Instead of calling it quits, they made an album
Los Lobos crafts a record of covers in an ode to LA sound
Cesar Rosas had just finished strumming his guitar and singing the first lines of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which the band would perform to open a recent baseball game at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, when he casually offered a concerning detail about the band’s status just prior to the pandemic.
“We were just about to throw in the towel, and say, ‘Hey man, let’s slow down,’ ” said Rosas, 66, sitting with his four Los Lobos bandmates of 40-plus years.
“We were working really hard,” added David Hidalgo,
66, who recalled being so exhausted early last year that he wondered to himself, “How much longer can we do this?” The coronavirus rendered the question moot, he said, noting after a comedic pause, “If it wasn’t for the impending doom, the vacation would have been great.”
The Grammy-winning Los Lobos — Rosas (guitar, bajo sexto, mandolin), Hidalgo (vocals, guitar, accordion),
Louie Perez (percussion, guitar), Conrad Lozano (bass, guitarron) and Steve Berlin (saxophone, keyboards) — chatted recently about “Native Sons,” their new Los Angeles-themed covers album.
Built in studio sessions during the 2020 shutdown, the project finds the quintet celebrating music made on its home turf.
Thee Midniters, the Blasters, Willie Bobo, War, the Beach Boys, Lalo Guerrero, Jackson Browne, Percy Mayfield, the Jaguars, the Blasters and more: “Native Sons” serves as an argument for, and an ode to, the LA sound. That they recorded it during their longest respite from the road in four decades might have been unplanned, but the extended break helped tether the record.
The touring halt came after an average of 100 Los Lobos shows per year since 2000, part of a commitment stretching back to the formation of America’s most prominent
Mexican American band in the mid-1970s. “The longest we had gone from the very beginning without touring was probably a month, and in that month we were probably doing something,” noted Berlin, 65, who officially joined the band in
1984 after playing with them for years.
The all-covers project relieved them of the need to compose new originals, allowing them to ponder their influences and to do so while isolating with their families, to whom in most years they said hello and goodbye dozens of times. “The guys are all grandfathers now, so they enjoyed just being around the kids on a regular basis. I got to hang out with my family,” said Berlin, who lives in Portland, Oregon.
“Native Sons” is Los Lobos’ 17th studio album since its 1978 debut, “Just Another Band From East L.A.” Back then, they were Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles and earned a living as an
all-covers wedding band. By the time they released their EP, “... And a Time to Dance,” on Slash Records in 1983, they’d shortened their name as they broadened their aspirations.
Their story has been told many times, most diligently in “Los Lobos: Dream in Blue,” writer Chris Morris’ 2015 biography: how the band expanded into Hollywood and West Hollywood as part of the city’s punk and post-punk scene; how their 1984 album for Slash, “How Will the Wolf Survive?,” earned them national and international regard alongside label-mates X and the Blasters; how their 1987 version of Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba” hit No. 1 on the pop charts; how they expanded their approach as their artistry improved on the dynamic 1990s albums “The Neighborhood” and “Kiko”; and how, much like the Grateful Dead, they’ve earned their livelihoods as a dynamic road band across their entire run.
“We don’t use a setlist most of the time. If it’s a loose setting, then we’ll just wing it,” Hidalgo told Relix magazine in 2015. “We’ll figure out maybe the first three songs and, from there, we’ll just try to read the crowd. If they shout out something, then we’ll play it.”
John Allen, president of Nashville-based New West Records, which is releasing “Native Sons,” first worked with Los Lobos in the mid-1980s when he was at indie publishing company Bug Music and helped facilitate Waylon Jennings covering Los Lobos’ “Will the Wolf Survive?”
Expecting that Los Lobos’ first record for New West would be an album of new material, Allen called their pitch for the covers album “a bit of a curveball.” After he, New West vice president of A&R Kim Buie and Los Lobos’ Berlin met to discuss the LA theme, any hesitation vanished.
“If they’re inspired, you know
it’s going to be good,” Allen said.
“Honestly, not having a record deal wasn’t something we thought about,” Berlin said when asked about the New
West deal. “Bands like us, well into our career, that’s not the be-all-end-all.”
Also not a prerequisite is a hyperactive social media presence, though during the forced sabbatical Los Lobos recorded a number of homemade missives, including one that celebrated Cinco de Mayo. Such clips were meant to both connect with and advocate for their devoted fan base.
Lyricist and multi-instrumentalist Perez, 68, said that such advocacy is ingrained in the band’s DNA. He cited as one example the lyrics for “A Matter of Time,” from “How Will the Wolf Survive?,” which he called “a song about an immigrant living in asylum across the border.”
“We’ve always been aware of the fact that there’s four
brown faces onstage in Helsinki, Finland, or in Kyoto,” Perez said. “It’s our responsibility to redefine a lot of the myths that people have heard about Mexican people — and continue to.”
Asked if they embedded certain themes into the “Native Sons” song selection, the band didn’t have an easy answer — other than the easiest.
“Everybody picked a favorite song, or a song from a favorite band,” said Lozano, 70, a Beach Boys fan who successfully lobbied for the inclusion of “Sail on, Sailor.”
“There were certain bases we had to cover,” adds Hidalgo. “You had East LA, the soul element, the Chicano or Mexican side of things, and the hippies and Laurel Canyon.”
“The city of LA really did birth us,” Berlin says. “Why not try something that says thank you with an homage to the people that inspired us? What could be cooler than that?”