Carlos Santana Tour Bags
- A selection of bags designed by (or at least commercially associated with) legendary guitarist Carlos Santana
- Listen, we’re as confused as you are
- Made with “vegan leather,” which is the new fancy way of saying “synthetic leather”
- Buy one for your mom for Mother’s Day and watch her eyes glaze over with the thought of seeing Santana live at Woodstock
- They’re “Tour Bags,” so there was at least some attempt at a logical connection, however tenuous
- Model: CS114M16 (Behold, the rare white whale of a model number that returns absolutely zero search results. Carlos, you still got it, man.)
Bag Magic Woman
The bus door slammed and he stormed in. Everybody stopped what they were doing – Coke tapping his sticks on the table, Rolie rubbing some local Dutch girl’s back. Nobody spoke. They could tell Carlos was pissed.
Carlos leaned against the bathroom door, sweat-soaked black curls in his face. A nearly empty brown bottle hung in his hand.
“The hell was that?” He said.
The band looked at each other, nobody sure what to say. Coke, who had been in Carlos’ good graces since Hamburg, finally spoke.
“Was a good set, no?”
“The set? Yeah it was all right.”
“Your solo on BMW [Black Magic Woman] killed, Car.” Luis said. Carlos sneered.
“Who cares? I just got back from the merch table. We only sold two bags.”
A hush. The thudding-together of train cars in the nearby Utretch yards rattled the windows. Everybody knew this was serious. Luis piped up again in his ingratiating whisper.
“Maybe the prices were too --”
“–THE PRICES AREN’T THE PROBLEM.” Carlos roared, breaking the bottle against the wall of the bus. “NOBODY WANTS MY DAMN … bags.” This last word choked with the emotion rising in his throat.
You have to understand: This was 1972 and Carlos was on top of the world. Abraxes was just coming off the charts after 88 weeks, Santana III had hit #1, and the band was finishing a hugely successful (albeit drug-fueled) world tour. But Carlos wasn’t satisfied. Music had always been second to his true, lifelong passion: Handbag design and manufacture.
Carlos walked to the terrified Dutch girl and waved one of his bags in her face, a patchwork faux-silk affair that was truly, objectively ugly.
“What do you think?” He said.
The girl looked from one stone-faced band member to the next, unsure what was happening or what to say.
“Is … how you say … gaudy?”
Another stunned silence. Then Carlos started laughing. A deep belly laugh we hadn’t heard in years. She was right, of course. The bag sucked. Things began to fall apart after that, musically and personally. Carlos didn’t have another big hit until the 90s, but in the years intervening he perfected his bagmanship. It took years – decades – before his first successful bag, a lamé clutch he released in 1998. But things took off from there, and you could see Carlos mellow and soften as that drive to be the best he always carried found a new outlet.
