And You Know That Can’t Be Bad

by Jim Washburn

Don’t you just love those little wolves? I’m talking about Los Lobos, most probably the very best band in the world. Maybe there’s a better band in an African township or Central Asian yurt, but I haven’t heard them. To my ears and attached brain Los Lobos are up there with the Beatles. Let’s see if I can come up with a comparison checklist:

Both bands have a “cute one.”

One band sang “Hippy Hippy Shake,” a song that originated in East L.A., the other did “Shakin’, Shakin’, Shakes,” also from East L.A.

Both bands drew on music from distant places, but filtered the sound and mood through their own hometowns.

Both are triple-threat bands, where their songwriting, voices, and instrumental prowess are each sufficient to warrant immortality.

In each band the members were first and foremost friends, and when you hear their music, you’re hearing the sound of friendship.

Each band seems consistently driven to achieve some new measure of perfection which only they hear, enriching and expanding the world’s artistic palette and embodying the spirit of their times.

Both bands just give and give and give, to the degree that four decades after they broke up, the Beatles are still turning people on at the top of the charts, while Los Lobos, in near obscurity and at workman’s wages, continue to turn people on one nightclub or casino gig at a time.

Both bands radiate love, not a bad thing to radiate

There are of course many differences between the two groups, one being that when the Beatles created something, the whole world heard it and it sparked an artistic and social renaissance. When Los Lobos do something, almost no one hears it and the world slumbers on. The latest remix of the Beatles catalog and the advent of the Beatles Rock Band were major media events this year, while Los Lobos’ splendific, masterful The Town and the City had been out for the better part of a year before I even heard of it, and only then because it was on the merch table at one of their shows.

I’ve listened to it nearly daily for months, during which it has seen me through some trying times, when it seemed all my life’s failures and current shortcomings came rushing in at once. The album seems custom-designed for times like that, though if you just want to dance, it’ll probably seem custom-designed for that as well. After maybe 100 listens, I’m still hearing new things in there.

I first heard and met the guys nearly 30 years ago, when I was a roadie for the James Harman Band, and they were Harman’s opening act at the drafty Music Machine in Santa Monica. There was a little renaissance going on then as well, when distinctive artists like the Blasters, X and Los Lobos slipped in through the doors punk had forced ajar.

When I say “met the guys” I mean saying “hi” in the hallway. A year or two later, when I’d fallen into the rock critic gig at the OC Register, I still knew so little about them that I brought along a friend to interpret in case they didn’t all speak English, which, upon reflection, was about as lunkheaded as bringing a Yoruba tribesman along to interview Wilson Pickett. 

They were delightful, of course, and delighted that they were finding any audience for their music. They’d started out playing rock and roll in East L.A., but by 1973 the scene had so dried up for everyone but bland cover bands that they stashed the electric guitars and started playing folkloric music at weddings and local events. After punk loosened things up in Hollywood, the Blasters and others encouraged them to ratchet things up again.

They were nuts about music. The band’s chief songwriters Louie Perez and David Hidalgo told me they used to hang out at the Musicians Union hall just in the hopes of seeing Earl Palmer walk by. (Palmer, then the union treasurer, had been the drummer on Little Richard and Fats Domino’s records and a million other hits.) They’re still total musical fanboys: When I saw Hidalgo backstage at a show a couple of months ago, he immediately started enthusing about how Fender’s Frontline magazine had mentioned Captain Beefheart guitarist Zoot Horn Rollo in a recent article on Telecaster players.

These guys have big ears. You can hear elements of everything from Django Reinhardt (on The Town and the City’s “Luna” you’ll hear a taste of what a frijole-fed Django might have sounded like) to the late Blue Cheer bassist Dickie Peterson in their music. Short of Hendrix coming back from the grave, they do the best live version of “Are You Experienced” you’ll ever hear. 

I used to try to describe the band as a sum of its parts, citing the Norteno, Zydeco, Mariachi, R&B, and myriad other elements that run through their music. Pointless, as is trying to describe their virtuosity. Though guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Hidalgo gets the most praise, they’re all monsters and Conrad Lozano is flat out one of the greatest bass players ever to grace this earth. 

Virtuosity’s fine, but oftimes its opposite works better, where Robert Pete Williams’ rambling detuned guitar style says more about the human condition than a Bruckner symphony. When you’ve got that emotional directness, and the virtuosity—as Lobos, Richard Thompson and far too few other contemporary artists have—look out.

Don’t look out for it at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, where Thompson (eligible for the last 16 years) and Lobos (eligible for eight) have consistently been overlooked while Madonna, Tom Petty, Blondie, Black Sabbath, and other arguably artistically inconsequential acts have been inducted.

Lobos did have a fluke No. 1 hit in 1987, with their title tune from the Ritchie Valens’ bio-pic La Bamba. Rather than milk the audience that created, their next album went in a pointedly different direction: the acoustic, Spanish-language La Pistola y el Corazon.

I’ve asked them at various times over the years if they’re at all bitter about their music being shut out of the mainstream and the answer has always been no, not much. Sure, they wish their efforts were heard by more people, and that they were better recognized and recompensed, but when it comes down to it, they’re friends, making a living making music they love, and you know that can’t be bad.

Los Lobos plays the White House

They’ve played their share of mega-shows in years past, opening stadium shows for U2. Back then Perez told me, “I think I’d be depressed playing that sort of scale all the time. It’s still a mystery to me that you’ve got 75,000 people, and there’s four or five other humans on stage. Why can’t you just pull out another handful of humans and put them on the stage and let these people go sit out in the seats?”

They’ve played a gazillion benefits, from big ones to ones for little local organizations and causes. They still do them, though Louie’s told me they regret the need for them. “It comes from a curious kind of impetus: It takes some rock and roll guy to think about an issue to convince other people? ‘Oh boy, rock stars say we should give money to poor people!’ You come to question the intelligence of people.”

Their music is as deep as anything. The Town and the City’s opening track, “The Valley,” reminds me of nothing so much as it does Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3, with its ever-ascending bass line and incantation-like qualities. Like much of their music through the decades, the album’s closing “The Town” seems to be saying that, while some people are closer to it than others, we are all ultimately immigrants on this planet, in a vast universe that’s shot through with love and sadness, pellets of joy, moments of bliss and vibration.

They’re as serious as your life, but they don’t take themselves too seriously. Back when critics were gushing over their culture-spanning songs, Perez described once such song to me as being “an old traditional tune from the golf course of Mexico.” They’ll crack each other up onstage by playing obscure snippets of music, like an 8-string bass line from Hendrix’s “1983, a Merman I Should Turn to Be.” 

As Hidalgo once put it, “If you're a musician, you're an entertainer. Little Richard and Ray Charles were entertainers, and it doesn't get any better than that. You're there to perform a service for the people. As long as you can make a connection with the audience where they walk away feeling that they actually mattered to you, that they were a part of making it happen, that's what builds a feeling of community.”

They have a new album, Los Lobos Goes Disney (you can hear selections from it at www.loslobos.org), their last for the Disney-affiliated Hollywood Records, while they move on to yet another small label. From the snippets I’ve heard, they treat Disneyland the way they do every other country they’ve drawn music from, making it entirely their own.

Their live shows are still incendiary, sometimes like a campfire, sometimes like a firestorm, which was the case at their recent hard-rocking Anaheim House of Blues show. They’d played a Latin music night at the White House three nights earlier—where their decades of genius was largely ignored to make way for “La Bamba”—and they looked road-dead, giddy with exhaustion. So they burned the place down, with a raw, loose, loopy show.

One more way they’re like the Beatles: They’re a band with nothing to prove and everything to share. They know just how much the music matters, and they wear that heavy mantle so lightly.

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