How the Wolves Survive

Los Lobos' Louie Perez on immigration, cultural mixing, and his band's new album

Radley Balko from the May 2007 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Perez: Technology has hugely affected this business. The way we access music has changed incredibly. The old machine that drove the business is antiquated. Of course, record companies are still trying to hang on to that old rusty machine that doesn’t work anymore.

I remember when a recording contract was the holy grail for a young band. Today, many young bands don’t even want to get signed. They think, “Why should I sign myself away for seven years when I could just do this myself?” So things have changed a lot.

But this band has always kind of lived on the outside of it all, so it’s been really easy for us to change. We haven’t clung to any formula or structure. I mean, we decided to reinvent ourselves as a Mexican folkloric band as teenagers. That was unheard of. We did that for close to 10 years, and then we crossed the river and started playing punk rock clubs. So this band has never had a linear path.

Reason: That seems like such an interesting combination—Los Lobos opening for punk bands. Did it have any influence on your music?

Perez: Well, we certainly weren’t doing 3-chord guitar assaults back then like the hardcore punk rock groups. We just did what we did. We’d go up to those clubs and we were just so juiced up from all the adrenalin that we would just play harder and faster. New music grew out of all of that. The new wave movement. Then the roots revival. That was just a good scene for us.

We never felt out of place. We met The Blasters, and they invited us to open for them [in 1980.] That’s now a legendary show. We opened for The Blasters at the Whisky A Go Go. The Blasters were so hot back then, as was [punk band] X and just about everybody else on [the Los Angeles-
based record label] Slash. At first they wondered who the hell we were, and where we came from. But eventually we were welcomed into that whole community.

Reason: Los Lobos’ first hit was 1984’s “Will the Wolf Survive?” Twenty-five years later, it sounds like that’s still an open-ended question for you.

Perez: Yeah, yeah, it is. It is. A lot of times we just feel like we’re just kind of outside of everything. For the sake of survival, we’ve created our own universe, our own world. But the difference between our world and the worlds that other people create is that there aren’t walls and fences that are patrolled to keep everybody out. In our world, there’s no gates and no walls. There’s no barbed wire. Our world is wide open for everyone to come and join. It’s been a journey for us, and everybody’s invited to become passengers on it.

Radley Balko is a senior editor for reason.

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