Los Lobos: KCRW Live from HQ

During my senior year in high school I used to drive my mom’s 1965 Volkswagen Beetle with a Panasonic tape recorder in the passenger seat. Into that tape recorder, during those years, went countless cassettes, including: Up On The Sun by Meat Puppets, Synchronicity by The Police, Murmur by REM, and How Will The Wolf Survive by Los Lobos. Fast forward almost 40 years to me finding myself soaking in the magic of Los Lobos from the Annenberg Performance Studio stage at KCRW HQ. 

50 years into their career, the SoCal legends still have it. I still can’t believe they chose to mark the occasion with us. 

During the performance, I looked around the room and saw parents, children, and grandchildren. Some folks in the audience grew up in SoCal listening to Los Lobos on KCRW, or seeing them in clubs and at gatherings around town. Some grew up in the same East LA neighborhoods that spawned the band, and a few were fellow attendees of Garfield High, the alma mater shared by Los Lobos’ original lineup. 

The career-spanning performance and the band’s interview with Morning Becomes Eclectic co-host Anthony Valadez are a capsule of Southern California cultural vernacular. In between cracking jokes and shouting out East LA, guitarist and vocalist Cesar Rosas breaks down how the band established, and continues to forge, the definitive punk-rock-norteño sound that is Los Lobos — and Los Angeles to the core. 

The following interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Anthony Valadez: What was it like being a Chicano in the ‘70s?

Cesar Rosas: It was kind of cool [laughs]. We went on this crazy ride with music. I had a good time. We were experimenting with Mexican folk music and we were young rock ‘n’ roll kids. We were one of many bands that were on every other corner in East LA… there was a lot of bands just having a great time.

Did it feel extra punk rock in a way to be incorporating these Mexican folk influences into your sound?

You got to understand we were rock ‘n’ roll guys first. We're rocking out, we all had rock bands and stuff. Then I got into the folk music for a second there, I invited all my homies over, and we started the band — Los Lobos. We got interested in Mexican folk music because that’s the music of our parents. [It’s] our heritage and it just felt good to do it. 

What was it like playing norteño sounds in punk rock clubs? 

When the ‘70s were coming to an end and we had been playing around for a while we decided to try writing some music. We started to write music [around the same time as] we started to plug back in. We were unplugged for [the early years] we were 100% an acoustic band. Then we started dusting off our fender strats and Les Pauls out of the closet and started rocking out again. And during that time we were fans of the local LA scene, especially the punk music. We thought that it was kind of interesting.

… Eventually The Blasters invited us to open up for them at The Whiskey and it was great. We rocked out the best we could [at that show] and I guess it was one of the first times [the crowd] heard rock and norteño music mixed together at The Whiskey and it went over well, it was rocking.