Carlos Santana: 'My guitar is my best lover, ever'

New documentary by Rudy Valdez, “Carlos”, chronicles his meteoric rise

NEW YORK (AP) — “Take no prisoners — peacefully,” Carlos Santana sometimes tells his bandmates before taking the stage.

“I don’t like to coast. I don’t like to rope-a-dope,” Santana says. “I want to get in the middle of the ring and knock the sucker out. That way the referee can’t steal the fight from me.”

Santana, 75, can still whip a crowd into a frenzy like few others. He’s been doing it since he stormed onto the San Francisco scene in the late ’60s. He left the Woodstock audience dazed and stunned before the first Santana record came out.

The new documentary by Rudy Valdez, “Carlos,” which is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival and will be released this fall in theatres by Sony Pictures Classics, chronicles the meteoric rise of one of the most singular guitar players in rock history. The critic Robert Christgau once wrote:

“He is less a man of style than of sound, a clear, loud, fluent sound that cleanses with the same motion no matter how often that motion is repeated.”

Santana, who launches the nationwide 1001 Rainbows Tour in Newark, New Jersey, on June 21, recently spoke by Zoom from his Bay Area home in California. He’s been in San Francisco since his family (his father played the violin in a mariachi band) moved from Mexico in the 1960s.

“The Bay Area definitely attracts characters, you know?” said Santana. “Like Minnesota Fats or Les Paul. Rascals. I call them Divine Rascals.” Santana, speaking with a panoramic photograph of the Woodstock performance hanging on the wall behind him, reflected on his journey, his sound and some of the demons he’s faced along the way.

“I have nothing but good memories,” said Santana. “I have developed selective celestial amnes