Lobos, Los

LOS LOBOS

Formed: 1973, Los Angeles, California

Members: Steven "Steve" Berlin, saxophone, keyboards (born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 14 September, 1955); David Hidalgo, lead vocals, guitar (born Los Angeles, California, 6 October 1954); Conrad Lozano, bass, vocals (born Los Angeles, California, 21 March 1951); Luis "Louie" Pérez, drums, guitar, vocals (born Los Angeles, California, 29 January 1953); Cesar Rosas, lead vocals, guitar (born Los Angeles, California, 26 September 1954).

Genre: Rock, World

Best-selling album since 1990: Good Morning Aztlán (1990)

Los Lobos is the most innovative and successful band to have combined elements of rock music with the traditional folk music of Mexico. The band came out of East Los Angeles, a center of Hispanic culture for decades. Ritchie Valens was the first East L.A. artist to become nationally known, but he was killed at the height of his popularity along with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in a 1959 plane crash that would be memorialized by Don McLean's "American Pie" as "the day the music died." Ironically, it took a film about Valens's brief career, La Bamba (1987), to bring Los Lobos into mainstream prominence with the number one hit single "La Bamba"—despite the fact that the group had been together almost a decade and a half prior to their smash number one hit version of the movie's title track. The single's extraordinary success exceeded Valens's original, which had only reached number twenty-two in 1958.

Rock Roots and Mexican Influence

The founding members of the group—David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano, and Louie Pérez—met in the late 1960s while attending Garfield High School in East Los Angeles. The earliest group musical efforts were based in the sound and approach of the British Invasion, complete with electric guitars. By the early 1970s the quartet had gone acoustic and become interested in performing norteño, the traditional folk music of Northern Mexico. Incorporating traditional instruments such as the bajo sexto, the guitarrón, the jaran requinto and the button accordion, the quartet dubbed itself Los Lobos del Este (de Los Angeles) ("The Wolves of the East [Los Angeles]") in a satirical nod to the Tex-Mex band Los Lobos del Norte ("The Wolves of the North.") They were in the unique position of bridging both sides of the Hispanic generation gap by appealing to both older audiences seeking to recapture their Mexican heritage and younger audiences in search of cultural roots and identity.

Although Los Lobos had appeared on the compilation album Sí Se Puede (Yes, It Can Be Done ) (1976), it was the group's own independently produced Del Este De Los Angeles (1978) that became the group's first recorded statement of purpose. Each of the album's eleven tracks highlights the folk music of a different region of Mexico. The title is a whimsical wink to an album by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Just Another Band from L.A. (1972). By the late 1970s the group began to reelectrify and reincorporate elements of the rock music that the band had played together as teenagers. Los Lobos was soon playing up and down the Sunset Strip, and they were asked to record a Spanish-language version of "Devil with a Blue Dress On" for the cult comedy film Eating Raoul (1982). That soundtrack also features the group's original "How Much Can I Do?"

Saxophonist and percussionist Steve Berlin of the Blasters was so taken with Los Lobos that he joined up as a fifth member in 1983. Berlin also co-produced the group's album . . . And a Time to Dance (1983), which features the group's Grammy Award–winning track "Anselma." The band's first full-length album for the new Warner Bros. Slash label, How Will the Wolf Survive? (1984), was a huge critical success, if not a commercial one; Los Lobos tied with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band for the Rolling Stone critics' poll "Band of the Year" award.

By the mid-1980s, Los Lobos had become an underground sensation. Appearances in Europe as part of Peter Gabriel's WOMAD (World of Music of Dance) Festival and on Paul Simon's smash album Graceland (1986) contributed to their 1987 emergence into the mainstream in La Bamba. In defiance of its newfound success, the group decided to return to an acoustic emphasis with the album La Pistola y El Corazón (The Pistol and the Heart) (1988), reestablishing the group's identity as emissaries of traditional Mexican folk music and winning Los Lobos its second Grammy Award.

Finding a Group Voice with Kiko

The early 1990s saw Los Lobos going electric again with The Neighborhood (1990) and Kiko (1992), the latter the most experimental of the band's albums to date and generally considered to be the group's masterpiece. Under the careful ears of producer Mitchell Froom and engineer Tchad Blake, Kiko epitomizes Los Lobos' uncanny ability to take diverse and seemingly irreconcilable influences and combine them into something truly new, exciting, and forward-looking. The Hidalgo-Pérez songwriting team had evolved to an extraordinary degree by Kiko ; the lyrics reflect the dreamlike influence of the Latin magic-realist writers Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Márquez; the band's arrangements are adventure-some and ethereal sonic collages. Kiko was chosen "Album of the Year" by many critics and remains an influential album across musical boundaries.

The hallucinatory freedom of Kiko inspired Hidalgo, Pérez, Froom, and Blake to continue to work together outside of the Los Lobos moniker as the Latin Playboys and to release the much-heralded Latin Playboys (1994) and Dose (1999). Hidalgo and Rosas also formed Los Super Seven to collaborate in summit sessions with other Latin artists on the Grammy Award–winning Los Super Seven (1998) and Canto (2001).

With the album This Time (1999) the band reunited with the Kiko producer and engineer team of Froom and Blake, and brought considerable acclaim to Hollywood Records, which finally reissued the group's long out-of-print, self-produced debut album. The legendary producer John Leckie (his client roster includes the Beatles individually, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and XTC) came aboard to produce Los Lobos' Mammoth Records release Good Morning Aztlán (2002). Neither exclusively traditional acoustic Mexican folk music nor experimental, Latin-flavored, blues-tinged electric rock, the album straddles these polarities with ease on studio tracks and live bonus cuts.

Los Lobos has continued to contribute to major Hollywood soundtracks, including Desperado (1995), which won Los Lobos its third Grammy Award, From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Feeling Minnesota (1996), and The Mambo Kings (2000). The group also received El Primio Billboard, a lifetime achievement award, at the 2001 Billboard Latin Music Awards, where Los Lobos was honored as the most enduring bicultural and bilingual band in the nation.

Having been together for over three decades, Los Lobos remains a fresh experience for both its members and audiences largely because the group is able to maintain the same spontaneity that it had when the group was playing neighborhood parties back in East Los Angeles. Indeed, for many, Los Lobos continues to embody the spirit of the rock and roll party band, albeit the thinking person's rock and roll party band.

SELECTIVE DISCOGRAPHY:

How Will the Wolf Survive? (Warner Bros., 1984); By the Light of the Silvery Moon (Warner Bros., 1987); La Pistola y El Corazón (Warner Bros., 1988); The Neighborhood (Warner Bros., 1990); Kiko (Warner Bros., 1992); Colossal Head (Warner Bros., 1996); This Time (Hollywood Records, 1999); Del Este De Los Angeles (Hollywood, 2000 re-release); El Cancionero: Mas e Mas (Rhino, 2000); Good Morning Aztlán (Mammoth, 2002). With the Chieftains: Santiago (RCA, 1996). With Lalo Guerrero: Papa's Dream (Music Little People, 1995). Soundtracks: La Bamba (Warner Bros., 1987); Desperado (Sony, 1995); From Dusk till Dawn (Sony, 1996); Feeling Minnesota (Atlantic, 1996); The Mambo Kings (Sony, 2000).

WEBSITE:

www.loslobos.org.

dennis polkow