How Music Industry Legend Pete Ganbarg Revived Santana, Learned from Clive Davis & Created the Definitive Classic Rock Podcast
If you were listening to the radio in 1999 (or just had functioning ears in 1999), it was impossible to ignore Santana’s Supernatural. The comeback album — which paired classic rock legend Carlos Santana with modern rock stars like Matchbox Twenty’s Rob Thomas and Dave Matthews (as well as fellow guitar god Eric Clapton) — was a rip-roaring success, hitting the #1 spot in 11 countries, winning more Grammys than Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and going platinum 15 times (!) in the U.S. alone.
But if you’ve ever wondered where exactly the idea for this massive career re-invention came from, the answer is two words: Pete Ganbarg. Today, Ganberg is and A & R and music publishing executive who also hosts the Rock and Roll High School podcast, a classic rock and music history podcast that features in-depth, career-spanning interviews with friends he met during his long career in the music industry, including Peter Frampton, Bryan Adams, Todd Rundgren, Kenny Loggins, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Jon Anderson of Yes, and most recently, Cliff Difford of Squeeze, among many more.
But in 1997, he was a newly-hired A&R rep at Clive Davis’ Arista Records, when the challenge of a lifetime came his way.
How Santana’s comeback was born
“I was on the job for a few weeks and really looking for a project to sink my teeth into,” Ganbarg told ReMIND. “And Clive had signed Carlos Santana for the second time.” Santana were already wildly famous, but their most recent albums had undersold, and they left their contract with their previous record label. Davis, looking for a way to revive the band’s career kicked it over to Ganbarg. And Ganbarg found inspiration in an unexpected place.
“There was an album at the time that was a little under the radar, by B.B. King, called Deuces Wild,” says Ganbarg. The 1997 duet album saw King team up with everyone from Bonnie Raitt to D’Angelo. But, Ganbarg recalls, “I listened to it, and I’m like, ‘There’s going to be a ceiling here, because the songs … They’re not pop songs. They’re not going to get on the radio.’ B.B. King … doesn’t sound like someone who is contemporary enough to get on contemporary hit or pop radio.”
Ganbarg tweaked the idea, envisioning a similar album with Santana, except the songs would place Santana into the musical worlds of his younger fans, not the other way around. Excited, Ganbarg pitched the idea to Davis and got … crickets.
“I sent him this memo, and he didn’t tell me it was a horrible idea, he didn’t tell me it was a great idea. He just never responded,” Ganbarg remembers. “[I thought] ‘Okay, I could either cry that my boss is not responding to me, or I can just kind of take the initiative, pick up the phone, call Santana’s manager, introduce myself, tell them I have an idea and see if they’re interested.’ And that’s what I did.”
The rest is music (and Grammy) history.
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Making hits for … the Ninja Turtles?
Ganbarg’s path to what many would consider an ultimate dream job began when he was 13, and listening to a “top 100 songs of the year” countdown on the radio. He was gripped by an urge to compare the countdowns on different stations, and began writing down each song; soon after, he learned that there was an entire magazine, Billboard, that was dedicated to tracking the music charts.
But in those pre-Spotify days, figuring out how to hear anything besides major radio hits was complicated (and expensive).
“I realized, first problem, I had no money, so what am I going to do to listen to this music?” recalls Ganbarg. Solution: buy a couple turntables, and DJ. Working DJ gigs around his hometown, Ganbarg poured all his earnings into buying the newest music releases: “If I really liked the song, I would bring it to the club or the party the next week and play it. And if people liked it, they would dance to it. If they didn’t like it, they would leave the room. So that was my first laboratory test of, why do people like what they like? And I was always fascinated by it.”
Plans to become a high school English teacher quickly fell by the wayside when Ganbarg got the opportunity to grab his first job in the music industry. And with that job came a unique challenge: “[my boss] called me into his office and hands me a movie script, and he says, ‘We’re doing the soundtrack for this new movie that’s coming out. I want you to read the script. We need a hit song for the movie. I want you to give it to me.'” The script, however, was not for a big action thriller, a cool teen comedy, or any other kind of film known for having hit soundtracks — it was for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
After a friend with small children suggested the song be called “Turtle Power,” Ganbarg reached out to a group he was working with and told them, “‘Read the script, write a song and call it Turtle Power.’ And they did. That song went to number one in 13 countries and was the biggest hit coming off of that movie. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is the easiest job in the world.’ Little did I know, you know?”
Lessons learn from Clive Davis
“Pretty much everything I’ve ever learned about how to do the job that I do, I learned from him” Ganbarg says of Clive Davis. the man that he describes as “a mentor and a friend to me for … well over 25 years.” How does the legendary producer and Arista Record founder Davis — who’s worked with everyone from Janis Joplin to Billy Joel to Aerosmith to Chicago to Whitney Houston — teach eager young music-execs-in-the-making? By letting them listen in on him as he worked with the greatest artists of all time.
“We would sit in his office for six hours, eight hours, 10 hours, 12 hours, and you would just, by osmosis, soak it in,” says Ganbarg. “[Davis] would take phone calls all day long, from the greatest artists and songwriters and producers of all time, and he would allow us to listen in on those conversations.
“So we would be listening to him talk to Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston or any of these artists, and give him suggestions and listen to what the artist was saying and help the creative process along.
“You would have somebody like Aretha Franklin saying, ‘Clive, specifically, what do you want me to do in this part of the song?’ And he would look at us, and we would all write little notes to him, and he would look at the notes, form his own opinion, and tell her what he thought she would do. But we were all part of it. It was so much fun and such a learning experience.
“And you learn so much in situations like that, that once you’re on your own, you can say, ‘Oh, how would Clive handle this?’ I’ve been doing it that way ever since.”
Teaching at the school of rock
Today, Ganbarg is the president of Pure Tone Music, an A&R consulting company, as well as the host of Rock and Roll High School, a podcast that grew out of seminars he created to educate his younger employees about music history — after a particularly hilarious interaction with a young staffer who was sporting a Velvet Underground t-shirt, but couldn’t name the band’s singer or any of their songs. Ganbarg began gathering informal sessions of young staffers, teaching the music history going back to 1955. Each week, more and more youthful staffers began to appear in class, giving a great reception to Ganbarg’s surprise guests like Graham Nash and Nile Rodgers.
Over the pandemic, the classes evolved into a Zoom series. And that Zoom series evolved into a podcast. “We call it Rock & Roll High School, specifically because we’re here to educate and entertain and teach people about the history of contemporary music,” says Ganbarg. The season recently launched its fourth season with an interview with Chaka Khan.
Ganbarg’s interviews are more than a fun trip down memory lane (though they are fun, especially when he knows myriad specific details about his guest’s life and work that the guests have forgotten). They’re also an attempt to document the story of contemporary music, from the people who made it. “And some of the people that I’m speaking with are getting older,” says Ganbarg. “Some of them, unfortunately, are passing away. I talked to Sam Moore from Sam & Dave, who was on my podcast last season. … He passed away, but their stories still remain in their own voices. So I’m trying to get as many of these recorded as I can.”
Remind 
Birth of Rock 'n' Roll
February 2024
"Long live rock," we like to say, but how did it come to life? Revisit the memorable moments, music and movies that made teens go beat crazy back in the 1950s.
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