When the six members of Los Lobos took the portable stage near the centerfield wall in Tropicana Field on Friday, they seemed ill at ease. One of the great cult bands of the last three decades, Los Lobos is accustomed to playing for a crowd of heads, an audience familiar with their eclectic barrio-meets-the-blues artistry.

What to make of this crowd? A post-ballgame throng loosely arrayed on the field and scattered around the stands. (It appeared as if more than half of the packed house left before the band’s set.) It was ostensibly Latin night, but Los Lobos is no salsa band, although they could probably fake it if needed. Their only hits are from the 1987 soundtrack to La Bamba, and the band has all but disavowed that phase of their career. This was obviously no occasion to play Kiko, their 1992 masterpiece, start to finish.

But, pros that they are, Los Lobos found their legs about a half hour in, when it seemed to dawn on them, “Hey, this is really just another gig.”

This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2010.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...