Earlier this year, Sammy Hagar claimed that he’d written his latest single in a dream with the late Eddie Van Halen. The story met with bucketloads of skepticism by many, but it turns out Hagar isn’t the only musician to have received contact from the dead.
“I get visitations from Miles Davis sometimes, as well as B.B. King,” Carlos Santana says in a new, eye-opening interview with Guitar World. “Sometimes a dream is not a dream; someone has come back to communicate with you.”
That was the case, he believes, when Stevie Ray Vaughan entered his dreamscapes from beyond the grave.
“He was saying, ‘Carlos, where I am, I don’t have any fingers; I am only spirit.’ He missed putting his fingers on a guitar and making the speakers push air,” Santana recalls of his supernatural visitation. “He told me to call his brother Jimmie and ask him to lend me his amp, the #007 Dumble, and then play it with a Strat so he could feel it through me.
“You know that Ghost movie with Whoopi Goldberg?” he asks. “There’s a part where a ghost comes into her body so he can feel. That’s what Stevie was doing. He wanted to utilize my body and hands because he missed playing guitar.”
More cynical readers may view this tale as a rather elaborate plan to get his hands on one of the most coveted amps in history. It’s safe to say Jimmie Vaughan wasn’t completely sold at first, either. In fact, it was only after SRV’s guitar tech, René Martinez, revealed he’d had the same dream that Jimmie relinquished possession of the historic tube amp.
“The last person to borrow it was John Mayer,” Santana says. “Let’s just say Jimmie doesn’t loan that thing out very easily.”
As for the amp? Carlos says, “[It] sounded like everything I love about Peter Green when he played a certain kind of heavenly blues.”
Pressed for more recollections of the amp’s tones, the Mexican guitarist thinks back to a conversation he once had with his mother.
“She once asked me, ‘Mijo, do you like Whitney Houston?’ and I said, ‘Of course,’” he begins. “She then told me that when Whitney sang, her voice would become a legion of angels. I think my mom knew what she was talking about. Sometimes when you play, you channel things.
I feel like I’m like John F. Kennedy International Airport, and all these musicians are landing on me and sharing things.”
Carlos Santana
“I feel like I’m like [John F. Kennedy International Airport] and all these musicians are landing on me and sharing things,” he adds of his clairvoyant abilities. “I have to figure out what it all means.”
For a time, SRV's other famed Dumble amp, the Dumbleland 300 SL that dominated the Texas Flood sessions, was under the care of Ben Harper. Then he found a Dumble of his own at a yard sale, and when following the rite of passage of asking Alexander Dumble for permission to use the amp, the near-mythical amp builder uncovered its unlikely back story.
In related news, Santana has recalled the time he ignited the strangest of feuds with Gene Simmons. He’s also discussed details of his 1999 album, Supernatural, the record that finally saw him give Tube Screamers a try, and he's revealed who convinced him to do it.
