Working for the managing director

By GRAHAM REID

Elsewhere

What's that Morrissey song, We Hate it When our Friends Become Successful?

We don't, actually. Some of us thought it really, really nice that 52-year-old Carlos Santana picked up so many Grammys last week. And it was one in the eye for you youngsters out there (anyone under 40, if these Grammys were to be believed) who reckon you rock out.

Sorry kiddies, making great music just ain't what it's about. What you need are powerful friends - and Carlos has those.

Now on Arista, the label headed by "the legendary" industry honcho and star-maker Clive Davis, Carlos had the best hype-machine money could buy for his Supernatural album, his first for the label. But, like most people who have heard the album, my guess is the awards to Carlos were more from an industry saying thanks to Clive for the good work he'd done down the decades and a salute to the might of his marketing machine.

And Grammy awards are like that. Sting gets best pop album for an album that wasn't that popular? Cher for best dance recording?

Yes, Grammys are suspect affairs. In 1988 they instigated a new award: best hard rock/metal act. As Guns'N'Roses and Aerosmith stormed the planet, they gave it to ... Jethro Tull.

Santana is another matter. What an industry based on marketing would like you to believe (and Clive's people made sure of this) was that Supernatural, among other things like "a return to form," was the best rock album of 99. Nonsense.

It's patchy, and a fairly blunt review in this column last year said as much. But it's a good one to market.

A "heritage artist" (as record companies are wont to call senior signings) working with famous young folks like the Fugees' Wyclef Jean and Lauryn Hill? Whew, that's so hip of him.

But as Salon magazine observed on the release of the album - which now comes with a gold "nominated for 11 Grammy awards" sticker - it was "a grasping attempt to piggyback on young multi-platinum artists who he thinks will make his own work relevant ... the result is a disappointing hodge-podge."

Carlos, a lovely guy despite the mystical psychobabble which passes for his conversation, is a man whose career has needed such guidance. He acknowledges his biggest hits were chosen for him (She's Not There) and that there were times when he wandered off the track.

Five'll get you 10 you can't name his last album. Or probably any in the past decade.

Okay, what of this Grammy magnet should you check out then?

By happy un-coincidence, this week Sony - which has Carlos' complete catalogue from the CBS days - reissued one of their many Best of Santana compilations.

As a single disc, it's a fair primer and has most of the early hits. But there's an even more thorough Viva Santana double-disc compilation around which comes with a good historical essay, helpful annotations and 30 of Santana's finest tracks through until the late 80s, some of them superb alternate takes.

There was also Santana's somewhat overlooked jazz-fusion phase when he went around in a snappy white suit, had a guru and was called Devadip Carlos Santana. Swing of Delight (1980), which had him alongside the likes of Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, is terrific. If you want to hear what Carlos can really do, you couldn't do better than that.

But what do reviewers know? My comments about Supernatural ended, "too uneven to be hailed as the comeback he was doubtless hoping for on his new label."

Sales of five million-plus units suggest I was wrong. But sales figures are seldom an indication of artistic quality. And Grammys certainly aren't.

By way of vindication however, my review of Shania Twain's dreadful Come On Over album was depressingly accurate.

It concluded: "Welcome to Shania Twain, the Marketing Concept ... 'Couldn't have hated it more,' are the words that comes to mind. A hit probably."

As John Goodman's character in the The Big Lebowski bellowed, "Am I right? Am I right?"

Hate to say it, but about Santana, Shania and the Shammy awards, regrettably so.