Los Lobos again? ¡Sí se puede!

To make a living as a writer, you must keep writing. Even if you’re William Faulkner or Steven King. That’s hard enough. But if you’re a musician, more specifically a band, you must keep writing and performing. Alas, some bands are known more for their ugly breakups than their music. They must surely agonize of an ever-diminishing fan base, sometimes dropping off precipitously; how many started out intending to be one-hit wonders? When many find themselves relegated to county fairs, private vanity parties and the casino circuit, the rationalizations must take over.

Maybe you’re looking across the pond at pop music’s intimation of immortality that is the Rolling Stones. Yes, they have defied the odds. But the more American, blue-blooded Angelino band you ought to cite is Los Lobos. A recurrent stroke of good fortune and glad planning brought this fabled ensemble to Landmark on a chilly February evening.

Most members have been along for the ride that began in 1973: David Hidalgo, Louie Pérez, Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano and Steve Berlin. Drummer Enrique “Bugs” Gonzalez joined in 2011 on the strength of his chops (and transcription skills).

As a recent December appearance at Chris Thile’s Live from Here illustrated, Los Lobos tours actively, and for decades now, prominently. They may not have completely stolen the show from LFH audience favorite Sarah Jarosz (who had similarly wowed a Landmark crowd), but came close. Perhaps you caught their opportunity to entertain Obama in the White House in 2012?

Wolfed-Down Music

The band's Spanish name can be misleading. As many have noted, their canon is diverse. When it’s not just plain fun and dance-ready, it can be inspired, as the Times Stephen Holden noted back in 1990.

“The band . . . espouses a musical pluralism, in which Mexican folk is only one of many styles -- including the blues, zydeco, early rock-and-roll and the plainer strains of folk and country -- that share a deep kinship through their working-class origins. What unites them in Los Lobos's music is not only an instrumental versatility that crosses ethnic and geographic borders, but also a vision of the common people's struggles that in songs like "Be Still" and "How Will the Wolf Survive?" has a mystical lyric flavor.”

Satisfying the present critic’s Los Lobos fix required only a satisfying rendition of “Chuco’s Cumbia” or “Cumbia Raza” and, of course, the finishing touch of their “La Bamba” adaptation.

There was more, of course. The evening’s setlist included “Yo Canto, ” “Will the Wolf Survive”, “Let Love Reign” “La Venganza De Los Pelado” “Sabor a Mi” “Don’t Worry Baby” and more.

In Los Lobos tunes like “Road to Gila Bend” (not on this particular setlist) it’s not so much the song as what of America’s Great Southwest the song evokes. You need not have driven by that historically noteworthy but insufferably hot and dusty town along Interstate 8 to know that this establishes a certain Los Lobos cred in the region.

Los Lobos con Jalapeño

The evening’s extra spicy side dishes surprisingly included the Neil Young classic “Cinnamon Girl,” a Who song, and a suitably raucous “La Bamba” finale.

For still more of the spicy stuff, check out “Burn it Down” (this one will blow your subwoofers off their stands), the dance-worthy “Maricela” and “That Train Don’t Stop Here”. Rest assured that Los Lobos left Port Washington with a consensus invitation to return otra vez.

Life is a Fly

And if you think their lyrics are all good-time bar stool riffs, consider this refrain from “Don’t Worry Baby”:

Well don't worry baby
What the world may bring
Well don't worry baby
It won't change a thing
Life is a fly
And then you die

Or, as Michael Prior wrote in “Wakeful Things”:

You should never put the new antlers of a deer
to your nose and smell them. They have little
insects that crawl into the nose and devour the brain.
—Kenkō, Essays in Idleness

Consider that the insects might be metaphor.
That the antlers’ wet velvet scent
might be Proust’s madeleine dipped into a cup of tea
adorned with centrifugal patterns of azalea
and willow—those fleshing the hill behind this room,
walls wreathed in smoke and iron, musk
of the deer head above the mantle.

Next at Landmark

Whet your appetite for a little Rolling Stones? Catch the tribute band Classic Stones Live on 28 February 2020.