Los Lobos - Live at Graffiti's, Pittsburgh, PA 1992 - Part 1
Los Lobos - Live at Graffiti's, Pittsburgh, PA 1992 - Part 2
Part 1
01 Ay Te Dejo en San Antonio
02 I Got to Let You Know
03 Kiko and the Lavender Moon
04 Let’s Say Goodnight
05 One Time, One Night
06 My Baby’s Gone
07 Short Side of Nothing
08 Just a Man
09 Dream in Blue
10 Wake Up Dolores
11 Anselma
12 Los Ojos de Pancha
02 I Got to Let You Know
03 Kiko and the Lavender Moon
04 Let’s Say Goodnight
05 One Time, One Night
06 My Baby’s Gone
07 Short Side of Nothing
08 Just a Man
09 Dream in Blue
10 Wake Up Dolores
11 Anselma
12 Los Ojos de Pancha
Part 2
01 Carabina 30-30
02 Wicked Rain
03 Papa Was a Rolling Stone
04 I Can’t Understand
05 Georgia Slop
06 Peace
07 Jenny’s Got a Pony
08 Evangeline
09 Will the Wolf Survive
10 Don’t Worry Baby
11 Marie, Marie
12 That Train Don’t Stop Here
13 Bertha
02 Wicked Rain
03 Papa Was a Rolling Stone
04 I Can’t Understand
05 Georgia Slop
06 Peace
07 Jenny’s Got a Pony
08 Evangeline
09 Will the Wolf Survive
10 Don’t Worry Baby
11 Marie, Marie
12 That Train Don’t Stop Here
13 Bertha
Michael Fremer: 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.
Cesar Rosas: 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.
Louie Pérez: 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!”
From: https://trackingangle.com/features/los-lobos-america-s-band-the-tracking-angle-interview
Cesar Rosas: 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.
Louie Pérez: 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!”
From: https://trackingangle.com/features/los-lobos-america-s-band-the-tracking-angle-interview
