Jet Airliner, Fly Like an Eagle, The Joker, Rock 'N Me, Take the Money and Run, Jungle Love etc - all in my head, since I can't actually hear through my left ear today after last night's Steve Miller Band/Carlos Santana concert.
A very good night (with Steve's band on stage for about 1.5 hours and then Santana on for another 2), except that the guy on the desk had the PA pushed past distortion point through the first part of Santana's set, hence the hearing loss.
The highlight for me was seeing and hearing Steve play with Santana on a couple of pieces, including an
hommage to Cream (Sunshine of Your Love, of course - a much livelier outing than the Rob Thomas duet Carlos did on "Guitar Heaven"). If you needed a wedding band to do Eric Clapton covers, you couldn't go much past these guys
. Santana has that trademark, quite unmistakeable sound and a flair for pyrotechnical display, whereas Miller, the consummate professional, can do absolutely anything with a guitar - (and has been, for a bit over 50 years). Miller's attention to the sound of his various guitars - and his control of all of them - is brilliant.
It was also good to hear Miller play three numbers, unaccompanied, on his steel string acoustic guitar. Among those, he sang a lovely version of Wild Mountain Honey, although realising that I was hearing it without Norton Buffalo's beautiful harmony singing for the first time (Norton sadly passed away a couple of years ago) was a sad moment. Norton's replacement, Sonny Charles (who himself was an R&B stand-out with the Checkmates in the 60's, even before Miller's group first seriously charted) is, however, a classic blues frontman and a fine singer in his own right. Of course, Sonny doesn't play harmonica as well, like Norton did, but there's not too many who can do both well.
Santana played all the usual things (slipping in the theme from "Waltzing Matilda" to the solo from "Black Magic Woman" and "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" into "Soul Sacrifice - no mean feat, frankly). His touring band is seriously hot (the usual Santana wall of percussion, Tommy Anthony helping out on guitar - not that Carlos really needs any, a very fine bass player - Benny Rietveld, Dave Matthews on keyboards, Jeff Cressman and Bill Ortiz on brass and dual vocalists Andy Vargas and Tony Lindsay), - so if you just want to hear good playing, there's plenty on stage at a Santana concert. Personally, I would rather hear Matthews put more of his own soul into his organ solos but I suppose it's difficult to avoid Gregg Rolie's masterful lines from the early Santana albums and people probably expect them (after all, my own interest in Santana was first kindled not by Carlos' guitar but by hearing the magic sound of Rolie's keyboards on "Evil Ways" and "Soul Sacrifice" when I was a boy).
Anyway, if you were thinking about going to any of the music festivals that are coming up around the country to hear either of these groups (among many others), they are both still in very fine form and certainly well worth seeing (if their music is to your taste).
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