Accurate or not, my impression is that a lot of people believe Santana\u2014born as the Santana Blues Band and made famous by its imaginative melding of rock, Latin, jazz, and soul elements\u2014first made a strong push to get in the charts with 1999\u2019s megahit album Supernatural<\/i>. But the truth is, bandleader Carlos Santana has always been a restless musical traveler, alternating jammy excursions and esoteric experiments with more commercially inclined collections of songs.<\/p>\n
Carlos broke up the founding Santana lineup after 1972\u2019s smashingly successful III<\/i>, regrouping with a smaller ensemble for the spiritually-tinged, experimental Cavaranserai<\/i>, before making the even more jazz-and-spirituality focused Love Devotion Surrender<\/i> album with John McLaughlin. When keyboardist-vocalist Gregg Rolie chose this era as his off-ramp (to co-found Journey), Santana brought in Tom Coster, a talented jazz-fusion player and arranger, who became his chief musical partner and foil for the band\u2019s next several albums, up through 1977\u2019s Moonflower.<\/i><\/p>\n
Coster\u2019s 1978 departure coincided with Santana\u2014and one assumes Columbia\u2014making a push for a return to the band\u2019s earlier chart successes. But a decade had passed since \u201cEvil Ways,\u201d with Santana himself the sole remaining member of the original band, and success in 1978 looked different than it had in 1968. The result is what AllMusic\u2019s William Ruhlmann astutely described as \u201cone of the band\u2019s more compromised efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Inner Secrets<\/i>, Carlos and company\u2014Greg Walker (vocals), David Margen (bass), Graham Lear (drums), Chris Rhyne (keyboards), David Solberg (keyboards), Chris Solberg (rhythm guitar), Pete Escovedo (percussion), Armando Peraza (percussion), and Raul Rekow (percussion)\u2014welcomed in the frankly commercial producing team of Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter, whose previous clients included Glen Campbell, The Four Tops, The Righteous Brothers and Tavares. Lambert and Potter\u2019s attempts to meld Carlos\u2019 jammy Latin-jazz-rock tendencies with more mainstream sounds were then applied to an album featuring more covers than originals.<\/p>\n
Opener \u201cDealer \/ Spanish Rose\u201d tries to have it both ways by cross-fading the radio-friendly \u201cDealer\u201d\u2014a muscular Traffic cover\u2014into a flamenco-influenced Carlos instrumental, as too-chirpy synths trade phrases with squalls of guitar. \u201cMove On\u201d (a band original) and \u201cStormy\u201d (a cover of the Classics IV\u2019s 1968 Top 10 hit) both lean into the group\u2019s soul and r&b side, playing to the strengths of this era\u2019s lead vocalist Greg Walker, with the latter being released as a modestly successful (#32) single.<\/p>\n
Song three is where you have to look at context to understand what in the world is going on. Lambert and Potter\u2019s \u201cOne Chain Don\u2019t Make No Prison,\u201d originally written for the Four Tops, is arranged here as a Latin-inflected disco tune. The thing is, it\u2019s not terrible; you can see what they were going for, given the times and what was getting on the radio. (It\u2019s worth noting that during this same era, Bruce Springsteen wrote \u201cCover Me\u201d for Donna Summer, before electing to keep it. Say what you want about disco; it did have an influence beyond the genre itself.)<\/p>\n
Santana opens up side two with \u201cWell All Right,\u201d a catchy, anthemic cover of Buddy Holly, of all people. It\u2019s a far cry from \u201cBlack Magic Woman,\u201d but again, it\u2019s not terrible, manifesting a kind of tidal surge as it comes into the chorus that feels tailor made for radio (and yes, it was a single, reaching #69 in the US). Next up, the Lambert\/Potter\/Santana\/Walker\/Margen co-write \u201cOpen Invitation\u201d veers in a hard rock direction, with a solo that even features Carlos doing some tapping (given the year, it\u2019s hard to read this other than as a reply to Eddie Van Halen). The latter half of the track finds Santana pushing farther, taking the fire and bite that has always been his trademark and turning it up to eleven.<\/p>\n
\u201cLife Is A Lady \/ Holiday\u201d is another odd bird, an instrumental medley opening with a rather bland Lambert-penned piano ballad decorated with sustain-drenched soloing from Carlos, before the Carlos-penned second half offers a salsa-flavored Latin-jazz-rock romp. Lambert and Potter\u2019s \u201cThe Facts Of Love\u201d is the album\u2019s lowlight, a pedestrian pop-rock song with Walker\u2019s soulful lead vocal and Santana\u2019s stinging licks the only elements of note.<\/p>\n
Album highlight \u201cWham!\u201d closes things out, a percussion-driven stomper of an instrumental with some of Santana\u2019s fieriest playing on the album, alongside Hammond organ adding soul and texture. It\u2019s the one tune here that carries forward the original band\u2019s sound, in the hands of co-composers Santana, Lear, Peraza, Rekow and Escovedo.<\/p>\n
Inner Secrets<\/i> has its moments, as nearly every Santana album does; the core elements of the group\u2019s unique sound are all here, just frequently muted or modified. This album wasn\u2019t the first time Carlos Santana compromised musically in the interest of chasing tastes and chart position, and it wouldn\u2019t be the last. The tone and bite of his wailing guitar is unmistakable, but the songs here feel both less organic and less interesting than usual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":53333,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"tags":[],"artist":[5724],"rating":[5614],"class_list":["post-53414","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-santana","rating-rating-c-plus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/53414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/53414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53414"},{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=53414"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=53414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}