Seeds Yield Album for Los Lobos : Music: ‘Neighborhood’ band will play San Juan Capistrano Thursday night.

Some fine, strong things can grow from some mighty small seeds, and Los Lobos’ current album, “The Neighborhood,” is nearly a literal case in point.

According to Lobos drummer Louie Perez, there was a time early in the writing stages of the album when he and David Hidalgo, his writing partner, were floundering in the wake of the band’s soundtrack version of “La Bamba.” Unexpectedly to them, it had hit No. 1, and “David and I found ourselves kind of going crazy.

“We were blocked up, trying to figure out what direction to go,” Perez recalled from a tour stop in San Francisco last week. “I’d close myself up in my workroom, and when my wife would sometimes stick her arm in to deliver the mail, I’d look up and give her one of those Phantom-of-the-Opera-tears-his-mask-off glares.

“We contribute regularly to a number of different charities,” Perez said, “and one day my wife dared to walk in the room a second time to show me this little thank-you gift from the St. John of God School for Special Children. It was a little packet of seeds that said, ‘Thank you for helping our flowers grow.’

“She set it right in front of me, and that was it,” he said. “I cleared the desk and said, ‘OK, I have to write something for me, without any of this concept or records or anything.’ I wrote it, gave David the tape, and the next day around noon he dropped off the finished demo of ‘Little John of God,’ sounding just like it does on the record.

“It was a really good thing for us. That was the song that told us: ‘What are we doing here? Let’s do what feels right,’ ” Perez continued. “And we moved on from there. Here we were trying to be these guys doing everything that’s the right way to follow up a big hit record, to write something people could hear on the radio, and all that went right out the window.”

What flew in was a luminous, heart-filled ballad, performed with an assurance and simplicity that enfold the whole of “The Neighborhood.” The East L.A.-bred quintet (Perez, guitarist-singers Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas, bassist Conrad Lozano and saxman Steve Berlin, who was added in the 1980s) has talent aplenty to rampage through a gamut of North American musical styles, yet the album displays a band with nothing to prove and everything to share.

In places, such as the title track, the group still addresses social issues directly. Elsewhere, perhaps the most daring thing about the album is a willingness to be simple. A prime example is the exuberant party rocker “Jenny’s Got a Pony,” with lyrics that never get more complex than “Jenny’s got a pony so Jenny can ride and ride.” Like the best early rock, it doesn’t rely on an overt, critic-ready lyric to explain that the song is about hope. Instead, the spirit with which it is played practically embodies hope.

“We wrote ‘Jenny’s Got a Pony’ with the idea that it be like a song you’d hear kids sing on the schoolyard while playing hopscotch,” Perez explained. “Those are hard songs to write, man. It’s hard to write a happy song. I admire Chuck Berry so much. He could write a song that really meant something without seeming to--’Brown-Eyed Handsome Man’! They hit home in such a simple way, where even the most frivolous thing really meant something to you in some way.”

In terse strokes, the song “The Neighborhood” paints a vision of the ways everyone in a family is affected by the decay of an old neighborhood; the song ends in a prayer for peace and serenity. Though Perez said he hopes the song addresses universal concerns, it was inspired by the changing life in the section of East Los Angeles where the band used to live.

Perez and Hidalgo now live in an older section of Whittier. He describes his block as a place full of people who “whether they know you or not, smile and say hello. It’s the way East L.A. used to be,” he said, “which has changed quite a bit.

“I’m in the process of moving my mother out of the house I grew up in, which originally belonged to my grandfather,” Perez said. “I can go back there right now and go out in the back yard and like find a rock that has been there since I was a little kid. It’s sad that I have to move her out of there, but she’s got to have bars on the windows now, and a chain-link fence. Everything’s creeping up on the old turf. There’s a lot of the stuff you can’t get away from on the news--the violence and drugs and all.

“And things had just started looking positive for a while,” he said. “When a lot of people like myself were growing up there, and had to make choices for ourselves, at the time there was this Chicano renaissance and this thing with Mexican-American studies and this ‘new pride’ sort of thing. Some of us were able to go on as a result of those things.”

Los Lobos have gone on to become one of rock’s most critically praised bands. Ironically, its long ascent began nearly two decades ago with the group abandoning rock, to instead explore its members’ acoustic folk heritage. Then, after years of playing weddings, benefits and social events in their community, they took up their electric instruments again and became a force in the early ‘80s Hollywood scene, which included X and the Blasters.

Since then, their Latino influences have mixed with an authoritative command of Western swing, blues, zydeco and other roots sources, sometimes defining fresh musical territories, as with the current album’s Mexican folk-style huapango -rock hybrid “Be Still.”

In the moment of fame that followed “La Bamba,” the band re-immersed itself in its traditional roots once more, and came up with 1988’s acoustic, Spanish-language “La Pistola y el Corazon” album. “ ‘La Bamba’ scared us a little. We had to wonder ‘What have we become?’ That’s when we dug way deep and dug out ‘La Pistola,’ ” Perez said.

“That was a way for us to reaffirm a lot of the things that excited us about playing music, and ultimately we became friends again,” Perez said. “Not that we weren’t, but we were taking a lot of things for granted amid all the madness and success. We became buddies again, hanging out at Cesar’s house every day, going through songs on the couch.

“It was like finding a trunk in the attic and going through it, discovering all those memories,” he said. “It was therapeutic, a spirit-cleansing experience. ‘The Neighborhood’ is the result of all those experiences and of the peace, hope and faith we got from sharing with each other.

“We want to express that hope and the need for peace, whether it be inner peace or the cessation of war, world peace,” Perez said. “That peace is something we talked about for a long time but never came right out and said was what we were looking for. That’s certainly what I’ve been looking for, some peace in my life, and I’ve been able to get a little of that. I became sober after the first of this year, after quite a little bit of a battle with alcoholism. A lot of this stuff just comes out of trying to make sense of your life. And I think that permeates the record.”

Now Los Lobos is paying the price of being so true to itself. Radio has all but ignored “The Neighborhood” album, which so far hasn’t even broken the Top 100 of the Billboard pop chart.

“I don’t have to tell you this is a tough time for a band like ours to tour and be putting a record out. With everything that’s been going on politically and economically and the way the industry and radio is formatted, bands like us are pushed out into oblivion almost,” said Perez. “It’s a tough one for us to stay out there.”

Still, he is content with the choices the band has made.

“What’s really cool is my wife sent a letter to the priest who runs the St. John of God school, and he wrote back saying: ‘Even though I’ve never heard of your husband’s group, this sounds wonderful. I’m looking forward to hearing it.’ Then after the record came out, he called the office a week ago and said he was absolutely at a loss for words and he was thrilled and said it was going to become their school song. On the tour now we’re going to stop off and visit them during a day off.

“If all the action the album gets is just this one phone call from this little old Irish priest in New Jersey, that’s enough. I’m happy.”

Los Lobos plays Thursday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $25. Information: (714) 496-8930.