Long before Ricky, Enrique and even Gloria, there was Mexico's Carlos Santana. His band almost single-handedly popularised Latin-based rock in a post-Woodstock white America, which turned out to be surprisingly game for an effulgent guitar solo against a percussive backdrop. And yet, until his 1999 album Supernatural, Santana had been for 20 years a commercially spent anachronism. His change in fortune was as spectacular as it was unexpected. Packed with young guests, the album won nine Grammys and sold 16m copies.
Three years on, with Supernatural still heirless, the rejuvenation has itself passed. A one-off outdoor date at an inaccessible, unatmospheric location was always likely to end in tears. Unseasonable weather boded further ill. At their best Santana are the languid sound of East Los Angeles in high summer, but in a desultory, third-full, rain-sodden athletics stadium, the band were marooned in an ocean of torpor.
They did little to save themselves. For 15 grim minutes, accompanied by only a mass exodus and silence from the bedraggled throng who remained, percussionist Karl Perazzo, drummer Dennis Chambers and congas thumper Raul Rekow played lengthy solos that Santana himself couldn't bear to watch. The nadir came with bassist Benny Rietveld's eight-minute showpiece of spirit-sapping numbness that incorporated Imagine. Such hogwash would have been eschewed by Level 42.
Proudly sporting Nike's logo and chewing gum throughout, Carlos Santana was an elusive presence. His guitar playing, especially lambent on Put Your Lights On, remains instantly recognisable and his solo on the encore Soul Sacrifice (a rare excursion into the back catalogue) was brief evidence of greatness. On the few occasions when he spoke, he either descended into psychobabble ("When the twin towers went down, the waters broke and the baby of collective one-mind consciousness awakening was born") or claimed that angels were present.
Supernatural's superior songs, the exuberant Maria, Maria and the uplifting Smooth, were trammelled by Tony Lindsay's weak vocals, tiny video screens and a sound as muddy as the paths to the latrines. The drum-fuelled (De La) Yalleo and Black Magic Woman were rare injections of joy, but even the ever-glorious spectacle of Concorde flying overhead could not salvage a soul-destroying evening.
