Santana, The Isley Brothers, and the Overlooked Legacy of Social Justice in ’70s Soul
A new joint album opens a window to a revolutionary era of emerging freedoms in the music industry.

The new Isley Brothers & Santana album, Power of Peace, pays tribute to a crucial but overlooked chapter in pop-music history. Between 1968 and 1976, a group of African-American musicians demanded and won from their record companies the same freedom to tackle new subject matter, new arrangements and new solos that their white counterparts Bob Dylan, the Beatles and Cream had won a few years earlier. The result was an outpouring of brilliant music from the likes of Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, George Clinton and Maurice White.
One reason this movement is not better remembered is that it never had a catchy name. Maybe if it had been called College R&B, Psychedelic Funk or Woodstock Soul, it might be better appreciated today. Like College Rock, this music was aimed at an educated audience that wanted an honest discussion of war and inequality, more ambitious arrangements and improvised solos. Like psychedelic rock, it used new technology and emboldened instrumentalists to reflect the mental disorientation of the times. And it was at the 1969 Woodstock festival that these possibilities were introduced to a wider audience in the form of memorable sets by Jimi Hendrix, Santana and Sly & the Family Stone.
Hendrix and Carlos Santana proved that non-white guitarists could play rock solos as well or better than anyone. But the Family Stone show was more revealing, for it proved that the freedoms enjoyed by Dylan and the Beatles didn’t require rock ‘n’ roll as a vehicle. You didn’t have to play FM/progressive rock as Hendrix and Santana did; you could exercise the same freedoms with the format of commercial R&B and funk. Stone had been a mid-‘60s San Francisco DJ who’d spun records by Dylan and the Beatles and had produced records for the Beau Brummels even as he remained enamored of his childhood’s R&B. He blended those two sounds into something unprecedented. As his brother Freddie scratched out the guitar chords at Woodstock, Sly stood behind his electric organ with afro muttonchops, amber bubble glasses and a white jacket with two-foot fringe. Suddenly he shouted, “I am everyday people,” as if he could dissolve racial and class barriers with such a simple assertion, especially when it was backed up with exuberant horns, guitars and drums. And for the better part of an hour, he could.
“I am no better and neither are you; we are the same whatever we do,” Sly philosophized while rotating his pelvis to the groove. When the women behind him wailed, “Different strokes for different folks,” they offered a vision of equality that didn’t require conformity. This wasn’t the Four Tops in business suits dancing to pre-arranged choreography. This was a thousand flowers blooming.
Before long, two of Motown’s biggest and most gifted stars, Wonder and Gaye, used their clout to demand control of their own recordings. Their battle was with Berry Gordy Jr., the Motown founder who had created an empire by creating an ingenious formula and sticking to it: The lyrics were clever takes on teen romance; the musicians and producers were jazz pros; the singers were giddy youngsters, and the beat was king. Now Wonder and Gaye wanted to ditch the formula, much like Brian Wilson had largely abandoned surf music. They had to fight the Motown bosses every bit as much as Wilson had had to battle Capitol Records.
The Motown rebels emerged victorious, with Gaye releasing 1970’s What’s Going On, named the “Greatest Album of the 20th Century” by a 1999 critics poll in England’s Guardian newspaper. Wonder built on Gaye’s example by releasing 1970’s breakthrough Where I’m Coming From, followed quickly by 1972’s Talking Book and 1973’s Innervisions. Motown producer Norman Whitfield had also pressed Gordy to use more adventurous lyrics and sounds and got the go-ahead to guide the Temptations to singles such as “Cloud Nine,” “Runaway Child, Running Wild,” “Psychedelic Shack,” “Ball of Confusion” and “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”
Sly & the Family Stone circa 1970.
Mayfield, as much the king of Chicago soul as Gaye was the king of Detroit, disbanded his harmony group the Impressions and launched his solo career with 1970’s revealing Curtis, followed by the masterful 1972 soundtrack for Superfly. Meanwhile, funk bands such as Clinton’s Funkadelic and White’s Earth, Wind & Fire were discarding the notion that R&B groups were for singers only.
It was the Isley Brothers who had given Hendrix a major break by hiring him for their road band and for such singles as “Testify” before turning younger brother Ernie into a lead guitarist himself. As such, the Isleys helped birth the “college R&B” genre, and now they help us remember it by working with Carlos Santana, one of the few Hendrix contemporaries who deserves a comparison. Playing drums on the new record is Cindy Blackman Santana, an accomplished jazz drummer of the Tony Williams school and now married to Carlos.
College R&B is a movement that deserves more attention. It proved that the same tensions between corporate control and creative restlessness existed in black music as in white. And when the creative spirit first broke through, it invented new forms and coalesced new audiences around its impulses. As with all such breakthroughs, however, the best work came early, inspired by the first flush of freedom and discovery before getting diluted by self-indulgence and the vices of celebrity. But its highlights were the highlights of the whole era.