When it was announced last October that Los Lobos has been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, it gave its five long-standing members and diehard fans a nice little lift.
Then reality set in.
“Some of us — some more than others — got kind of excited about the prospect,” says keyboardist/saxophonist Steve Berlin. “But it didn’t take long before I realized we didn’t have a chance in hell with the competition that we were facing.”
The Hall of Fame class of 2016, announced in December, includes Chicago, Cheap Trick, N.W.A., Deep Purple and Steve Miller. Los Lobos didn’t come close. And according to Berlin, that’s just fine.
Truth be told, Los Lobos may never be enshrined. It is, after all, a Hall of Fame. And that’s something Los Lobos has never chased.
Here’s an example: The band notched its only real pop hit in 1987 with a snappy cover of Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” the title song of the soundtrack from the rock legend’s biopic. The single went to No. 1.
How did Los Lobos follow it up? With June ’88 release La Pistola y El Corazon , a collection of Tejano/Mariachi folk music sung in Spanish. The disc reached No. 179 on the Billboard 200. It won a Grammy for Best Mexican-American/Tejano Music Performance.
Los Lobos never had to worry about rock stardom again.
“We’re happy to be working, is the best way I can put it,” Berlin says. “That I could pull this off for this many years and not have to get a real job is all I ever asked for.”
Besides being one of the most inventive and tireless bands in the annals of American music, Los Lobos’ greatest achievement is their longevity — and more particularly, their continuity. Which is to say: All of the original members are still on board.
In 1973, four friends from East Los Angeles’ Garfield High School — David Hidalgo, Louie Perez, Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano — formed Los Lobos (“The Wolves”) to play weddings and bars.
The cover band evolved into an ambitious outfit that incorporated norteño and conjunto from their Latino heritage, as well as embracing the full pantheon of American roots music. Their first album, the Spanish-sung acoustic effort Los Lobos del Este Los Angeles, came out in 1978. After re-embracing electric instruments, the quartet somewhat improbably found itself part of the L.A. punk scene.
The Blasters, a hard-driving L.A. roots-punk band, became big fans, and urged their record label, Slash, to sign Los Lobos. At the time, Berlin played saxophone in The Blasters. As Los Lobos prepared to record their label debut, …And a Time to Dance , released in 1983, they invited Berlin to play sax parts.
It was an eye-opener. “I walked into this calm, cooperative environment among grown-ups,” Berlin recalls. “The Blasters were ready to fistfight at the drop of a hat. That’s kind of how I thought bands were. If there was a disagreement, whoever was the last man standing after the ‘Pier 6 brawl’ was the winner of the argument. I’m not even kidding about that.
“When I met the Los Lobos guys, they didn’t fight at all. They would discuss career choices and artistic decisions and maybe it would come to a vote. I thought, ‘Wow, there’s another way to do this, and it’s a lot more fun.”
The camaraderie has persisted through the decades. “Like any other family, we have our beefs, and some times the temper comes out,” Berlin says. “But whatever you were upset about three hours ago, it just goes away. The guys in this band, most exemplified by Mr. Hidalgo, don’t let anything bother them all that much.”
As the years went on, and their stature — if not sales — grew, Los Lobos continued to stretch boundaries, embraced avant-garde elements, and notched a legitimate masterpiece in 1992’s Kiko , co-produced by sonic adventurer Mitchell Froom. In 1994, Hidalgo and Perez joined Froom and Tchad Blake for an even further-out project tagged Latin Playboys. The self-titled debut and 1999’s Dose live on as classics of avant-rock.
Just last year, the band unleashed Gates of Gold , which, by the estimation of this longstanding fan, is easily among their five best. Berlin isn’t so sure. “I was talking with a friend of mine not long ago, kind of fretting that some of the songs weren’t up to snuff,” he explains, then chuckles. “And he says, ‘At this point in your life you’re allowed to do whatever you want. You get to your 20th record and you can get away with it.”
Above all, Los Lobos is a touring outfit. Their current jaunt includes ambitious “Fiesta Mexicano Americano” shows, pairing the band with a folkloric dance troupe, while others (like the one at the Capitol Theater) fall under the banner of “Los Lobos Disconnected.”
Berlin characterizes the sets as “semi-plugged, with acoustic guitars plugged into amps,” he explains. “It still rocks, still hits hard, but it’s probably 30 percent quieter. It’s kind of neat to hear the texture of the songs change as much as they do. For me, it’s more fun than a lot of electric guitars. The songs have a different feel to them done this way.”
Los Lobos performs Fri., Feb. 18, 8 p.m., at Capitol Theatre, 405 Cleveland St., downtown Clearwater; tickets are $36-$56. More info at rutheckerdhall.com.
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2016.