Los Lobos Quotes

“The album was filled out with a faithful, ripping cover of “I Got Loaded,” a slice of swampy R&B celebrating the joys of alcoholism originally cut by Little Bob & the Lollipops on the La Louisianne label in 1965;”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“As these new songs began to materialize, it became apparent to the band’s producers that something new was afoot in Los Lobos’ music. Berlin says, “I remember very, very distinctly when Dave started singing [‘Will the Wolf Survive?’] for the first time that the thought entered my head: ‘OK, everything is different from this point forward.’ Everything we had done up ’til ‘Wolf’ was our version of something else they had done or something they had taken with them. In everything prior to ‘Wolf,’ our influences were pretty obviously on our sleeves. I would say that ‘Wolf’ was the first song where we had built something out of those influences that was uniquely ours. It was just us being us. It was pretty obvious that it was special. We didn’t have anything that was as obviously unique as that song.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“The night of the Grammys, Los Lobos were 1,895 miles from home, in New Orleans, in the middle of their first tour of the East and Southeast, driving from gig to gig in a van and sharing a single hotel room on the road. They were to play Jimmy’s Music Club that night, but repaired to a local bar to watch the awards show on TV before their set. Berlin recalls, “[The announcer] said, ‘Earlier this evening, these awards were handed out.’ And sure enough, there’s a picture of Los Lobos. So we start flipping out—‘Oh, shit, we won this thing! We won a Grammy!’ And this old drunk at the bar said, ‘Yeah, right, buddy.’ We were all ecstatic. And we get to the gig, and there’s five people there.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“Burnett recalls that Warner Bros. vice president of A&R Steven Baker asked him to see one of the Lobos’ local shows, and he dropped by a date at the Cathay de Grande to check them out. “They were a groove,” Burnett says. “They were the killingest band in town at that point. They probably still are . . . With David Hidalgo, you knew immediately that this was one of the most amazing guitarists, musicians, ever. That was not hard to tell. Cesar was such a bad, bad man. The whole band was great. Louie’s a killer writer.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“That title had been succeeded by X’s first two albums, Los Angeles and Wild Gift (the latter of which was named album of the year by the critics of the Los Angeles Times); the soundtrack for the wild, intimate 1980 L.A. punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (directed by Biggs’s then wife, Penelope Spheeris); The Blasters; and The Record, the debut of the ultra-provocative, tongue-in-cheek quartet Fear. Chris D.’s Ruby subsidiary had issued A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die and the Gun Club’s debut, The Fire of Love.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“By 1982, the mileage had paid off. Berlin had worked regularly with Top Jimmy & the Rhythm Pigs (playing on and producing the band’s only album, Piggus Drunkus Maximus, belatedly issued in 1987), the Plugz (with whom he recorded the band’s 1981 sophomore set, Better Luck), Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions (as tenor saxophonist on Bomp’s 1981 live album West Hollywood Freeze-Out), and the “all-star” iteration of the Flesh Eaters (on the 1981 Ruby/Slash album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die). The latter unit included the Blasters’ Dave Alvin. Berlin”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“Besides opening for such punk and roots attractions as the Blasters and the Plugz, they were billed with rockabilly performers like Rip Masters, James Intveld, and the Rebel Rockers, and with such other East L.A. invaders as Los Illegals and the Brat. They also made their first trip out of town as a rock group, traveling to Austin, Texas, for shows with Joe “King” Carrasco and Rank & File, the L.A./ Texas combine that would soon release their debut album on Slash; the latter, a country-skewed “cowpunk” group, featured brothers Chip and Tony Kinman of the early L.A. punk band the Dils and Alejandro Escovedo, formerly the guitarist for the San Francisco punk act the Nuns.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“Thus it was probably inevitable that Los Lobos would approach the members of the Blasters and attempt to get their music to the more established band. Memories of their first meeting have dimmed over time: both the Alvins recall it taking place backstage after a show they played at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip, while the Lobos remember it as happening at a date somewhere in the San Fernando Valley, possibly at the Country Club in Reseda. Rosas says, “At the end of the show, Dave and Louie were walking out to the car in the parking lot, and Phil Alvin was walking right there next to them. Their cars weren’t that far from each other. Everybody looked at each other. And I guess Dave and Louie said, ‘Hey, man, we’re fans. You guys were great tonight.’ Then Phil does a double take. He says, ‘Hey, where do I know you guys from? . . . Did you guys do a documentary or something?’ You know how Phil is—he’s a walking library. So Dave and Louie go, ‘Yeah, we did do a documentary, way back, some years ago.’ That’s how the connection got made, right there.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“The band could not have known that the Alvin brothers were already well aware of Los Lobos, and had been for more than five years, for they had seen the band’s TV debut on La Cultura in 1975. “The first time we had ever heard of them,” says Dave Alvin, “Phil and I were at home, and we watched a thing on the local PBS station, channel 28. It was a half-hour documentary on this band from East L.A. that played traditional acoustic Mexican music from all of the various states.” Phil Alvin adds that the Lobos’ example in fact had an impact on the genre-defying way in which the Blasters conceived of their own music: “I remember watching it and really being just impressed, particularly about the way they talked about Mexican music and the variety of it. When we went down to Rockin’ Ronnie’s and he kept pressuring us to say we played rockabilly and stuff like that, I remember thinking of those guys when I [told him]”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“The Blasters proved to be the most prominent and popular of these acts by far. Originally a quartet, the band was bred in Downey, just down the freeway from East L.A. In their teens, brothers Phil and Dave Alvin were bitten by the blues bug; they became habitués of the L.A. club the Ash Grove, where many of the best-known folk and electric blues performers played, and they sought out the local musicians who could teach them their craft, learning firsthand from such icons as Big Joe Turner, T-Bone Walker, and Little Richard’s saxophonist Lee Allen (who would ultimately join the band in the ’80s). But the Blasters’ style was multidimensional: they could play R&B, they loved country music, and they were also dyed-in-the-wool rockabilly fans who were initially embraced by the music’s fervent L.A. cultists. Their debut album, 1980’s American Music, was recorded in a Van Nuys garage by the Milan, Italy–born rockabilly fanatic Rockin’ Ronnie Weiser, and released on his indie label Rollin’ Rock Records, which also issued LPs by such first-generation rockabilly elders as Gene Vincent, Mac Curtis, Jackie Waukeen Cochran, and Ray Campi. By virtue of Phil Alvin’s powerful, unmannered singing and Dave Alvin’s adept guitar playing and original songwriting, the Blasters swiftly rose to the top of a pack of greasy local bands that also included Levi and the Rockats (a unit fronted by English singer Levi Dexter) and the Rockabilly Rebels (who frequently backed Ray Campi). Los Lobos were early Blasters fans, and often listened to American Music in their van on the way to their own (still acoustic) gigs. Rosas says, “We loved their first record, man. We used to play the shit out of that record. Dave [Hidalgo] was the one who got a copy of it, and he put it on cassette.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“many of the 1977–1978 punk generation “flopped the hardcore testo rage rite,” and gravitated to a new breed of roots-based rock bands with a foot planted in the O.G. punk firmament. These included Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Pigs, a brawny, hard-drinking blues–rock unit fronted by “Top Jimmy” Koncek, a close friend of and sometime roadie for the punk band X; the Gun Club, a feral, unpredictable punk–blues unit led by vocalist–songwriter Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a blues devotee and frequent contributor to Slash magazine; and Phast Phreddie and Thee Precisions, a cranked-up R&B unit featuring singer Fred “Phast Phreddie” Patterson, former co-editor of Back Door Man, the first fanzine to explore L.A. punk. By late 1980, the NYC-by-way-of-Cleveland psychobilly quartet the Cramps had relocated to Los Angeles. The Flesh Eaters—one of the earliest L.A. punk bands, led by singer–songwriter Chris D. (born Chris Desjardins), another Slash contributor and head of the magazine’s in-house subsidiary label, Ruby Records—would begin to probe punk–blues terrain with the 1981 album A Minute to Pray, A Second to Die, a swampy collection on which the bandleader was backed by members of X and the Blasters.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“The first single was tracked at Media Arts Studio in Hermosa Beach, south of L.A.; the label copy helpfully dates the session—October 9, 1980. The producer is identified as “Screwy Louie.” The A side is a cover of “Under the Boardwalk,” the Drifters’ 1964 R&B ballad. David Hidalgo takes the soaring lead (his first solo vocal on record), effortlessly duplicating the tug of Johnny Moore’s original performance. But the number receives a twist in the band’s hands: in place of the lush string instrumental break on the Bert Berns–produced original, one hears a Tex–Mex button accordion solo. The flip was a rendering of “Volver, Volver,” a bolero penned by Fernando Z. Maldonado that had been an enormous hit for the Mexican ranchera superstar Vicente Fernández in 1976. Returning to his original role as the group’s ballad specialist, Cesar Rosas takes the lead vocal. Here the band offers an old-school East Side spin on the swaying, lushly romantic number, bringing some unidentified friends into the studio to scream and howl in the background, in the manner of the “live” supporting casts on Cannibal and the Headhunters’ “Land of 1000 Dances” or the Premiers’ “Farmer John.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“By any measure, the PiL show was a catastrophe for the band, but they left the Olympic with a new resolve. Says Pérez, “Because it was kind of a big deal for us, our wives came with us, and everyone in the family came, and they were all hanging out in the wings of the backstage area. We went around the curtain and went back. Our families were in tears. I had spit hanging from my chin. But”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“Along with Alice Bag (née Alicia Armendariz), front woman of the Bags, and the members of the all-Chicano, Chula Vista–bred quartet the Zeros, Humberto “Tito” Larriva was one of the first prominent Latino performers on the L.A. punk scene. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Larriva had arrived in L.A. in 1975. The singer–guitarist–actor (later featured as a heavy in several of director Robert Rodriguez’s films) had founded the wound-up punk trio the Plugz, sometimes billed as Los Plugz, with Chicano drummer Charlie Quintana and Anglo bassist Barry McBride in 1978. That year, a three-track single by the band became the second release (following a 45 by the Germs) from Slash Records, the fledgling imprint of the like-named L.A. punk magazine. It prefaced the Plugz’s self-released 1979 album Electrify Me, which included a high-velocity, lyrically retooled version of Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.” It”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“The band members were doing what they could to make ends meet: Hidalgo and Pérez took work as instructors at Plaza de la Raza, the East L.A. center for arts and education, while Lozano worked as a teaching assistant at Hollenbeck Junior High in Boyle Heights. At one point around this time, jobs became so scarce that, at the behest of Mike Gonzalez, a former member of Rosas’s band Fast Company, they worked as strolling musicians, in full mariachi garb, drumming up business for a new restaurant by performing Mexican tunes on the mall at the Music Center in downtown L.A. A picture of the group from this era shows them looking stiff and distinctly uncomfortable in their matching embroidered black suits.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“After the first pressing sold out, the New Vista partners turned the masters over to the band. “They were very cool,” says Rosas. “We paid them back, and that was it. We sold a lot of records off the back of our van. We sold it off the stage, and we had about ten record shops that were selling it for us. I think eventually we sold about eight thousand records. Little by little, year after year, we kept selling it.”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue

“Trio Los Panchos and listened to the requinto player, we said, ‘Shit, this guy”
― Chris Morris, Los Lobos: Dream in Blue