In 1990, Los Lobos released a terrific record, ”The Neighborhood”-and nobody cared.
The album got generally glowing reviews, but it sold modestly and quickly dropped off the pop charts. After a decade of critical acclaim and only three years after launching the ”La Bamba” craze in the summer of 1987, the quintet began to doubt its relevance.
”We weren`t sure if we had run our course,” says saxophonist Steve Berlin. ”We found ourselves in this bizarre gray area, feeling sort of muddled because we thought it was a big step forward for us but everyone else was indifferent to the record.”
Rather than call it quits or cobble together ”La Bamba II,” however, Los Lobos recently released its most daring record, ”Kiko” (Slash).
On ”The Neighborhood,” the band began weaving folk rhythms and instruments from its Mexican heritage with contemporary lyrics and
arrangements in songs such as ”Be Still” and ”Angel Dance.”
”It`s something we`d always talked about but never had the courage to try, because whenever it had been done before it always sounded like a campy novelty,” lyricist Louis Perez said of the experiment.
Perez and David Hidalgo kick-started the new album by writing a series of songs that built on that foundation, and joined the rest of the band and producer Mitchell Froom in pushing the songs even further in the new direction in the studio. The result is a more complete marriage of acoustic instrumentation and studio technology, giving a much needed twist to what had been an increasingly predictable amalgam of Latin-flavored garage rock, accordion-pumping dance tunes, Mexican folk and blues.
”The Neighborhood,” Berlin says now, ”really wasn`t that far off from what we`d done before. You never grow at the speed you think you`re going to.”
Berlin has been an integral part of the group for nine years, but ethnically and geographically, he`s still somewhat of an outsider. Hidalgo, Perez, Conrad Lozano and Cesar Rosas were boyhood pals who formed a rock band in East Los Angeles two decades ago and still live only minutes apart. Berlin was born in Philadelphia and now lives in Seattle, and was the group`s producer before signing on as saxophonist. So his comments on Los Lobos`
development combine an insider`s knowledge with a certain critical distance.
With ”Kiko,” he says, the band felt like it had nothing to lose.
”As artists, we sort of felt like there was only one door,” Berlin says. ”It was either take a chance and push through it, or-oh, God, this is gonna sound terrible-turn into the Blasters,” the saxophonist`s former band, ”which did a couple of great albums, a couple of crappy albums and then fell apart. Those guys are our best friends, but that`s not the kind of career I want to have.”
”Kiko” opens with the aptly titled ”Dream in Blue,” and much of the album has a dream-like quality, accentuated by rattling, echoing percussion, lurking bass lines and eerie sonic colorations such as backward guitar effects and bleating horns.
Every day during recording, ”it was like a competition who could find the weirdest box or device from the `60s, plug it in and then do a solo or guitar part through it,” Berlin says. ”The record is more the confluence of a lot of weird little processes throughout, rather than an all-over vibe.”
The gimmicks enhance the dark, disconcerting mood of the songs. Whereas once the band was known for telling straight-forward narratives of blue-collar struggle and triumph, ”Kiko” is edgier and more elusive.
”My legs are tired/my face feels hot/Wake up, Dolores/Please try to walk,” Hidalgo sings in ”Wake Up Delores,” as though waking up in a cold sweat.
Then there is the portrait of twisted heartache in ”When the Circus Comes To Town”: ”But when the lights are turning round/And wheels are rolling on the ground/That day I`ll burn this whole place down.”
”Louie`s lyrics are so incredibly distilled, so refined,” Berlin says.
”David and Louis are both being more courageous with the songs, because they`re not afraid to leave out the expository stuff. They`re just letting the songs be, without saying here`s how, here`s when, here`s where.”
Which makes ”Kiko” a tough sell, but Berlin says the band isn`t worried.
”I think a lot of artists have made similar records to this one, in terms of their courageousness: Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, even U2,” he says.
”A lot of these records are thumbing their noses at what pop is these days. Like how do you sell a really dark, slow, moody k.d. lang record? Or a gospelly, weird Lyle Lovett record? But people are finding those records.
”It`s just time for this sort of music to be out there: dark, angular, complex. Certainly the U2 record has those qualities, and people are finding it and loving it. Even our record company told us, `Go for it, keep pushing further in the direction you`re going, and we`ll figure out a way to sell it.` ”
Los Lobos has been pushing boundaries since graduating from the wedding and party circuit in East Los Angeles. Its first big show was as an opening act for the English art-punk band Public Image Ltd., in Los Angeles in 1980.
For Berlin, it was his first glimpse of the band he would later join, and he recently heard a tape of the show that brought back some memories.
”It was the first time they had crossed the river, so to speak, to play for an Anglo audience, and you could hear on the tape how amazed they were that people were responding,” he says.
”They were playing their folkloric material for a punk crowd, and it was like Sally Fields at the Oscars: `You like me, you really like me!`
”I remember it as an amazing triumph; people were just buzzing about who this band was and how they could be so good without anyone really knowing about them. . . . In a sense the rest of my life began that night, and for those guys too.”
Berlin went on to produce Los Lobos` first EP, ”. . . And a Time to Dance,” in 1983, and joined full-time midway through the recording session.
With ”How Will the Wolf Survive?” in 1984, the band established itself as a major new voice in American rock, but lost ground with the lackluster
”By the Light of the Moon.”
”I completely gave up on that record,” Berlin says. ”I didn`t care what the hell it sounded like by the time it was over with.
”It was not a pleasant record to make. We did five songs in a week, and the other five took a year. That year was no fun.”
The band then did a remake of Richie Valens` ”La Bamba,” for a movie about the late singer`s life, starring a then-unknown actor named Lou Diamond Phillips.
”While doing it, we thought, `This is going right to cable TV,` ” says Berlin, who found himself acting as producer again ”because no one else wanted the job.” But the movie was a hit, and ”La Bamba” went to No. 1 on the pop singles chart.
Instead of capitalizing on the success, Los Lobos released an album of Mexican folk songs sung entirely in Spanish, ”La Pistola y El Corazon”
(”The Pistol and the Heart”), which re-energized the band for ”The Neighborhood.”
”It was a fun record to make, but we thought we were done with it in 1989 and it went through another year of remixing and rethinking and redoing,” he says.”
”Kiko,” however, is a different story. Recorded and mixed in two months, ”it still feels new to me,” Berlin says. ”I know where all the bodies are buried on the other records, all the mistakes I made and where things could`ve been better. But there`s still a lot of moments on `Kiko` that I don`t get, even some of the things that I`ve done. There`s no secret plan, no answer to the riddle of this record, and that`s what makes it so fresh for me.”
