Los Lobos remains one of the most prolific Latin-Americana rock bands of the past 50 years.
Next week, they rock Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races in West Virginia on April 12, followed by The Birchmere in Alexandria, Virginia on July 10.
“We’ve been coming there since the early days,” Saxophonist and Keyboardist Steve Berlin told WTOP. “We go back to the original 9:30 Club. I was a hothead once, if you can imagine. Back then I was easily riled and the stage mix was so bad I picked up my monitor and threw it at the monitor guy. … We’ve been lucky enough to play the White House. It was Obama’s first year, a tribute to Latin Music, so it was us, Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez.”
Formed by a group of high school buddies in Los Angeles in 1973, Los Lobos blew everyone away at the legendary music club Whiskey a Go-Go on Sunset Blvd. where they opened for Berlin’s former group The Blasters.
“The night that Los Lobos opened up for The Blasters was sort of like an epiphany,” Berlin said. “No one had heard of them before and certainly no one had ever heard them play rock ‘n roll before and it was like overnight that’s all anybody was talking about: ‘Los Lobos, did you see them? Did you hear them?’ So, it literally blew up. This band that had been together for seven or eight years at that point was quite literally an overnight success.”
Berlin joined the band around 1980, meaning he was a pivotal part of the lineup when Los Lobos won its first Grammy Award for Best Mexican American Performance with “Anselma” in 1984.
“We won our first Grammy on our first record, and we’ve been riding that wave ever since,” Berlin said.
Of course, the band became a household name of pop culture when it provided the movie soundtrack of the Ritchie Valens biopic “La Bamba” (1987) starring Lou Diamond Phillips. The title track earned Grammy nominations for both Record of the Year and Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal.
“Ritchie’s family all lived in a town called Watsonville outside of Santa Cruz, so whenever we’d go up there, they’d feed us, we’d sleep on their floor,” Berlin said. “One time they said, ‘Hey, we’re selling the rights to Ritchie’s story, and we’ve stipulated that the only guys who can do his music is you guys.’ We were like, ‘Wow, what an honor.’ Nothing about it said this is gonna be a hit: a first-time director, most of the actors had never done anything.”
That same year, Los Lobos earned another Grammy nomination for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal for its third album “By the Light of the Moon,” recorded concurrently with “La Bamba.”
“We were doing both,” Berlin said. “At the time, we were at a studio called Sunset Sound in L.A. I was working on ‘La Bamba’ in Studio 1 and they were working on ‘By the Light of the Moon’ in Studio 2, so we’d all be running back and forth between the two studios trying to get both of the projects done at the same time.”
In 1990, the group won the Grammy for Best Mexican American Performance for “La Pistola y El Corazon.”
“‘La Bamba’ happens and it’s a big hit, so we’re faced with how do we follow up this giant hit?” Berlin said. “I believe Louie Pérez, our guitar player/drummer, who said, ‘No one will ever pay as much attention to what we do now as whatever we do now, so let’s go back to the roots and do a record like we did back in the early days, let’s clear the palette.’ … We didn’t want to be a one-hit wonder attached to a movie … so ‘La Pistola’ was to reclaim our identity.”
In 1993, the band’s defining album “Kiko and the Lavender Moon” earned two more Grammy nominations for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal and Best Music Video: Short Form.
“We got a little too big for our breeches,” Berlin said. “We were touring on a scale that we couldn’t really afford. … For the first time in our career, we got back from a tour and realized that we had lost money, so we were kind of pissed off, honestly. … We thought well, if we’re gonna go down, we’re gonna die with our boots on, so we made this record ‘Kiko,’ which was basically us telling everybody who had poorly advised us … to basically get lost.”
In 1996, Los Lobos not only earned a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Album for Children with “Papa’s Dream,” it won the Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance for the “Mariachi Suite” on the movie soundtrack of Robert Rodriguez’s “Desperado” (1995) with Antonio Banderas carrying a gun in a guitar case.
“At that point, no one had ever heard of Antonio Banderas or Salma Hayek,” Berlin said. “It was Robert doing everything, he shoots, he edits. … He wants twice as much music as there is length of movie, so for a 90-minute movie he wants like three hours of music because he wants to listen to the music as he’s shooting the scene, he’s actually shooting the scene to the soundtrack, so it was an amazing amount of work, but it was also really fun.”
In 2011, Los Lobos was nominated for Best Americana Album with “Tin Can Trust,” as well as Best Rock Instrumental Performance for “Do the Murray.”
“We had always recorded in Hollywood, and the studios in Hollywood are pretty great, but it was always a drag for the guys, traffic was a pain in the neck and every session would start two or three hours late,” Berlin said. “For ‘Tin Can Trust’ we found this really cool studio in East L.A. that was more or less in the guys’ neighborhood, so every day started in a much more pleasant place. … It just remember it being kind of effortless, really.”
Most recently in 2022, Los Lobos won the Grammy for Best Americana Album with “Native Sons.”
“The pandemic hits, everybody’s touring plans are out the window, everybody’s locked down and we’re high and dry like what are we gonna do? Will there even be a touring business? Are we all gonna die?” Berlin said. “The concept of that record became: why don’t we see what we can do if we just do it in bits and pieces? That’s where the notion of a love letter to L.A. came from. … It helped us stay sane as the crazy COVID year was unfolding.”
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