Los Lobos at 25
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 23, 1999) - Well before most bands reach the quarter-century mark, they find themselves settling comfortably into the niches they have carved out for themselves. Not so Los Lobos. Twenty-five years after they began playing Mexican folk music together in East Los Angeles, the members of Los Lobos continue to expand into and explore new musical horizons, both within and outside the confines of the group.

If rolling stones gather no moss, then the members of Los Lobos, constantly in motion and breaking new creative ground, are highly polished gems by now. This jewel of a band, which has reinvented itself several times over in the course of the years while always staying true to itself as a Mexican-American roots band, will unveil its latest incarnation on Sunday, May 30, in the inaugural concert at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, capping the opening weekend's festivities with a courtyard concert at 5 p.m. The show will be moved indoors in case of rain. Boston Music Awards nominee Robby Baier, of Housatonic, will warm up the crowd for Los Lobos. For tickets and more information, call 662-2111.

"In traditional music, there's a very purist approach, and that's not what we're about," said Louie Perez, a Los Lobos co-founder and, with David Hidalgo, co-visionary of the spinoff band, Latin Playboys, speaking in a recent phone interview from Los Angeles.

"We do maintain our cultural integrity as Mexican-Americans, and we do maintain the integrity of traditional American music. But what we do is we carry on the legacy. We live in the contemporary world and we write about things that are around us."

The members of Los Lobos were high school pals who played in various garage bands, power trios, soul outfits and wedding bands, before joining forces in the 1970s as Los Lobos del Este, a folkloric band dedicated to playing the nortenos, corridos and boleros of their Mexican heritage.

"It was quite unusual to see a bunch of guys with long hair, holes in their jeans, and flannel shirts playing music that was usually connected with older people," said Perez.

For years the group played weddings and back yard parties in East L.A., until gradually they came to the attention of the world outside el barrio, easing their way back into L.A.'s rock clubs in the thriving roots-rock scene of the early-'80s.

Including a two-CD retrospective collection, "Just Another Band From East L.A.," released in 1993, Los Lobos has released nine albums since 1978. They range from the rootsy folk-rock of "And a Time to Dance," to the new-wave "How Will the Wolf Survive," to the Mexican-folk tribute "La Pistola y El Corazon," to the more recent, densely-textured experimental albums, "Kiko" and "Colossal Head." The group also released a children's album, "Papa's Dream" (Music for Little People) a few years ago.

Along the way, various members have released other albums as solo projects or in various combinations with each other. The experimental approach debuted on "Kiko" spawned the first Latin Playboys album in 1994, a collaboration between Perez, Hidalgo and producer/engineers Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, which further explored the subterranean, industrial aesthetic replete with found sounds and world-beat textures that pervades much of Froom's work with Los Lobos and other groups.

That was recently followed up by a second Latin Playboys album, "Dose" (Atlantic). A sonic drive through the East Los Angeles of Perez and Hidalgo's childhood, the album exposes the listener to the sounds of the streets, cars and machinery, the smells of the food, and brings to life the characters that populate the barrio - La Lola, Locoman and Cuca, the tender-hearted prostitute.

In addition, last February singer/guitarist Cesar Rosas released his first solo album, "Soul Disguise" (Rykodisc), a more conventional collection of mostly original, Tex-Mex-inflected blues, R&B, New Orleans funk, Chicano soul and roots-rock - the sort of music Los Lobos was making back in the 1980s.

And earlier this year, Hidalgo released a collaboration with 72-year-old blues singer Mike Halby, called "Houndog" (Legacy/Columbia), a dreamy, stripped-down bit of neo-delta blues.

To make things even more complicated, Hidalgo and Rosas are members of the Grammy-nominated, Tex-Mex supergroup Los Super Seven, along with such contemporary legends as Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender and Joe Ely.

This summer, Los Lobos will release its tenth studio album. Perez says it is a logical progression following "Colossal Head," which followed logically from "Kiko."

Yet "This Time" (Hollywood) will not simply be more of the same. For one, there are more Spanish songs on it than on any Los Lobos album since the all-Spanish "La Pistola y El Corazon." And even though the sound continues in the recent vein of the group's more orchestrated work - "it doesn't sound like a simple guitar-rock record," said Perez - "This Time" will include several conventional, roots-rock songs.

The group's greatest success came as a kind of fluke, when its version of "La Bamba," recorded for the Ritchie Valens biographical motion picture of the same name, went to number one in 1987. While Valens's Mexican-inflected rock 'n' roll is part of Los Lobos's musical heritage, the group refused to capitalize on the song's success by becoming a Mexican-American pop party band. They followed up their greatest commercial success with "La Pistola y El Corazon," a full-length tribute to their Mexican folk roots, which won them a Grammy award.

"We chose to carve our own niche, to follow our own direction," said Perez. "We don't compromise and we do what we do our own way. That's maybe what keeps us from the big success in the larger sense of the word, but it gives us the satisfaction and freedom to do what we want."

Hence, the sensation that the members of Los Lobos go off in forty different directions at once.

Perez is quick to emphasize that the Latin Playboys albums and all the other members' side projects were not borne out of frustration within Los Lobos or the feeling of being limited by the group.

"We're talking about a group of guys who've been together for twenty-five years now, and there's definitely a very intuitive thing that springs out of the friendship," he said. "We're still enthusiastic and we rarely look back over our shoulders. We've been around for a while, and somehow maintained our sense of discovery and enthusiasm. We're always looking forward to finding new things.

"Plus, we were friends before we were musicians. We never took out an ad for a bass player."

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[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 28, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]