by jon bosworth jaxvillain@yahoo.com
Even if you've never heard a single song by them, there is no way you have never heard of Los Lobos. Did you see the movie La Bamba? That wasn't Lou Diamond Phillips singing the 60s hit, it was Los Lobos. Have you seen the cult hit film Desperado by Robert Rodriguez? Los Lobos scored that film.
In addition to being the poster child rock band of a new America where the largest minority is Latin Americans, Los Lobos is one of the longest running acts currently touring. Originally from East LA, they started out as a group of Chicano musicians that all went to high school together and played in various Chicano punk rock bands. In the late seventies they got together and their lineup has barely changed since. Eleven years later, in 1983, they got signed to a label and Rolling Stone named them Band of the Year.
In the subsequent 24 years they have released more than 8 full length albums. Los Lobos is legendary. How many Mexican-Americans from East LA find themselves touring the world with a rock band during late middle-age? But, to utilize a stereotype, they have a Mexican work ethic. They tour like crazy and they never quit. EU caught up Louie Perez, songwriter, percussionist, and guitarist for Los Lobos.
EU: I noticed you guys are coming all the way down to Florida, playing this festival, and then your next date is a week later up in Nevada. Are you guys going to hang out on the beach for a week?
LP: Oh yeah, right. (Laughing) No fun allowed. The only fun in rock and roll is the two hours on stage. No, we're going to go home for a little bit. We've been working like crazy. The only break we had was in June and the only reason we took June off was because David was expecting his first grandchild, so we've been working like crazy and we will pretty much be on the road until December.
EU: Did you ever think you would be traveling rock stars when you were grandparents?
LP: (Laughing) Well, that's a really good question, because as you know, in our history, we didn't have our first record deal and first real tour until eleven years into this band. I guess I could say we made the decision to be rock stars as adults. Being a grandparent at all, whoever thinks of that?
EU: How long have you been playing together?
LP: This November it will be thirty-five years.
EU: Has there ever been a lineup change?
LP: No. Steve is the new guy and he's been with us twenty-five years.
EU: Yeah, I've been meaning to ask you about that, are you sure Steve Berlin is a Latino name?
LP: (Laughing) It depends on how you pronounce it, I guess. No during the early years of playing the Hollywood clubs and the basement punk rock joints of the early eighties, Steve started moonlighting with us and we eventually got him to be full time. But, yeah, it's just been the four of us since 1973.
EU: How difficult was it for a bunch of Latinos to break into the punk rock circuit?
LP: Well there were no rules. During the seventies there were some rules imposed on rock and roll because labels got the idea that they could make a lot of money from it. That's when disco and all other kinds of weird stuff was going on. That's when punk rock sort of started in the late seventies and it was about having no rules. It wasn't unusual. There were already a few Chicano punk rock bands from East LA, but we were different from everybody else, that's for sure.
EU: How did you first meet JJ Grey & Mofro?
LP: We met him in Europe. E was on the bill with us for about seven out of eighteen shows we did in Europe, in May and April. We were there for three and half weeks and that's where we met him and kind of clicked.
EU: Do you play a lot of bluegrass type festivals?
LP: We've been stretching the definition of acoustic for a long time. We just did Winnipeg Folk Festival and we're about to do the Edmonton Folk Festival and somehow we can morph into just about anything without it being forced or deliberate sounding.
EU: So you're probably not nervous about playing in a redneck town with a bunch of grass roots southern bands?
LP: Oh no. No. As a matter of fact some of our earliest shows were in the South. In Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama. Something unusual happens when music is introduced in the mix between humans. There's something, a commonality. We've never really experienced any weird stuff on the road. We've been real fortunate.
EU: What is a Los Lobos show like?
LP: It is two hours plus of little bits of everything we've done, favorite covers, and stuff from our current record Town and the City, which has been out since September. Lately we've been doing some acoustic stuff. A Mexican acoustic folk sort of thing. We start the show with that. Whether we'll be doing that at this show, I'm not sure. I think it will kind of fit, so we probably will. We started introducing some of that stuff into our electric show earlier this year because we had done a tour of the US unplugged in February and some of this is just fallout from that.
EU: Are audiences more receptive to you in Mexico or overseas?
LP: Well Mexico we don't have too much experience with. We've never really done a real tour down there. We went down there to open for Bob Dylan for a dozen shows and we've done scattered shows here and there in Mexico City and Monterray, but we never did a definitive tour in Mexico, so I can't tell you too much about that, but the audience seems to be great. Other parts of the world, Asia and Europe, we've always done really well. The tour we did in Europe in May was mostly Scandanavia and Northern Europe. It's always great for us in places like Holland and Norway and Belgium and Denmark. Not to mention, of course, the reception we get in Italy and Spain.
EU: What musicians were major influences on Los Lobos? Was there any music you all liked in common?
LP: Well soul music was always something that was just the soundtrack growing up in East LA, whether it be Motown or Stacks, something like that. The Miracles, the Four Tops, all that kind of dominated the airwaves anyway. What musicologists and journalists have called the East LA sound is really Chicano musicians playing R&B music. All of us gravitated toward Hendricks and Clapton and Cream and all that stuff that was going on. You gotta remember that this was at a time when radio wasn't as polarized as it is now. You could listen to Hendricks, James Brown and The Byrds back to back on the radio and hear the long version of Light My Fire (laughing), you know? So it was all of those things rolled into one. We made it back to rock and roll after years of playing as the acoustic band that we started off as in 1973. After playing in local rock bands with friends in high school, we went back to rock and roll that was informed by a lot of new things. It never seemed unusual for us to mix it up.
EU: Do you ever work with Robert Rodriguez anymore?
LP: Uh, he's still a friend but he's his own one-man movie/music machine, he can do all the stuff himself. He's a pretty good musician. He knows music and he's a huge music fan, obviously, you can tell by the films he makes, the music is always great. He learned how to manipulate technology to do his own thing. We haven't done anything with him in a long time. I don't think anyone really has, he has created his own music for some time now.
EU: As trailblazers in the Mexican-American rock circuit and the Chicano punk thing, have you seen any young Latino rock bands that are following in your footsteps? Are there people that we should look out for? I know there will never be a next Los Lobos, but are there some bands that are following in the same path in some way? A band that you might have paved the way for?
LP: Good question. When we broke in 1983 with a record and all that crazy band of the year stuff from Rolling Stone, we thought a lot of other bands would come through but nothing much really happened. Everything just kind of took on its own natural progression. There are bands over the past ten years now that are doing a lot of things. Not necessarily emulating us, but I'm thinking more inspired by us. By our tenacity and our willingness to challenge what people expect to come from a Chicano band from East LA. Bands are doing a lot of different things. There's a band called Quetzal that's from East LA and there's Ozomatli, which is a mix of hip-hop and Latin jazz and everything else. They've been successful doing that. Those are just a few. There are bands from Mexico as well. Casa te Cuba is doing some really incredible things. They were a punk rock band that over the years has been including traditional Mexican music as well. There's a lot of cool shit out there.
EU: Does Los Lobos have any feelings about the immigration reform issues that are making all this noise? Is there a Los Lobos stand?
LP: Yeah, it's a huge issue. It's just a shame that for every step forward its two steps back. We don't involve ourselves that much politically. We don't take any party sides or anything like that, we're more community-based, you know, charities and projects, there's a scholarship fund that we raise money for for kids from all over the US. It's mostly education that we focus on rather than the political thing, but its unavoidable, what's going on as far as the borders. It's a shame that they are zeroing in on the Mexican-American border. There are a lot of other things going on in other places too. There was this huge thing on the news and all these protests because there was this little pizza parlor in Los Angeles that was accepting Pesos. You can go to Detroit and use Canadian money, what's the big deal? But because it was such a hot topic, the right becomes very myopic when it comes to anything that seems to challenge the American way. And we've always been hugely patriotic because we've been a part of the American fabric for generations and generations. We've contributed so much to the culture and the workforce here for so long that it's a pitiful shame that anybody who has a last name that ends in a vowel.
The latest record, Town and the City, a lot of reviewers looked at it and talked about how this record is about immigration. It isn't that I'm going to say that it wasn't, but at the same time, when haven't the songs we've written been about our culture and how it is perceived by the larger scheme of thing in the United States. Go back to Will the Wolf Survive and This Time. It is difficult for me to separate that as a writer, I've been writing about these things for the past twenty years.
EU: Why "The Wolf?"
LP: It started off as a joke, Los Lobos, there's a thing with Mexican bands always naming themselves after animals, so we picked Los Lobos as a joke but then it just stuck around. Then it became something more symbolic. A wolf is an incredibly misunderstood animal. (Laughs) Which can apply.
LP: What's the weather going to be like?
EU: Hot as blazes.
LP: Like the rest of the planet, but we won't go there.
Now these legends join some other legendary players at the Blackwater Sol Revue concert at the new St. Augustine Amphitheatre so that you can see them live. Although it will be hot, the new amphitheatre is covered, so you will be in the shade!
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