rastic change of moving from the small, quiet town of Autlan to the humming, thriving boom town of Tijuana brought a renewed hope and opportunity for a new life. Both for Carlos and his family. The eight-year old Carlos quickly left the violin for the guitar, studying and emulating the sounds of B.B. King, T-Bone Walker and John Lee Hooker. Soon he was being asked to join local bands like the "T.J.'s", where he added a unique touch and feel to his own renditions of all the great songs of the 1950's. As he continued to play with different bands along the busy "Tijuana Strip", he not only started to perfect his style and sound, but actually started bringing home enough money to really help his family. His future looked promising. In 1960, Carlos' family moved to San Francisco while Carlos stayed in Tijuana for another year to make extra money until his family was settled. However, he soon found himself amid the multicultural atmosphere of San Francisco, with all of its diverse influences and musical styles. It was here that Carlos would find what he had been searching for, as if destiny had brought him to the right place at the right time. For the next five years, Carlos continued to evolve his own unique style of music that would later identify him as one of the most distinctive, innovative musicians of our time. In 1966, the music of Carlos Santana exploded on the streets of San Francisco with the debut performance of the Santana Blues Band. For the next two years, the Santana Blues Band was catapulted by a wave of popularity that would take them from the stage of San Francisco's Fillmore West, to that historical performance in 1969 before 500,000 at the Woodstock Festival in New York. Carlos Santana had arrived, and with him, an uncompromising spirit and dedication to his music that would affect and mark people's lives for the next quarter century. Always changing, always searching, always growing--yet always consistently and clearly C...
