Life hasn't been easy for guitar legend Carlos Santana.
In fact, it's been a long and bumpy road to legendary status for the Rock and Roll Hall
of Famer, and his real-life story is full of tragedy.
Here are some of the things he's had to tough through.
Born in southern Mexico, Carlos Santana's family moved to Tijuana when he was seven.
He told Rolling Stone his father put him and his brothers to work, selling gum on the street,
shining shoes, and eventually, singing Mexican folk songs.
Showing an aptitude for the guitar, he soon accompanied his bar-musician father to gigs
in dirt-floored saloons full of shady characters.
By age 14, Santana went off on his own, earning $9 a week providing musical accompaniment
to strippers.
He didn't get a lot of pleasure out of the work, saying,
"It's just watching an assembly job.
After a while, you learn the most sensual thing is innocence."
During this time, Santana says he was abused by an American man who would buy him food,
clothes, and toys, and then take him into the U.S. and abuse him.
After the man slapped him for watching a woman through a window, Santana explained,
"I looked at him for the first time for who he was: a very sick person."
Santana's family moved to San Francisco when he was a teenager.
But he didn't want to move, nor attend what he perceived as a boring American junior high.
Santana recalled to Rolling Stone he was constantly angry and upset, even refusing to eat.
"It was a shock and a horror.
It was like I was in this man's world, and then I come back to junior high school."
Things got even worse when some of his money went missing.
He'd saved up a small fortune to pay for immigration papers, only to discover that his mother stole
it to pay for his sister's dental work.
She left $300 behind, which Santana planned to use to buy a new Stratocaster guitar.
When he asked his mother for the $300, she revealed that she'd spent it on rent.
Santana was so angry that he took the $20 his mother offered him and went back to Tijuana.
He returned to the strip club world, until a year later when his estranged family forcibly
retrieved him.
He said,
"They actually kidnapped me.
Put me in a car."
In the spring of 1967, while fronting the Santana Blues Band and still in high school,
Santana had gone from busking on the streets of San Francisco to opening for The Who.
His work impressed the likes of Steve Miller and blues legend Howlin' Wolf, and both invited
Santana's band to open for them on tour.
Sadly, the group didn't get the chance, because 19-year-old Carlos Santana was diagnosed with
tuberculosis.
He told Rolling Stone that he spent three months in San Francisco General Hospital getting
regular penicillin treatments.
At one point, he developed an aversion to the drugs, so medical staff started injecting
the antibiotics into his rear end.
Unable to sit down for weeks, Santana worked with a tutor to finish up his high school
education, and graduated while hospitalized.
The first three Santana albums deftly fused jazz, Latin music and psychedelic rock to
create something fresh and popular.
The self-titled Santana hit #1 on the album chart and was certified double platinum, while
follow-ups Abraxas and Santana III did as well or better, going quintuple and double
platinum, respectively.
But when it came time to release album number four, Caravanserai, in 1972, Santana and his
bandmates faced resistance from the record label.
It was an almost vocals-free experimental jazz record recorded with an almost entirely
new band to reflect Santana's new spiritual side.
Columbia Records didn't want to release it, and Santana wrote in his memoir that company
president Clive Davis said it would end his career.
But it was a top-ten hit.
Two years later, Santana once again earned Davis' ire.
The live album Lotus, as originally presented, was a three-LP set.
Citing its commercial risk, Columbia only released it in Japan, killing some momentum
for Santana and representing another professional setback.
Unless they shelled out for an import, fans couldn't buy it in the U.S. until a CD reissue
in 1991.
Columbia Records dropped Santana after the release of 1990's Spirits Dancing in the Flesh,
his third straight album not to go gold or platinum.
The label Polydor released Santana's 1992 record, Milagro, which also flopped.
After that, Santana couldn't get a record deal, and he couldn't record anywhere without
a contract.
In 1997, after the death of his musician father, Santana found that even listening to music
was too much to bear.
After a mourning period, he finally felt ready to try again.
His wife at the time, Deborah King Santana, suggested he reconnect with Davis, then an
executive at Arista Records.
The result was Supernatural, one of the most significant comeback albums in pop music history.
A 1999 collection of collaborations between Santana and young pop and rock stars, it sold
13 million copies in the U.S. and won eight Grammy awards.
Back-to-back deaths hit hard
Santana probably wouldn't have had his storied, successful career without a well-timed big
break from Bill Graham.
The powerful manager and concert promoter convinced Woodstock's organizers to book a
slot for Santana's band.
The group gave an electrifying performance.
"We were in this helicopter and I'd never seen so many -- it was like an ocean of hair
and teeth and arms."
Within a year, they were topping the charts.
Graham and Santana remained close until Graham's tragic death in November 1991 in a helicopter
accident in Vallejo, California.
Graham was 61.
Santana played through his grief at a memorial concert in San Francisco.
Another friend, legendary trumpeter Miles Davis, who died just two months before Graham
did.
Santana said in a 1992 interview with the Charlotte Observer,
"They sharpened my tenacity, they sharpened my convictions."
Santana and his ex-wife Deborah King went through a lot of ups and downs.
They married in 1973 and had three children.
Partners in business as well as life, they opened a small chain of Mexican restaurants,
established a charity called the Milagro Foundation, and in 1994, King restructured and saved her
husband's finances.
But Santana wasn't always the most faithful husband.
Deborah told the San Francisco Chronicle that after their children were born, Santana "was
sleeping with people on the road."
Santana admitted to his infidelity in his memoir and publicly apologized for his indiscretions.
But a little over two years later, Deborah filed for divorce.
Santana moved on, and in 2010, proposed to Cindy Blackman, the drummer in his band.
After his divorce, the guitarist's life grew alarmingly dark.
Santana seriously entertained thoughts of ending it all, and in 2008, he told Rolling
Stone that he'd attempted to take his own life seven times.
Not only did the failure of his marriage upset him, but so did lingering memories of the
regular abuse he suffered in his youth.
Santana credits his faith for helping him out of that very low place.
He told Plain Truth.
"You have to go through the darkest night of the soul to get to the brightest light
of the day.
[...] Forgiveness, man, forgiveness is incredibly liberating."
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255).