Tony Lindsay plays Friday at 5:30pm on the mainstage at the San Jose Jazz Festival.

WHEN Tony Lindsay takes the stage Friday at 5:30pm, at the San Jose Jazz Festival, he'll mark three decades as a working musician in the South Bay, two decades as lead singer of the band Santana and one since the Y2K Grammies sweep of the breakthrough album Supernatural.

His longevity is no trivial accomplishment. Santana has gone through at least three times as many vocalists as the Grateful Dead has buried keyboardists. And while they've not fared as badly as the Dead's death seat occupants, let's just say a tenured professorship is a more secure career choice.

Some of them have never been heard from again. Alex Ligertwood, whose Journey-esque vocals on "Winning" and "Hold On" in the early 1980s were Santana's biggest charted hits in the two decades preceding Supernatural, has been recording Christmas albums, and his website's down. More than a dozen Wikipedia-listed singers have wrapped their hands around Santana's mic stands.

Talent and luck figure into any long-term success, but Lindsay's career attests to the necessity of hard work in the mix. That's why, after arena tours on other continents or resident artist runs in Las Vegas, local music fans can enjoy Lindsay's voice in intimate settings.

"When I get home, I allow myself two days off before I start again. I get a tiny bit of rest. Then I jump back into it," he says. "Otherwise, people will forget about you."

Maintaining a solo career makes for a prudent survival strategy when working with a serial practitioner of musical reinvention like Carlos Santana. "I never know when Carlos will go through that phase when he wants to try somebody else," says Lindsay, who was twice bounced out of the band, only to be invited back.

Nimble enough to execute songs from the band's deep catalog—whether originally recorded by a predecessor or one of many guest artists—Lindsay has an edge over whichever dancing fool or pretty face Santana might want to toss the mic to next.

Lindsay began performing as an 8-year-old in an a cappella group in upstate New York. "My dad used to work at the hotels and would get us gigs. That was the start," Lindsay says.

"We were actually making money. The patrons were throwing coins and bills out on the floor. We were busy all of time. All we did was go to school and practice. I stayed out of trouble that way. "

Lindsay went on to Albany State, an hour up the Hudson from his hometown of Kingston, N.Y., and spent eight years in the state's capital. One of his band mates had moved to sunny San Jose, which was looking increasingly attractive. "It was so doggone cold out there. That was brutal. I called up and asked his folks if I could stay with them. They said, 'Come on out.' I shipped my things out UPS, converted $5,000 I'd saved up into traveler's checks and split.

"That was 30 years ago."

In 1980, Santa Clara Valley was a sprawling suburb with a hollowed-out downtown and clubs littered about. Semiconductor manufacturing had replaced fruit growing as the dominant industry, a video game company named Atari was enjoying early success, and the first personal-computer company, Apple, would go public by the year's end.

Lindsay took a job at Guitar Center, which was then located in a green tiled building at North Second and East St. John streets once occupied by S&H Green Stamps. He sold suits and ties at an Oakridge Mall department store and later at the Clothing Clearance Center on El Camino, near Lawrence Expressway.

Finding a band to play with was more difficult. "Trying to find that first gig was tough. After six months I thought it probably wasn't going to happen. I was thinking, 'I don't know, maybe this isn't going to work'," he says.

Lindsay even considered returning to the East Coast. "That's when things started to happen," he remembers. He was asked to join the power fusion band Danny Hull Quintet with sax player Hull, bassist Bob Boehm, keyboardist Steve Czarnecki and Tower of Power drummer Ron E. Beck.

Club owner Joe Antuzzi booked the quintet into Lord John's, a pub near the Santa Clara University campus, and its following grew. "We played Season's at Old Town in Los Gatos on Tuesdays, Lord John's on Wednesdays and Bourbon Street in the Old Mill in Mountain View on Fridays and Saturdays—and sometimes on Thursdays. Every Saturday and Sunday we'd play a wedding or two in the afternoon.

"That band used to work like crazy. It was pretty hot."

Band members worried about livelihoods dependent on brand Hull, who enthusiastically embraced some of the career-unfriendly habits of a musician's 1980s lifestyle. Lindsay recalls conversations with band members expressing concerns that "if something should happen and Danny leaves, we'd be stuck."

The group adopted the name Spang-a-Lang, which didn't entirely please Hull, but "it was the smart thing to do," Lindsay says.

Former Tower of Power keyboard player Chester Thompson had joined Santana in the 1980s and would drop by to see Spang-a-Lang in the clubs. "He and Ron E. Beck were good friends. He told me Santana was auditioning a singer and said he would throw my name in the pot." Lindsay was sent three songs to practice and went to San Rafael to try out.

Overnight, Lindsay went from playing 100-person clubs to 10,000-seat amphitheaters. The next year, he left on a world tour that would take him to Europe, Mexico City and Brazil.

It was a dark time for Santana though. Carlos took the death of manager Bill Graham in 1991 quite hard. His records weren't selling—at a time when recordings comprised the majority of a musician's income. By the decade's end, Santana was without a contract.

Lindsay was sidelined from Santana for a period in the early 1990s but was called back. Bandmembers filed for unemployment between concert tours. At one point, Lindsay had nodules on his vocal chords and began to fill out an application for benefits, but couldn't go through with it. "I looked at the form. They wanted to get a little too personal. I said, 'Screw this, I'm not going to do this.' Nah. They don't need to know all that stuff."

While the band was in remission, members played the Bay Area circuit. Congo player Raul Rekow and drummer Karl Perazzo were frequent performers at the San Jose club Fuel. Lindsay continued to play with Spang-a-Lang.

The Latin pop explosion of 1999, the year "Livin' La Vida Loca" blew up the charts, changed Santana's fortunes. Arista's Clive Davis restyled Santana to appeal to a young demographic by bringing in a long list of guest artists, from Wyclef Jean and Matchbox Twenty's Rob Thomas to Maná. Supernatural sold more than 27 million copies and won nine Grammies, including Album of the Year.

Lindsay participated in the recordings and received co-author credits on two of the cuts but was eclipsed by the name guest artists. In the video for "Smooth," Lindsay slaps a grooved Peruvian guiro gourd with a stick while Thomas wails into a microphone. For the 2000 Supernatural tour, 19-year-old Watsonville-born Andy Vargas, a Davis recruit, danced and sang onstage alongside Lindsay and was compared to Ricky Martin. It looked like Lindsay was being pushed aside just as a decade of perseverance paid off.

By 2004, Santana informed Lindsay that the band no longer needed him. The next year, Santana released All That I Am, an unmemorable album (except for the Michelle Branch collaboration, "The Game of Love"), followed by an equally forgettable tour that kicked off Sept. 15, 2005, at San Jose's HP Pavilion. Lindsay, meanwhile, recorded solo albums and enjoyed success touring with "Dancing with the Stars." He says he was surprised at how well his merchandise sold on the "Stars" tours, even though it was a different audience. Proving his appeal to a younger audience than the R&B/classic rock crowd, Lindsay's Love Train was picked up on the electronic compilation Bargrooves Vol. 10 in 2007.

Even after Lindsay left the band, Santana called upon him to perform from time to time. "They know where to find me if they need me," Lindsay says. Eventually, he was asked to rejoin, and he couldn't be happier. "I keep on my toes," he says. "I do the best I can at all times. I give 1,000 percent. That's more than everyone else can do. I just want to kick ass every night.

Lindsay performs regularly with Santana at Las Vegas' Hard Rock Hotel, which unfortunately requires a blackout on other West Coast Santana shows. Lindsay is excited about the next Santana album, Guitar Heaven: The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time, which goes on sale next month and features covers of Cream, Led Zeppelin, Doors, Beatles and Deep Purple songs (sung by a new roster of guest artists whose styles he'll have to study). And the 10-year rerelease of Supernatural contains two previously unreleased tracks on which Lindsay shares writing credits: the new Santana single, "Ya Yo Me Cure," and "Angel Love (Come for Me)," sung by Lindsay.

He's producing a new solo album, plans to release a single this fall and is looking forward to his appearance at the 2010 San Jose Jazz Festival this weekend. He wishes more local performers could be on the bill with him at the festival.

"There's a lot of us that kept the music scene going for a lot of years. The local music scene would have died a long time ago. We kept it going."

While some locals bemoan the decline of live performance in a world of electronic music, Lindsay calls this area a good one for a working jazz or blues musician. "In the Bay Area, I can work seven nights a week. So we're pretty lucky in that way. In L.A., you can forget about it unless you play rock.

"Live music is slowly coming back. The Little Fox [in Redwood City] is going to reopen, so that's pretty cool. And JJ's has survived.

"There's a lot of folks taking other peoples' beats and chord changes and laying their own stuff on top of it. They never really learned how to play the kind of thing that they're trying to record. That kind of killed learning how to play an instrument.

"There's nothing like the pleasure of hearing what you've done," he says.

After three decades as a sideman, Lindsay has learned to play the support role. "If your name is on the marquee, then you're the boss. And then when they give you the opportunity, then it's time to shine."

With an upcoming album, single and solo slot on Friday, Lindsay will be able to shine, be the boss and have his name on the bill. It suits him fine.