos Santana. A fantastic guitar player who had the vision to meld Hispanic culture with the ongoing psychedelic and hard rock movements. His group and extended family spawned many imitators, some maybe even better than anything Santana released. While Carlos deserves heaps of praise, the X-factor in the group has to be Gregg Rolie. His soulful voice, songwriting ability, and Hammond organ work is at the highest levels. The juxtaposition of bluesy hard rock soul numbers like 'Shades of Time', 'Evil Ways', 'Persuasion', 'Treat', and 'You Just Don't Care' against the percussive Latin rockers 'Waiting', 'Savor', 'Jingo', and 'Soul Sacrifice' is what makes the debut so special. Rolie was to Carlos what Roman Bunka was to Christian Burchard (Embryo). Taking a great band to a timeless one. Even though I've known this album for well for 40 years, I still managed a +1 listen out of it. It now resides in the very top tier.
Ownership: CD: 2006 Columbia (Japan). Papersleeve edition. Comes with a Disc Union promo box set that includes the first six Santana studio albums. Online acquisition (2016). I consider this box one of the treasures of the collection. The first CD has three bonus tracks taken from Woodstock.
LP: Columbia. Single sleeve. Later commodity pressing that I picked up at a local collector's garage sale for a couple of bucks (2021). I'll probably keep it because I like to have both media formats for my Gnosis 13+ albums. My first copy was a similar press purchased new at Sound Warehouse in Dallas (1983) while wrapping up high school. The CD is the primary copy for me.
1983; 6/13/16; 11/26/23 (new entry)
No comments:
Post a Comment