Features

MF: Why are there so many guest drummers on your records?

LP: Because I'm a guitar player. I think what happened in the ’70s with all the disco kind of stuff — all the drummers became, like, machines? So that kind of drumming became a prerequisite....

MF: And how did you feel about that? Was that pushed on the band?

Unidentified voice: The White man again! [Laughter]

MF: That was pushed on the band....

Unidentified voice: The evil White Demon! [More laughter]

MF: [Changing the subject] Have you guys heard The Plugz's soundtrack to the porno film New Wave Hookers?

Unidentified voice: Alright! Yeah, we have.

MF: That's a great soundtrack! The picture's not bad, either. Hey, where'd that song "I Got Loaded" come from? I had never heard that before.

CR: Little Bop & the Lollipops — from Lafayette Louisiana — about 1965. It's a cover. You should hear the original — it just puts us to shame.

MF: After listening to all of your records I had this idea: what would you think about Van Morrison Sings Los Lobos?

CR: Actually, I'd have to think about it, but I could see him singing a couple of our songs. You know, Elvis Costello has done some live. T-Bone Burnett has sung some of our songs. I could see it. Van is a great vocalist — one of the greatest of our time. I don't think he will, but it would be a great honor.

MF: "One Time One Night" is a very gentle protest song, but beneath all the hard images it sounds very optimistic.

CR: Ask these guys [Pérez and Hidalgo] — they're the writers.

[Bedlam ensues in the room. Berlin starts blasting away on his baritone sax and the interview grinds to a halt.]

MF: This is the worst fucking interview I've ever tried to conduct! [Laughs] Are you as optimistic now as you were then?

LP: Well, I'm working on being not so cynical.

MF: That song was cynical?

LP: That digressed into cynicism. Now I'm working my way back to being more hopeful.

MF: What is it like being on the road, being married, being older guys — what's it like?

CR: It's like this [takes out a package of Rolaids and puts it in MF’s face]. Well, you know what? We hate the road.

MF: But you love playing and you have to be on the road to support the record, right?

CR: Yeah, we love playing, but being on the road is pretty difficult. We have families and it's hard leaving your family behind and we all have young ones. The road is physically hard. This tour seems like nothing. You know, we're doing 18 shows and one day off.

MF: But you try to book it so it’s concentrated and then you have time off.

CR: Yeah, that we do.

MF: Okay, I want to talk with you about the working relationship you have with Froom and Blake. People say it’s like a George Martin thing, that they're doing all of this stuff....

CR: Yeah, it's pretty much like that.

MF: Well, like on Kiko, whose idea was it to add the sounds of a scratchy record behind one track and all of the other effects-type-things? Yours or theirs?

CR: It's a collaboration of us and them, you know? It's like, we all kind of grew together, because when we did the Kiko record we were kind of messing around with — it was the first record where we just kind of said, “Fuck it, let's forget everything we've learned and just do things that are wild and not be afraid to do things, not be afraid to record a certain way, and we're going to mess around with different sounds.” So as we went along we kind of fed Tchad and Mitchell ideas, and they fed off of us, I guess.

MF: And so you were saying you want “something that sounds like this,” and they were saying, “How about that”?

CR: “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! We like that! Stop! Stop! Stop!” They were into it too, you know? Tchad is really creative that way, he's really —

MF: Did you ever worry that they were going to run away with you? That they were going to take over and it was going to be their record?

CR: No. Because I think the final way the records come out, we're really pleased with them, you know? We've gotten to a place now where we sort of have such a great relationship with that certain sound we have with them, that it's like we really trust them — [with] everything. Now it's like, “Yeah, do that thing!”

MF: Colossal Head has more of a jam quality to it. Kiko sounds more produced; it sounds like you spent more time with it.

CR: Well, no. I like to think of the record as an extension of Kiko in a way that sounds like we're still messing around, but the other material [Kiko] wasn't as rockin', you know? It wasn't as up. It was more dreamy. This one's more aggressive.

MF: Where does that aggression come from?

CR: We like to rock, you know?

MF: Well, The Neighborhood is like a folk record, a lot of gentle stuff.

CR: Yeah. You know, another difference between Kiko and Colossal Head is that Colossal Head was done in a shorter period of time and it was more spontaneous. Kiko was thought out just a little bit more than this record. A lot of the tracks are really more live on Colossal Head. It's like we go over the song a couple of times to learn it, then, you know, “Start the machines, count it out” — we just went for it. “Fuck it, let's do it!” More play — and that was intentional. That's what we wanted to get.

MF: You know Max Fleischer’s cartoons?

CR: Yeah.

MF: Those records remind me of Max Fleischer cartoons.

CR: Oh wow.

MF: That wouldn't insult you, would it?

CR: No!

MF: Would you like to score a cartoon?

CR: That would be cool.

MF: I want to go back to The Neighborhood, which Larry Hirsch recorded. In the sense of documenting a band playing live in a room, that strikes me as your best recording.

CR: Yes, I agree with you. More organic, more of a folk record.

MF: Where does that song dedicated to the children of the St. John of God School for Special Children in Westville, New Jersey come from?

CR: You gotta ask Louie, man. Louie and Dave write 90 percent of the body of work.

LP: My wife contributes to many different charities, and she came into the room and I was looking for inspiration and this thing had come in the mail and it was a note card with the name of the school and I thought about what the whole school was about and then just sort of spun this little tale about a kid who has this problem, and then I told David about it and he got really excited and it was just one of those things that wrote itself.

MF: Do you like that record? It's a very different sound for you.

LP: Yeah, it's different. It's us trying to still kind of shake La Bamba — it was kind of like a long process. Our first reaction was to go back to the beginning and retrace our steps because we were all trying to screw our heads back on.

MF: It wasn't comfortable to have a hit with "La Bamba" because it was sort of a novelty item?

LP: Yeah, really. Commercially it eclipsed everything we'd done prior to that. It was the culmination of all of our experience playing in garage bands and then years of playing rock music, putting Mexican music aside, kind of entering the stream again with the punk-rock thing and the whole music community, the comraderie, and making a couple of records and finding ourselves all over the United States, and then all of a sudden, "La Bamba."

MF: Did you feel kind of cheapened?

LP: No, we didn't feel cheap. We didn't lose sight. But everybody kind of had this funny, kind of twisted kind of vision of us, you know?

MF: They kind of tried to put you in a box?

LP: It was easy for them to put us there.

MF: And you had to claw your way out.

LP: Yeah. We could have gone in the direction of "La Bamba" and we could have ended up with "Los Lobos' Mexican Village" in Branson, Missouri, and at that point we figured we had to go back to what we were doing, and I guess La Pistola... was about, like, throwing the proverbial monkey wrench in the works. And then The Neighborhood was kind of an overkill reaction. When we took that thing on the road we had, like, the Marshall amps way too loud 'cause we're rock guys. We wanted to interpret it loud. Then we met Mitchell and Tchad and they helped up to get to another chapter.

MF: You began using the studio as a tool — not just as a place to document the band.

LP: Yeah. We screwed around with technology. We found in Mitch and Tchad people who didn't take it as literally as most people had. They went in and said, “Hey, there's no formula” — we always believed that, you know?

MF: On your earlier records it sounds like the rhythm section is put down first — Jerry Marotta, or Ron Tutt — the beat is put down first and you guys had so much more to give, but you were in a rhythmic straightjacket. Now you have these heavily processed studio records. How do you take these songs and do them live? I guess I'm gonna hear that in an hour.

LP: Well, we've been playing together for so long, and we didn't have a Saturday off between 1973 and 1981. The way we tell it, if you're a Mexican American and you got married between 1973 and 1981, we probably played at your wedding. It's an intuitive thing. We just reinterpret again. As long as we don't beat ourselves up trying to sound exactly like the record.... There's a Zen story about how it's better to approximate and maintain all of the soul than to make a lifeless duplicate.

MF: Ah yes. The CD versus LP story.

LP: I think our approach to the studio now is that it is a tool and that it is a different medium — it's all about expressing yourself. The studio is just another way of expressing yourself. Mitchell and Tchad — and I don't think I'm discounting them — they've admitted that they learned a great deal from us.

MF: Have you thought about doing a live album?

LP: Yeah. It's overdue. We kind of reclassified ourselves by the live stuff we threw on the two-CD set. Those things were recorded in Holland using 24-track recorders. Even if it's a radio taping they bring out stuff like that. I think the only way we would do it is if we had some kind of small transport and recorded every night and see what happens.

MF: Well, yeah, you wouldn't want the pressure of recording a one-nighter! And you'd want to do it in a smaller-sized club. So who's your audience today, do you know?

LP: We're not too sure. With our first record we had this huge college following of alternative rockers and we had stage-diving going on. We had hard-core kids and new-wave kids. Then "La Bamba" hit and these kids went, “Well, they're not cool anymore.” Then that went away and we kind of found ourselves in this funny kind of grey area again. You see, when we first made our way across town to play in the Hollywood clubs, like when we opened for The Blasters, they couldn't understand what was so exciting about us. They were like, “Stage diving?!” It could have been The Circle Jerks up there. And then back home [in East L.A.] everybody said, “What are they doing over there?”

MF: Isn't that amazing? In the United States you go across town and all of a sudden its, “What are you doing there?”

LP: Yeah. And with "La Bamba," with our audiences, we kind of felt like we were in the same place again, where there were all these people coming to see our show expecting to see "The Ritchie Valens Show," and it didn't happen. And we had all the others — the core following — going, “Okay, next!”

MF: No wonder you went back home, musically speaking. So what is a good-selling album for you?

LP: For us? We're not selling any records.

MF: Kiko didn't sell?

LP: Kiko did really well.

MF: What is really well? 50,000? 100,000?

LP: No, about 250,000.

MF: That's respectable.

LP: We never used to have any airplay. But now with the AAA [Adult Alternative] format, we're getting a lot of airplay for Colossal Head. But since April, since the release date, we've only sold around 100,000 copies. That's like, “Okay, all this time it’s like, radio is the thing we're trying to crack,” and we finally do....

MF: Well, maybe they don't hear "songs" in the standard sense. The record is more of a charging, jazzy kind of thing. But the record will have “legs,” I think.

LP: As long as the record company stays with us!

MF: By the way, do you know how many records are out there right now with pictures of robots on the cover? Whose idea was that?

LP: Actually that was Steve's idea. I've been art-directing most of them.

MF: Well, that's a real problem. I must have gotten, in the last six months, about 10 different groups with robots like that on the cover. I swear to God! To see you guys in that pile is very strange! It's not terrible, but for a distinctive group, it's not a distinctive cover!

[After a pause in the interview, I sat down again with Cesar Rosas to talk about his home recording studio.]

MF: So what's in your studio?

CR: I have a small studio and I have a handful of outboard tube stuff. I have a pair of Manleys, I have a pair of Neves, a pair of tubed Siemens, the ones that came out of The Beatles' studio. I have a tubed compressor. I have that new Peavey stereo tube mic preamp, and I track with that stuff first.

MF: What kind of recorder?

CR: I got ADATs, which is really why I have a lot of tube stuff.

MF: Warm it up a bit?

CR: Yeah.

MF: Most of what you do there is demos?

CR: No. I make albums there. We've done a handful of movies that we've scored there. We've done the Desperado soundtrack there. We've done a new movie called
"Feeling Minnesota" with Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz. We did this thing for HBO or Cinemax called "The Wrong Man," and we've done some Levi's commercials. We did the theme song to a sitcom, “Common Law.” I produced several records there.

MF: So that must be fun. You get to stay home and work.

CR: Yeah, it's great.

MF: So are you scoring scoring or just doing background stuff? Are you scoring cues and hitting action?

CR: Oh, yeah!

MF: So you've got time code and all of that?

CR: Yes. We've been getting into that in the past couple of years and learning to like it. It's a lot of hard work, but we appreciate it. It keeps us calm.

MF: And you do it as a group effort?

CR: Right.

--------end of Part 2-------