Santana, arguably my first musical obsession. I listened to a few of their albums quite relentlessly for a few years and they were the first band I saw live in concert thanks to my mother who was willing to cart my butt to Denver for this show, which was part of the tour for Marathon, when I was just 13.

Santana is another band from my early life that lost interest in, probably by the time I was 15 if not sooner but as I mentioned in the week 3 video if I hear some music from my past and my reaction is to tune in, to listen, then I know it still holds some significance for me and deserved to have a place in this series. I am quite certain that listening to Santana opened my ears to Latin music and percussion that I would later explore as a musician once I reached university.

An interesting piece of my musical history that I rarely think about is that Stainless Steel, a group I helped create and lead and with whom I played and recorded actually was on the bill of a Kansas City summer music festival with Santana just a day or two after Stevie Ray Vaughan died in 1990.

With this week I begin talking about the music that I specifically chose or was recommended to me as opposed to the music I was just exposed to in my early environment at home and as I say in the video this is the beginning of an extremely rich period of musical discovery. 30 of the 52 posts in this series, starting with this one, are referring to music I was discovering and listening to between 1980 and 1986. Looking back I can't believe that my friends and I managed to take in all that different music in such a short period of time. Time was moving really slow for us in some way that allowed us to have remarkably rich musical experiences that were sometimes widely varied in terms of genre.

Hope you enjoyed this weeks post. Please leave me comments and reflections below and tune in next week.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santana_(band)