BLACK MAGIC MURDER

BLACK MAGIC MURDER

CREEM POLICE FILES

Wherein the philandering ways of Santana's original conga player caught up with him

Joel Selvin

"I want that n****r to come outside,” shouted the angry, estranged husband. The Santana conga player Marcus Malone had been spending the afternoon lolling around with his girlfriend when her husband showed up banging on the door. Malone was slated to leave that week to begin recording his band’s debut album at Columbia Studios in Los Angeles with producer David Rubinson. This was not a welcome intrusion.

Malone was a central figure in the young band. They called him Marcus the Magnificent. At age 23, he was slightly older than the other members and, as a part-time pimp and petty criminal, far more streetwise. The band found him playing in the weekend drum circle at San Francisco’s Aquatic Park, and he brought an African sound to what had essentially been a blues band with a conga drummer. Marcus showed the band the drums-and-chant “Jingo" from the 1959 album Drums of Passion by Nigerian percussionist Olatunji. Malone was also the key ingredient in the band’s own tribal offering “Soul Sacrifice,” which was built around a showpiece solo by Malone, who cut a flashy, charismatic style on stage.

In January 1969, Santana were on the cusp of something special. The band had already risen to headline the Fillmore West without having even released any recordings. With the rock world’s eyes trained on the San Francisco scene, which had produced a steady stream of barrier-breaking, genre-busting bands following the emergence of Jefferson Airplane two years before, Santana were on the brink of moving out of the Mission District.

After a number of labels expressed interest, Rubinson signed the band to Columbia Records, where he had been responsible for landmark albums by Chambers Brothers, Taj Mahal, Moby Grape, and others (Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records famously passed on signing the band after attending a Fillmore West performance: “Can’t play; furthermore, won’t sell,” he said). Rubinson first tried capturing the band live in their element during a December 1968 weekend headlining the Fillmore, but nobody loved the results and studio sessions were set for Los Angeles in January.

The fiery band had come together over the past few years through a careful selection of musicians. When guitarist Carlos Santana came out of a three-month stay at S.F. General Hospital for tuberculosis, band management dumped the original conga player Michael Carabello, along with the bassist and drummer, and replaced them with David Brown on bass, Bob “Doc” Livingston on drums, and Malone on congas. Livingston did not prove to be the drummer of their dreams, and his heavy drinking didn’t go well with this band of pot smokers and acid eaters. During the New Year’s Eve gig, he was so drunk he fell off his drum stool.

ITIALONE PICKED UP A KNIFE FROm THE COUNTER AND PLUNGED IT INTO flmiDO'S SIDE, BREAKING OFF THE BLADE.

Malone was no hippie. He dressed exclusively in burgundy and spent his album advance on a shiny new red Cadillac El Dorado—just like the big-time pimps—where he had the upholstery done in maroon to compliment his wardrobe. He would frequently excuse himself from rehearsal to use the pay phone outside. “I got to call my bitches,” he would say. He still lived with his mother on Potrero Hill, and she let the band rehearse and store their instruments in her garage. He didn’t know anything about Latin music, but he turned young Carlos Santana on to John Coltrane.

With Malone, there were always women. He had been seeing Edward Amido’s wife for a few months, and there had already been some run-ins. Amido had crashed his car into his wife’s car in the street that October, the day after she reported him to the police for beating her. But he and Malone had never come face-to-face before this January afternoon.

Amido kicked down the front door and charged into the living room. He snatched the phone from his wife, who was calling the police, and grabbed Malone around the neck. He outweighed the conga player by a good 50 pounds and choked him violently. The scuffle moved from the living room into the kitchen, where Malone picked up a knife from the counter and plunged it into Amido’s side, breaking off the blade.

The two tumbled out the back door and down the stairs, where the fight continued on the street. Malone was able to wrest himself free, and Amido was lying, bleeding, on the sidewalk when the police cruiser pulled up. He leaned up on his elbow and pointed to Malone, who was getting into his car across the street. “He did it,” Amido told the cops. “He stabbed me.”

Police arrested Malone and sent Amido to S.F. General, where he underwent three separate operations before finally succumbing three weeks later. The charges against Malone were changed to firstdegree murder.

The day it happened, Carabello got a phone call telling him about Malone’s arrest and headed over to the house on Bernal Heights where guitarist Santana, keyboard player Gregg Rolie, and one of the band’s managers lived, acting as if he knew nothing. He found them in a panic with a gig looming the next day and recording sessions in Los Angeles with Malone in jail. They asked Carabello to substitute for the show the next day at a local college, so he borrowed a conga drum and came back to the band.

The law firm that negotiated the band’s record deal swung into action. Their criminal law specialist Michael Stepanian was a tough, burly, voluble Armenian who spent the afternoon of the epic hippie gathering, the Human Be-In, playing rugby in an adjacent field in Golden Gate Park. Stepanian arranged bail and took charge of the case. With Malone out of jail, he rejoined the band for a show at the Avalon Ballroom with Carabello on a second set of congas, who found it difficult to mesh with Malone’s style of playing a constant running solo through the rhythm.

Malone went to Los Angeles for the Columbia Studios sessions with producer Rubinson but was understandably distracted. He showed up late, couldn’t concentrate. The sessions were not especially productive. Doc Livingston did not play well with the congas. The band had been performing the six songs on the session for the previous year and a half, but the sound was thin and the solos stretched into irrelevancy. When they returned to San Francisco, they cut Malone loose. At another demo session at Pacific Recorders in San Mateo, they fired Doc Livingston and tried out an 18-year-old drummer named Michael Shrieve who happened to be hanging out at the studio, who worked out fine. He woke his parents up in the middle of the night to tell them he was moving to San Francisco to join a band.

It was Carabello who found Jose “Chepito” Areas playing at the Aquatic Park drum circle. He wouldn’t let the guy go until he tracked him home and learned he was playing with his band, the Aliens, that night at a Mission District club. The diminutive Nicaraguan didn’t speak English, but his explosive timbales playing was persuasive and all Carabello needed to hear. He went and watched, amazed, as Chepito made mincemeat of the timbales, whipped out a trumpet for a searing solo, not to mention what he did with congas and behind the drum set. Carabello phoned Santana and Rolie and told them to come down to the club and hear this guy. In Carabello’s mind, he saw the timbales-and-conga combination he had heard in recordings by Chico Hamilton or Gabor Szabo. Santana and Rolie arrived and concurred. Santana, who was still learning English, spoke to Chepito in Spanish. He joined the band.

The group finally managed to stagger into the studio five months later in May to record their debut album. They replaced Rubinson as producer with an inexperienced and inept soundman from one of the local ballrooms. Even if the album didn’t fully reflect the power and glory of the band’s live performances, nothing else sounded like it, and that August, the band headed out for their first out-of-town date, arranged by Fillmore West promoter Bill Graham, one of the band’s biggest fans—the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair.

Meanwhile, Stepanian went to battle for Marcus Malone in court. After more than 20 pretrial hearings with Malone out on bail, the case finally went to trial more than a year after he was first arrested. He presented Malone’s case as self-defense, although the knife wound in Amido’s back tended to undermine that delicious argument. Stepanian told the court that Malone had been face-to-face with Amido and reached around behind to stab him, which may not have been that convincing. Under crossexamination, however, Stepanian flummoxed the prosecution’s medical expert, who admitted under harsh questioning that with all three surgical incisions going directly on top of the original wound, it was impossible to say what killed Malone—the stabbing or any of the three subsequent botched surgeries. Malone was found guilty of second-degree manslaughter and served three years in prison. By the time he was released, the Santana ship had sailed and left him far behind.

Flash forward a lifetime...to 2013. KRON-TV news reporter Stanley Roberts is talking to a homeless man he met while the man was rummaging through trash for a story about illegal dumping in Oakland when the man claims to be an original member of Santana. Miller didn’t believe him, but when he went back to the station, his story checked out. He had found Marcus Malone. After his piece aired, Carlos Santana went cruising the streets of East Oakland looking for him, but it wasn’t until the television news reporter reached Santana management through Facebook that an emotional filmed reunion was arranged.

At the time, the superstar guitarist was planning to record a reunion album with the other members of the original band, and he suggested that Malone might have a role to play. He told reporters he would buy Malone clothes and rent him an apartment. Santana did buy him a conga drum. He wrote a song specifically for him, and Malone was invited to a rehearsal, but he was weak and frail and his playing was not up to par. The cultural gap proved too wide, and Santana soon backed away from Malone again, leaving him living on the streets in a dilapidated camper.

But that is not where the story ends.

Three years later, an unsupported tire flying off the back of a passing truck hit Malone in the head and knocked him to the pavement. Sustaining massive head trauma in a freak accident, he was taken to Oakland’s Highland Hospital and put on life support. A GoFundMe page was established to help with medical expenses, and he was transferred to a skilled nursing center in Alameda, where Malone died four months later at the age of 77.