There are guitarists who defined their era, and then there is Carlos Santana — who defined an era, survived its nostalgia circuit, and kept refining the sound on the other side. He walked onto the Woodstock stage in the summer of 1969, a young bandleader from San Francisco playing an Afro-Latin-blues-rock fusion that the festival crowd had no ready category for, and didn’t need one. The music explained itself. Nearly six decades later, the band bearing his name is still out there doing it. This summer, Santana and The Doobie Brothers bring the Oneness Tour to American Airlines Center in Dallas on Saturday, August 22, 2026 at 7:00 PM.
About Santana
Carlos Santana formed the band in San Francisco in 1966. The Woodstock performance put him on the map in the most conspicuous way possible; the 1970 album Abraxas confirmed that what happened that weekend wasn’t a fluke but the beginning of a language. That language — built from Afro-Cuban percussion, American blues, and a guitar tone identifiable in the first two seconds of any recording — has proved durable through fashion cycles that consumed bands with longer reputations and shorter memories.
In 1999, Supernatural reset the conversation entirely. The album’s Grammy sweep — nine awards in a single night — introduced a new generation of listeners to music that had been quietly essential for thirty years. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame recognized Santana’s larger arc, and in 2026, the Recording Academy presented Carlos Santana with its Lifetime Achievement Award. Rolling Stone places him eleventh among the greatest guitarists of all time, a ranking that underestimates the specific feeling of watching him work through an extended passage live — when the melody keeps circling back toward a resolution the audience senses before they hear it.
The Oneness Tour set draws from the full catalog — Abraxas, Supernatural, and the decades in between — with the extended instrumental passages that recorded versions can only approximate.
About The Doobie Brothers
The Doobie Brothers arrive in Dallas as Rock and Roll Hall of Famers (inducted 2020) and, since 2025, members of the Songwriters Hall of Fame as well. The current lineup — Tom Johnston, Pat Simmons, John McFee, and Michael McDonald — is performing material from Walk This Road, the band’s 16th studio album and their first with McDonald as a contributing songwriter since 1980. That reunion of creative voices — Johnston’s roots-rock directness meeting McDonald’s soulful architecture — is the actual story underneath Walk This Road, and it’s a story worth hearing live, where the two strands of the band’s history finally share equal billing.
The catalog they’re drawing from covers the full arc of American rock: “Listen to the Music,” “Black Water,” “What a Fool Believes,” and the long stretch in between where they proved the two eras of the band were never mutually exclusive to begin with. They were the supporting act on Santana’s 2019 Supernatural Now Tour; this summer they come as co-equal headliners — a distinction the billing reflects and the set time will confirm. No openers. Two bands, two Hall of Fame catalogs, trading the stage.
American Airlines Center
American Airlines Center is Dallas’s major-market arena, located at 2500 Victory Ave, with seating for up to 20,000. For a co-headlining show of this scale — two Rock and Roll Hall of Fame acts, a combined catalog spanning six decades of American popular music — the room is the right fit. More on the venue and upcoming events at americanairlinescenter.com.
Tickets
Tickets for Santana and The Doobie Brothers at American Airlines Center on Saturday, August 22 are on sale now through the link below. Live Nation is the tour promoter. VIP packages — including premium seating, tour lithographs, and exclusive merchandise — are available through vipnation.com. Showtime is 7:00 PM. Browse all upcoming DFW concerts on Lonestar Concerts.