Los Lobos Interview
From humble beginnings in East Los Angeles to four Grammys, worldwide recognition to critical respect, Los Lobos — and, by extension, its multi-instrumentalist members Steve Berlin, Louie Perez, Conrad Lozano, David Hidalgo, and Cesar Rosas — have lived that part of the Great American Dream we hold most dear. To hear a Los Lobos record is to hear what it sounds like to be an everyday Mexican-American in a melting pot. Their great strength has always been to recognize each distinct side of the hyphen — “Mexican” and “American” — as they live and create from the third, “Mexican-American.”
Appearing: 8/24 at Ravinia in Highland Park.
Los Lobos hit number one with their cover of Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” yet their most critically acclaimed albums — How Will The Wolf Survive and Kiko — are musically catholic: Jazz, blues, rock, country, Tex-Mex, Mexican folk all mesh into an expansive, distinctive sound. Los Lobos manage to be meditative and thoughtful but always raggedly real.
Given all that, it’s probably time (if not past time), for Los Lobos to look at what it means to be an immigrant in a country composed of them, yet deeply divided about them. This what they do in The Town And The City, due out in September. With songs that are often in the first person and a loose story arc over the course of the album (both departures for Los Lobos), the band look at an issue that is as intensely political as it is personal, and do so characteristically: walking softly, carrying big sticks. Emotional and powerful, The Town And The City is as much an expression of a band at the height of their powers as Kiko.
“This record took on its own life,” says Louie Perez. “I don’t know quite what it was. The last time I felt this way was when we made *Kiko. Once the songs started to unfold for *Kiko and we went into the studio, it [was] almost like we were spectators, observing this thing go on. I felt the same way about this one. There was something going one that I couldn’t completely claim credit for.”
The Town And The City didn’t come easily. Perez and Hildago, the primary songwriters, began writing the album thinking to make a more acoustic record. The band tour a lot and so Perez and Hidalgo write most of their music on the road or just prior to going into the studio. From the outset, The Town And The City was different. “We usually come into the studio with two or three songs that serve as prime for the pump,” Perez explains. “After about a month of going back and forth, he called me and said, ‘You got anything goin’?’ I said, ‘No. Do you?’ ‘No. I was hoping you had somethin’.’ It was really difficult to get anything started.”
He continues, “Finally David had a couple things on tape and one of the them was the song that ultimately became ‘The Valley.’ I heard that and I immediately thought there’s almost something primordial happening with all that atmospheric thing going on, almost like creation. So I felt that the only way I can approach that is by taking myself back to the very start. I started to think about our parents and the struggles that they went through when they first came to the U.S. I started to think of what’s been going on about immigration, which is something that you can’t ignore and I thought to myself that if I was sitting in the chair across from Larry King and he asked me what my take was about immigration, I’d say, ‘Larry, what do you expect me say? I wouldn’t be sitting here. I wouldn’t have four Grammy awards if my parents hadn’t crossed the border into this country.’
“So I started to draw a picture about people traveling and coming to a new world. It wasn’t exactly a story with characters but there certainly are characters and there certainly is something that is persona. That one song and everything else just started to kind of fall in line almost in a linear plot like way.”
Los Lobos had a lot to pull from in their backgrounds. Born and raised in East L.A., they are part the wave of artists of the early ’70s who lived the disparity between the ideal world they saw as children in television shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It To Beaver” and the real world of their own backyards. Their work reflects that, The Town And The City in particular. But where so many artists have dwelled on the differences between the two, Los Lobos go further. The album recognizes the allure of that TV life (and, hence, American life) but also the cost of attaining it — a cost paid in traditions lost, not dollars.
“When we were just out of high school,” says Perez, “We decided we wanted to play Mexican music. Nobody had ever done that. This was the whole melting pot process of modernization, you know. Most kids our age were trying to sanitize themselves from the culture. But we did it because it felt right and whenever something felt right, that’s what we did.”
To learn more about the melting pot of Los Lobos, find the August issue of Illinois Entertainer, available throughout Chicagoland.
— M.S. Dodds
