Julian Lage is one of the world’s finest electric guitar players, so it will come as absolutely no surprise to learn he was already being tipped for greatness before he was even 10 years old.
In a new episode of the Broken Records podcast, the jazz virtuoso reflects on his early guitar-playing years, and looks back on the time he shared the stage in front of 20,000 with a bona fide guitar legend… when he was just nine years old.
The guitar legend in question was Carlos Santana, who at the time was touring the US with Jeff Beck. In the late 1990s, a chance encounter between his father and a friend of Santana’s put the aspiring guitarist on a path to the guitar gig of a lifetime.
Lage recalls: “My father worked at Fog City diner in San Francisco and someone came in who he was friends with and he said, ‘I know Santana and I heard your son's playing guitar.’ My dad said, ‘Yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, Santana's playing at [a San Francisco venue] in two weeks. You should just show up. Usually they get there by 2pm.’
“That's all the information we had. So we got in the car and we drove there and showed up at 2pm. This would have been when I was seven”
After showing up out of the blue, it was clear Santana had been expecting the Lage entourage: “We go backstage. ‘Where's Carlos?’ ‘He's in that room.’ ‘Okay.’ So my parents and I, we knock on the door, and he's, ‘Oh, you're the kid I heard about. Come in.’
“We sat, we played, and that night it was Jeff Beck and him doing this tour. But check this out. The best part about it to me was he said, ‘Do you want to play tonight?’”
Playing in front of 20,000 clearly wasn’t what Lage had planned for the evening and so – as you’d probably expect from a seven-year-old aspiring guitarist – he politely declined Santana’s offer. Fortunately, the offer was extended for another 12 months.
“I said, ‘No, I didn't come to play in front of 20,000 people. I came to meet the master! That's the point,’” Lage continues. “And he said, ‘Well, no worries, enjoy the show. And we come here every year, so when we come back, you should just come again and bring your guitar.’
“So with no communication, a year later, almost to the date we drove up, got there at two, knocked on the door and he said, ‘Oh, you came. Do you have [your] guitar this time? Yeah? Okay.’”
Lage’s long-awaited cameo – which saw the youngster solo through a cover of Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain – was captured on the night, and can be seen via grainy fan footage online.
“It was surreal,” Lage says of the experience. “But also, I don't think I was in an environment that hyped anything up. It also didn't push me down. And I've known people who have that figure in their life who says, you know, ‘Don't get too comfortable, kid.’ There was none of that good cop, bad cop, macho stuff. It was just like, just respond, be present.”
