By David Holmberg
Daily Bruin Staff
After digging through over 30 years of his own musical history,
keyboardist/vocalist Gregg Rolie has discovered his roots. One of
the co-founding members of both Santana and Journey, Rolie recently
released his third solo album, “Roots,” an
appropriately titled excavation and revisiting of a musical genre
that he helped to create in the 1960s.
Looking back, the seeds of his future style were planted before
Rolie knew it.
“I was introduced to Latin music at an early age,”
said Rolie. “My parents listened to Herb Albert and the
Tijuana Brass, and I always liked Dave Brubeck and the
Beatles.”
But it took more than a strong musical background to start
things growing.
“I took piano lessons when I was 10 and I hated it,”
he laughed. “But I always liked music, and bands in high
school were the thing so that’s kind of how I got
started.”
But it was in Northern California in the late 1960s that a
rather haphazard encounter with Carlos Santana would fertilize the
budding Gregg Rolie’s fate as one of rock’s leading
musicians.
“I met Carlos in a tomato patch. One of the guys in our
band heard Carlos playing at the Fillmore on local’s night,
when just musicians from the area play, and he later went out
searching for him and found him working at a burger joint. So we
were playing together and, I guess, making too much noise and the
police came. Carlos and I ran and hid in the nearby tomato
field.”
“That was the beginning of the band and I stayed with them
from 1967 through 1971,” Rolie added.
It was an amazingly diverse band, both culturally and musically.
This lent itself to an atmosphere of experimentation, where
anything was possible.
“We tried everything we came across,” said Rolie.
“We adapted our music to congas and anything we knew. There
was an animal drive to the music, with songs like “˜Oye Como
Va.’ We played the stuff we liked.”
The hybrid of styles created a sound that was astonishingly new
and one that remains fresh and exciting even today. But eventually,
despite a slew of Santana hits with Rolie on the lead vocals,
including “Black Magic Woman” and “Evil
Ways,” the flowering band started to wither.
“Santana was too much too soon,” he said. “The
music kept it together; it was the common thread. I didn’t
know much about any of them personally, and we all had very
different cultural backgrounds. It was amazing we even pulled it
off.”
Founding one legendary rock band is enough for even the most
ambitious musicians. But not Gregg Rolie. In addition to Santana,
he also helped form the jazz-rock fusion band, Journey, in the
early ’70s. He stayed with the band until the ’80s.
“By then I wanted a family, so I stopped playing,”
explained Rolie. “I was burnt out, and just didn’t have
anything more to give.”
“Journey was harder because it was more structured and
more vocal, but I became a better writer,” continued Rolie.
“We started Journey in 1973 and built it from the ground up.
It went from being instrumental to very vocal. But Santana was just
about the groove and the playing.”
It was this same intuitive feel and musical vibe that Rolie
tried and successfully transplanted on his latest solo album,
“Roots.”
“I set out to do some acoustic stuff in ’98 after
playing with Santana again at the Rock “˜n’ Roll Hall of
Fame induction,” Rolie explained. “I didn’t care
anymore about the label, I just cared about if I liked it, and
because of that the music came alive.”
“There was no pressure,” he continued. “I just
kept adding, tried this and that, like the way it used to
be.”
The resulting album is a healthy and musically diverse garden of
songs.
Most importantly, it retains the sought after
“groove” that was pioneered by Rolie and company during
the heyday of Santana.
With his roots once again in place, Gregg Rolie has no where to
go but up.
Gregg Rolie’s newest album “Roots,” is
currently available at major record stores. A future tour is also
being planned, but exact dates are unknown due to the tragic events
of Sept. 11.