Just another band from East L.A.

I thought I knew the story of Los Lobos (formerly known as Los Lobos del Este – after the famed norteño band Los Tigres del Norte, or Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles, which is a mouthful). These guys got together at Garfield High in East LA, the alma mater of my late friend David Okuma. While they were rock and roll fans, they began playing traditional music for their mothers before electrifying and hitting the big time for a short period. While still playing 50 years later, they have not reclaimed their fame of the mid-80s – our loss.

What I didn’t know was the guy who brought them together: their original lead singer, who played harp and mandolin. Francisco (then known as Frank) Gonzáles left the band in 1975, before their first self-released recording Los Lobos del Este de Los Angeles (Just another band from East L.A.) in 1978, but not before local PBS affiliate KCET aired a video of the band. (The album was re-released on CD in 2000.)

Note the polyrhythmic “El Canelo” beginning at 18:08. A version would later be released on the grammy-winning “La Pistola y El Corazón” in 1988.

Gonzáles first teamed up with César Rosas, then added David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, and Conrad Lozano. He left the group in 1976, according to the LA Times, to continue to play traditional music. He went on to become musical director of El Teatro Campesino and found a company to make strings for traditional instruments.

Los Lobos made only one major personnel change after that. In 1984 Steve Berlin left The Blasters to join Los Lobos after joining them onstage at the Whisky A Go Go, where Los Lobos had opened for The Blasters. Berlin had appeared on the 1983 Los Lobos EP “…And a Time to Dance”.

The influence of hanging out in the LA rockabilly and punk scene is clear here. KCET again. Stick around for David Hidalgo playing “Sleep Walk”, a 1959 #1 hit by Santo and Johnny, on steel guitar over the closing credits. “Sleep Walk” was reported to be the inspiration for Peter Green’s “Albatross” (Fleetwood Mac), which was, in turn, the inspiration for The Beatles’ “Sun King”. It was also the inspiration for Stephen King’s screenplay “Sleepwalkers. And it was a Grammy winner for The Brian Setzer Orchestra in 1998. (Setzer, of course, also started Stray Cats.)

David introduced me to the EP in 1983 and gave me a copy when he saw how much I liked it. In 1988 he called and asked me to meet him in Monterey, CA for a concert with Los Lobos, David Lindley, and the Grateful Dead. He didn’t have to ask twice. The fact that he had backstage passes was just icing on the cake. A Los Lobos concert at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco was the site of my first date with my future wife that fall.

They released the critically-acclaimed “How Will the Wolf Survive?” in 1986. (The single “Will the Wolf Survive?” reached #26 on the Billboard rock chart and Waylon Jennings’ cover reached #5 on the country chart.) My favorite, “By the Light of the Moon” (which I consider their masterpiece), followed in early 1987. Neither the critics nor the record-buying public agreed with me, though Ted Cox, in the “Chicago Reader”, agreed at least in part when he said ” By the Light of the Moon is an album that asks the big American questions.”

The film “La Bamba” (starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Ritchie Valens – real name Valenzuela but changed for crossover appeal) was released six months later and catapulted Los Lobos to fame when the Valens family recruited them to perform Valens’ music. The soundtrack album reached #1 on the charts. They followed up with the all-acoustic and mostly traditional “La Pistola y El Corazón”. While winning a Grammy (for “Best Mexican-American Performance”), it probably skewered their chances of a major career as a rock band. (Of note, they previously won this Grammy for “Anselma” from the EP “…And a Time to Dance”. Other winners in the category include Flaco Jiménez – an acknowledged influence on Hidalgo’s accordion playing, Los Tigres del Norte, and Los Super Seven, which featured members of Los Lobos.)

Title track from “La Pistola y El Corazón”, written by David Hidalgo and Louie Pérez.

With the changes evident from the first two videos above, it should be clear that Los Lobos were not ones to rest on their laurels. They teamed with Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake to take their sound in a new direction. “Kiko” was both a critical and (minor) commercial success in 1992. They released the children’s album “Papa’s Dream” in 1995 and wrote and performed the score for the Robert Rodriguez film “Desperado” (starring Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek). The members of Los Lobos appeared on the albums of Los Super Seven, which also featured Flaco Jiménez, Rick Treviño, Freddy Fender, Ruben Ramos, and others. Los Lobos continues to record and perform today. The title track to their 2015 album “Gates of Gold” was dedicated to the memory of our mutual friend David Okuma.

“El Canoero”, Los Super Seven, featuring Cesar Rosas

Francisco González died March 30, 2022. This post would have waited for the anniversary, but the blog Powerpop posted something on the Blasters and I decided I couldn’t wait.

Snow!

This has been an awkward winter – mostly too warm for skating and skiing, too cold to pretend it’s not winter. Winter has finally arrived. I awoke to ten inches of fresh powder and a temperature of 14º F (-10º C). The bike club postponed its ski trip three weeks ago due to lack of snow. Somehow they picked today. Can you say “perfect”?

I headed to the outskirts of town and waited for the group to assemble. Folks made fun of me for my 45 year old boots and 50 year old gaiters. The skis, bindings, and poles were slightly newer. When I lived in California I once lamented to my friend Curtis that my wooden back country skis had cracked and all I had left were the plastic waxless skis with the fish scale bottoms. For California conditions, they were actually preferable to wood and wax. Next thing I knew, Curtis was at my front door (no mean feat, since we lived 400 miles apart) with a pair of lightly-used wooden skis.

Half the fun of skiing is picking the right wax for conditions (though I found out last year that the vast selection of waxes from my youth is no longer available). We used special green for 5-14º F, green from there to 23º, and blue from there up to just below freezing. There were several others (including a slew of waxes for the transitional temperatures above freezing) but those were the mainstays and I’d run out of green.

Today was a special green day and the skiing was perfect! Untrammeled snow, freshly groomed but not tracked. (Tracks sometimes feel too much like transportation and not enough like fun.) In some places, they hadn’t gotten out with the machine at all, so it was just fresh powder deep enough to make my skis disappear, and that sparkled like diamonds in the brief moments that the sun poked through.

A rabbit hopped down the trail toward me, followed by a mink. The mink was enough to convince me to pull out the camera. The mink was shyer than the rabbit so, while the rabbit hopped past me, the mink turned around when I stopped. I had to satisfy myself with a snowy landscape photo sans mink.

The trail wound through the woods and onto a golf course before eventually getting me back to the starting point. A coffee shop on the way home beckoned with the offer of a cortado and a chocolate/espresso scone. An hour and a half of skiing is enough to make one hungry and thirsty. Since I had to discard my old woolen ski knickers (which were both too small and worn out) I did a little online shopping while I had my treat. I figured if these young whippersnappers (truth be told, some of them were near my age) are going to tease me about my old equipment, a pair of wool knickers with wool knee socks oughta put ’em in their place.

I expect that snow to beckon again Monday morning. We’ll see if I answer the call, as the forecast is for 1º (-17º C) and breezy.

Back to school?

I’m back to being a student again. As part of the Wisconsin Idea (also see https://www.wisc.edu/wisconsin-idea/and https://lafollette.wisc.edu/outreach/), the university has a program for Senior Guest Auditors. Old folks are allowed to take university courses (for no credit, just to learn). We aren’t allowed to turn in assignments or take tests, and we are supposed to sit quietly at the back of the room as observers/passive listeners. I figured that last thing would be the hard part.

My first class was in the Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics, called “Cooperatives and Alternative Forms of Enterprise Ownership” . The professor asked us to introduce ourselves, say why we were taking this class, and, if we could eat only one kind of cheese for the rest of our life, what would it be? (Aged Cheddar; if I had to be specific, it would be Renard’s Two Year Cheddar. While I love older Cheddars, I’m not sure I would want to eat them all the time. Feel free to answer the question in the comments.) She clearly wanted me to answer like everyone else. After class I told her our instructions as Senior Guest Auditors. She considered that silly and wanted me to talk like anyone else, especially since I spent a career in co-op management. Whew! That was going to be a hard class in which to sit down and shut up.

My next class was “History of the Cold War” with a professor whose primary work is in Southeast Asia, with published works including “The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia:CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade“, and “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror“, and “Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation“. And those are just the books of his that I’ve read. I was far from the only old fart in that class, so he did let us know that we are not welcome in the discussion sections, though a fellow old fart did ask a question at the end of class, so we might not have to be totally silent, just circumspect. I didn’t have access to course materials until a few hours before the first class, as I wasn’t allowed to register until the first day of classes. I found there were 110 pages of required reading for the first class. I didn’t finish. There are about that many pages every week, plus hundreds of pages of suggested readings. This may keep me busy if I want to keep up. Luckily I don’t have to write papers or take tests. The class was in a packed lecture hall and only a few of us wore masks.

Bike? What bike?

It’s been awhile since I posted anything about riding. I have been commuting to school and the library. Virtual rides have been in Norway and Austria. I have yet to try Fulgaz, as the free rides on YouTube have suited me just fine.

The winter is at an awkward stage. For a while it was too warm for anything involving ice or snow. It’s cooling down and starting to look like winter. There has been too much snow to skate and not enough to ski. That might be changing (1/27) and I have a ski outing planned (1/29) with a bike club.

Last minute addendum: went to friends’ house for dinner Saturday night. Five inches of snow fell while we were there and I’d already shoveled there times today. Still coming down. I hope I can get the car out in the morning to join folks for skiing. Otherwise I may just have to ski out the front door.

“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”

Henry Jaglom says Orson Welles told him this over lunch one day. He explained that creativity comes from having to figure out how to do something, with an example being that you don’t have a million dollars to blow up a bridge (for a film) so you have to find another way to get the effect you want.

My friend Martha wrote about limits, and a rediscovered old friend Margie quoted her brother about limits in her book “More Than Meets the Eye: Exploring Nature and Loss on the Coast of Maine”. Her brother had ALS and was about to start using a ventilator. He compared it to SCUBA diving: “You need a lot of cumbersome equipment to dive, but it’s worth the view you get from deep in the ocean. I feel the same way about a ventilator – it will be cumbersome but worth the view.”

As a (former) diver, I could relate. I didn’t like the limitation of holding my breath to snorkel when I was in water where all the action was 30 feet down. The limit of being able to breathe for only 45 minutes was freedom, not a limit. While I felt weighted down on land (the lead weights on my belt had something to do with that), I was weightless in the water. It was pretty hard to walk in fins, but they sure came in handy down there.

Likewise, we often speak of someone “confined to a wheelchair”. The alternative is often “confined to a bed”, but we tend not to see it that way. In this case, “confined” refers to a past that is no longer here. The wheelchair provides freedom (from the bed) and mobility. It also grounds us in the here and now, not an inaccessible past. While it may be a relative limit (compared to walking, which is not an option when paralyzed), it is an actual freedom. We could say that our inability to fly is a limitation, but since we never could fly we tend not to see it that way. When the day comes that I can no longer ride a bike, will I remember and experience this truth, or only experience the loss?

A limit also gives you the freedom to explore within that limit. Is it a limit, or a framework? We live with gravity and friction every day. That limits us from the ability to fly or to travel at infinite speed. Then again, would we have any of our current sports without those two “limits”?

“Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are.”- “Squire Bill” Widener 1840-1920

Or as Si Kahn sang:

Also see previous post re: Django Reinhardt. Django had no use of the ring finger and small finger of his left hand. You wouldn’t know it to hear him play the guitar.