Los Lobos Plays to Beat of Its Own Sense of Rhythm

From a commercial standpoint, it would appear that Los Lobos is its own worst enemy.

In 1987, after more than a decade of playing tough, passionate roots-rock steeped in the Mexican folk music they had grown up with, the boys from East L.A. got their big break. They put seven songs on the sound track to the movie “La Bamba,” the story of the late Latino rocker Ritchie Valens.

The title cut, a cover of Valens’ big 1959 hit, gave Los Lobos its first single on the national Top 40. But, instead of seizing the momentum to showcase its own brand of Latino rock, the group took an abrupt detour a year later with “La Pistola y El Corazon” (“The Pistol and the Heart”), an album of traditional Mexican folk songs sung entirely in Spanish.

It took the band, which will be performing Saturday night at the Starlight Bowl in Balboa Park, two more years to get back on track with “The Neighborhood,” released last month. But, by then, the momentum was lost, and today, Los Lobos is once again a cult act with a cult following--just as it was before “La Bamba” brought it temporary stardom.

Do these guys have a death wish?

Not at all, said guitarist-accordionist David Hidalgo. It’s just that what makes sense, commercially, doesn’t necessarily make sense, musically. They are not businessmen. They are musicians guided by their hearts, not their pocketbooks.

“We were surprised, I guess pleasantly, with the success of ‘La Bamba,’ ” Hidalgo said. “We got involved in the film because we believe in Ritchie, in what he had done, and we wanted to be a part of it.

“And, when it took off, when the song was a hit, it was a nice surprise, but at the same time we felt a little removed from it. It wasn’t exactly what the group was about, so after that all kind of died down, we felt it was a good time to go back to Square 1, to the music we had started out playing 17 years ago.

“I guess we were trying to get reacquainted with that, and the success of ‘La Bamba’ gave us the freedom to do something a little different. We had always wanted to put this music down,

and expose it to the rest of the world.”

While the detour was intentional, Hidalgo said, the two-year delay in returning to the beaten path wasn’t.

“After we did ‘La Pistola,’ we kind of got it out of our system, and we were ready to do a rock ‘n’ roll record again,” Hidalgo said. “And, since it had been a few years, I guess we just took our time.

“We went into the studio in July of 1989, worked up to the holidays, and, at that point, we looked at what we had, and we all felt we should give it another shot, write a couple more songs and see what else we could come up with.

“So, after the first of the year, we went back into the studio until the album seemed complete. But, at that time, the record company didn’t feel it was a good time to release it, so the album sat around for a few months, until September.”

“The Neighborhood” took a long time to make, but not nearly as long as it took Los Lobos to develop their unique, bicultural sound--colored by their use of such traditional Mexican folk instruments as the accordion and the four-stringed requinto jarocho.

Four of the five band members were born and raised in East L.A. They met at Garfield High School, and, in the early 1970s, formed a garage band, playing straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll.

“Mexican music had been around all our lives--it was in our homes, everywhere we went--but we didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” Hidalgo recalled. “We were like any other kids--we wanted to listen to the Stones, James Brown, that sort of stuff, and we had people like Jimi Hendrix and Gregg Allman to look up to.

“It wasn’t until we were in our late teens--when the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing, all these back-yard parties and all these jam sessions kind of died down, and all the older musicians in the area settled down in Top 40 cover bands just to make a living--that we went back to it. We were frustrated, and out of that frustration, we took a little detour and got into Mexican folk music.

“I remember one day, we were sitting around at (guitarist Cesar Rosas’) house, and just for the fun of it we pulled out some old records and tried to learn these old songs. Only when we played them for our parents and they started to cry did we realize there was a whole lot more here than we had thought.

“Technically, it was really demanding, really intriguing, just the rhythms and all the instruments, and, before we knew it, we put all our electric gear away and dove in, head first.”

Hidalgo and his buddies spent the rest of the 1970s further exploring their common musical heritage, thanks to their parents’ extensive record libraries. As they listened, they learned, and as they learned, they played.

Los Lobos hit the L.A. club scene in 1980 and frequently shared the bill with rockabilly revivalists the Blasters. The Blasters brought Los Lobos to the attention of their label, Slash Records, and in 1983 Slash released Los Lobos’ debut album, “ . . . And a Time to Dance.” One of the songs on the album, “Anselma,” won a Grammy for the best Mexican-American performance.

In 1984, Blasters saxophonist Steve Berlin, who had co-produced the first Los Lobos album with T-Bone Burnett, jumped ship and became an official member of the group, joining Hidalgo, Rosas, bassist Conrad Lozano, and drummer Louie Perez.

Since then, Los Lobos has released four more critically acclaimed albums: “How Will the Wolf Survive?”, “By the Light of the Moon,” “La Pistola y El Corazon” (another Grammy winner), and now “The Neighborhood.”

“Even though we tried to stretch it out a little bit and tried not to repeat ourselves, it still sounds like us,” Hidalgo said. “I think maybe the difference is that, on our earlier records, it was more clear-cut, the different styles--you had a Tex-Mex song, something that sounded like country, something that sounded like rhythm-and-blues--whereas on the new album, all those things sort of wash over onto one another.”

Their post-”La Bamba” actions may have cost them a large chunk of their audience, Hidalgo said, but he’s not really too concerned.

“After ‘La Bamba,’ for a while there, we were playing larger halls, and our whole audience had changed,” he said. “A lot of younger people started coming out, and it was OK, but it wasn’t really because of us, it was because of ‘La Bamba.’

“And now, it seems like it’s gone back to the hard-core listeners who have followed us from the beginning--our real fans.”