A Good Wank

Michael Shrieve at age 19 with Santana @ Woodstock provides the concert and film's most intense musical moments. (or so says most) Part of the power of Shrieve's performance was undoubtedly his youth. He grew up on the east side of the Bay, playing in the house band of a local club that backed up R&B greats like B.B. King and Etta James. San Francisco was the center of a burgeoning rock music scene that included Santana, Jefferson Airplane and Sly and the Family Stone, among others. The music was daring, fresh and different. When Shrieve was 16, he met Santana's manager, Stan Marcum, and bass player, David Brown, at a jam session at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium. Impressed, Marcum took Shrieve's phone number. A few years later, Shrieve ran into the other members of the band at a recording studio and was invited to jam. At the end of the night, they asked him to join, and a boy's youth ended. Shortly after his 20th birthday, he played Woodstock. "Soul Sacrifice," an instrumental, was the seventh of eight songs the band played. It was pure Santana, a mix of hard rock, African, Latin and funk music. "We played like that all the time," Shrieve said. "The only difference was that performance was filmed. No doubt, there was a lot of luck involved." Shrieve's memory of Woodstock is both powerful and indistinct. He remembers sensations more than specific scenes. He remembered being summoned to play earlier than expected. He and his band mates rode a helicopter to the concert stage and looked out the window in awe at the mass of people covering the grass below them as far as they could see. "You knew that something incredible was happening," Shrieve said. "It represented an ideal of the consciousness of the time." Once on the stage, Shrieve said, he felt like he was "standing at edge of the ocean. When you're at the beach as far as you can see is water and then you see sky. As far as I could see is people and then I saw the sky." The members of the band played to one another as much as the audience. Shrieve said he was in "the zone." The band had killed, yet no one talked about it. After Woodstock, the band recorded its first album and toured the country.