Los Lobos
Fifty trips around the sun is a lot for one band to make. But that’s exactly what Los Lobos is celebrating with their current tour, which stops in Nashville Thursday night at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s CMA Theater.
Teenage friends Cesar Rosas, David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez and Conrad Lozano formed the band in Los Angeles in 1973 and are still making music together. The members of Los Lobos, whose name is Spanish for “The Wolves,” have more than answered the question posed in the title of their 1984 breakout album, How Will the Wolf Survive? Speaking to the Scene recently from his home in Southern California, Pérez ruminates on the key to a long run that includes 18 studio albums, three Grammys and one No. 1 hit.
“We grew up as friends before we were ever a band together,” Pérez explains. “And I think that has a lot to say about why we’ve been together for this long. You know, our parents knew each other. We were kids from the neighborhood. We went to the same high school. We were friends. So we were all family before we were a band together, and that’s really how deep the roots are.”
Pérez met Hidalgo, who would become his songwriting partner, after transferring to Garfield High in East Los Angeles in 1970.
“I was going to a parochial school at the time, and I ended up at Garfield because — well, I’ll put it this way, they thought it might be a better idea if I went somewhere else,” he says with a laugh. “So I ended up in public school, and I was put into an art class, and lo and behold, there was Dave. We started chatting about music, and he had different tastes that most people wouldn’t connect with young Chicano kids. He was listening to Fairport Convention, I was listening to Incredible String Band, and he said, ‘Really, you like that?’ ‘Yeah, it’s great.’ And then we just became really good friends.”
Pérez describes how he and Hidalgo soon stumbled into a fascination with the traditional Mexican music of their ancestors — not something immediately of interest to Mexican American kids at the time. For that he thanks Rosas and another friend, Francisco “Frank” González, who Pérez credits with “reeling in” the rest of the group.
“When Frank and Cesar started messing around with this [traditional] stuff, they naturally just called us up because we were all friends, and we all hung out together. And then we needed a bass player and we all knew Conrad, who was playing with another local band. … We just got so totally smitten by it that we quit the bands we were playing in to do this full time.”
González, who died last year at 68, was a trained musician and the band’s early leader. But he had a falling out with the other members in 1976 and left Los Lobos just before they were to make their first record Sí Se Puede!, an album to honor Cesar Chavez and benefit the United Farm Workers.
“If it wasn’t for that project, this band could have remained in limbo,” Pérez says. “And who knows if it would have survived. But we owed this to the United Farm Workers and to Chavez and to the producer that was putting it together.”
So the four remaining members of Los Lobos decided to go forward, and not only survived but thrived with a sound that blends traditional Mexican music and instrumentation with rock, R&B and country. Working the L.A. club circuit, the band became friends with members of The Blasters, who helped them land a deal with Slash Records. Blasters sax man Steve Berlin signed on as co-producer for their EP ... And a Time to Dance, recorded in late 1982 and early 1983. Berlin recalls that The Blasters’ core duo, brothers Dave and Phil Alvin, were prone to fighting with each other at that time, so during the sessions for the EP, he made the easy decision to leave The Blasters and join Los Lobos.
“When this all started, I didn’t think I’d be talking to anybody about looking back over 40 or 50 years,” Berlin says. “The main thing I would want to share with anybody is just how grateful we all are to be able to make our own way and make these records the way we want to, and not really have to compromise ever. We’ve done stuff that people have asked us to do sometimes, but more often than not, it’s just us trying to do what we want to do.”
Los Lobos’ place in the history of the L.A. club scene in the late ’70s and early ’80s led to the band being featured in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s current exhibit Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock.
“About the time California country-rock reached its commercial zenith in the late 1970s and early ’80s with the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and other major-label acts, a new breed of roots-oriented rock ’n’ roll emerged from the L.A. club scene,” says exhibit co-curator Michael Gray. “We thought it was important to also look at that next generation of bands, including Los Lobos, The Blasters, Lone Justice, Rank and File and The Long Ryders.”
On Thursday afternoon before the evening’s show, Rosas, Hidalgo, Pérez, Lozano and Berlin will participate in a panel discussion of their place in history that will be moderated by the exhibit’s co-curator Michael McCall.
“You know, you do this for a living, you don’t think that anything you’re doing is museum-worthy,” Berlin says of their inclusion in the exhibit. “[Musicians celebrated in museums] are gods, you know — not the normal schmoes like the guys in my band. Then you kind of realize, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I guess we’re getting there somehow, someway.’ So, yeah, it was nice. It’s always gratifying to feel like something you’ve done is worthy of commemoration.”
