Wolves Out of the Den : Los Lobos have been lying low, or as low as you can when you’re working nonstop. With their new album ‘Colossal Head,’ they’re back running with the pack.

The mood is upbeat as the five members of Los Lobos, whose music conveys the character and diversity of Los Angeles as well as that of any band ever to emerge from the city, gather for a photo session on the roof at Warner Bros. Records in Burbank.

It’s the first of two days of interviews in support of the group’s new album, “Colossal Head,” and even the weather is cooperating by bringing sunshine in the midst of a seemingly endless parade of rainy days.

As the photographer sets up, the band members marvel at the gorgeous view of the distant mountains, outlined against a brilliant blue, cloud-dappled sky.

But the mood is quickly broken.

“OK,” says singer-guitarist Cesar Rosas, one of the band’s three main songwriters. “Get with the snappin’.”

Clearly, this isn’t a group that cares much for standing still.

It has been four years since Los Lobos last released a full-blown studio album, so some fans may have assumed that the band had taken an extended break.

In truth, the East Los Angeles-bred roots-rock quintet has maintained a feverish pace, barely finding two weeks in its schedule last spring to record “Colossal Head” (see review, Page 74), the long-awaited successor to its widely praised 1992 album “Kiko.”

The cover of the new album, which shows the band’s name revolving around the head of a vintage toy robot, seems to reflect the state of Los Lobos: perpetual motion.

“The past three or four years have been our most active,” Rosas says, chomping on bagels and cream cheese as he sits in a conference room before the photo session. “We’ve been grinding it into the ground.”

In addition to touring and releasing a two-disc 1993 retrospective, “Just Another Band From East L.A.: A Collection,” Los Lobos worked on three film soundtracks (“Mi Vida Loca,” “Desperado” and the coming “Feeling Minnesota”). The band contributed songs to tribute albums for Buddy Holly, Richard Thompson, Johnny Thunders, Doc Pomus and Jimi Hendrix.

The band also worked with legendary Chicano folk singer Lalo Guerrero on a children’s album, “Papa’s Dream,” which earned a Grammy nomination this year.

And drummer Louie Perez and vocalist and multi-instrumentalist David Hidalgo, who together write most of Los Lobos’ songs, released a highly praised side-project album in 1994 under the name Latin Playboys.

Why the breakneck pace?

“It takes us off the road,” Perez says of the soundtrack work in particular. “It’s nice to sleep in your own bed every night and still be able to make a living. We’re not 20. We have obligations that go along with being [in our 40s] and having families. This allows us to satisfy the creative urges and also to make a living.

“The bonus is that it’s cool work. It’s a lot of fun. It’s challenging, it’s frustrating--everything that has to do with doing honest work.”

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Big things have been expected from Los Lobos since the late ‘70s. That’s when the band first started attracting attention outside its home base of East L.A., where it had built a loyal following by performing acoustic Mexican folk music at hundreds of weddings and dances.

Once classmates at Garfield High School, the four original band members (Rosas, Perez, Hidalgo and bassist Conrad Lozano) switched to rock after getting caught up in the energy and imagination generated on the Hollywood club circuit by bands such as X and the Blasters.

Adding former Blasters saxophonist Steve Berlin in the early ‘80s, Los Lobos blended country, folk, R&B;, blues, norteno and traditional Spanish and Mexican music into a delectable brew that earned the band critical acclaim for its first two major-label albums, 1984’s “How Will the Wolf Survive?” and 1987’s “By the Light of the Moon.” In “Light of the Moon,” especially, the group spoke eloquently about the troubled pursuit of the American dream, as seen through a barrio perspective.

The road was paved for a major commercial breakthrough when the Los Lobos-powered soundtrack for “La Bamba,” the hit movie about ‘50s rock star Ritchie Valens, shot to the top of the pop album chart in the summer of ’87.

Los Lobos contributed eight songs to the album--all remakes of Valens hits, including the title track, which also reached No. 1.

The band, though, refused to cash in on its star status by following up with another album in the same mainstream pop vein. Instead, the group returned to its roots for 1988’s “La Pistola y El Corazon,” an all-Spanish album of traditional Mexican music. Two years later came “The Neighborhood,” which was similar in theme and texture to “Wolf” and “Light of the Moon.”

“We didn’t want to go for the obvious,” says Perez, the band’s most loquacious member, sitting across the table from Rosas. “We didn’t want to put on the funny hats. When ‘La Bamba’ hit, the stage was set for us to sell Doritos for the next 25 years.”

Instead, Los Lobos opted to stay true to their musical vision.

“[Selling out] would have perpetuated that legacy, those same stereotypes that have gone on forever and ever about Mexican people,” Perez continues. “We said, ‘We’re not going to take it,’ and we probably turned down a whole pile of dough. But we still had to look at ourselves every day--and at each other.”

Nine years later, the band seems to have finally escaped the shadow of “La Bamba.” Enough time has passed for the band to even feel comfortable playing the song in concert again.

“We recently lifted the moratorium,” Perez says, laughing.

“Kiko,” which won The Times’ pop critics poll as album of the year in 1992, went a long way toward erasing the stigma of “La Bamba.” With its highly textured layers of sound, the album was unlike anything the band had recorded before.

And Los Lobos’ subsequent work on soundtracks only added to their credibility, says band manager Paula Sartorius.

“What it did was actually make them more creative, and people look at them a bit differently too,” she says in a separate interview. “It has opened other people’s eyes to their music.”

Los Lobos began aggressively soliciting film scoring and soundtrack opportunities two years ago, mailing out cassette samplers of their past work in films and other related projects.

The band had actually been introduced to movie audiences way before “La Bamba”--back in 1982, when its Spanish version of the old Mitch Ryder hit “Devil With a Blue Dress” was used in the black comedy “Eating Raoul.” Its songs have since been used in more than two dozen films, TV shows and commercials.

The outside work adds to Los Lobos’ creativity and spontaneity, band members say.

“Our stock in trade has always been our diversity, so this makes the whole thing a little richer,” says Berlin, joining the conversation. “We get to explore and mess around in the studio, and the thing about soundtracks is the most experimental music tends to work the best. Orthodoxy very rarely works well when you’re trying to match the music with the visual.

“So, it lets us work together and develop our collective vocabulary in interesting ways, and certainly we bring what we learn there to the record-making process.”

Outside projects and touring aren’t the only things that have occupied Los Lobos’ time since “Kiko.” Also delaying “Colossal Head,” which is due out Tuesday, was a dispute with Slash Records, the L.A. label that until this year had released all of the band’s albums.

The group was unhappy with Slash’s overseas distribution deals with labels the band believed were indifferent to the group and didn’t aggressively promote its albums. Los Lobos also believed that Slash misunderstood the band’s direction and was slow in agreeing to sign off on the band’s outside projects.

“Slash’s point of view was always way off the mark,” Berlin says. “We more or less told them that we would just as soon break up the band as make another record for them.”

Last spring, Los Lobos negotiated a separation from Slash and subsequently signed with Warner Bros., which had distributed the Slash albums in the United States.

“I never saw [the split] as antagonistic,” says Slash President Bob Biggs. “It was pretty mellow, as far as these things go.”

Biggs says Los Lobos simply wanted a more lucrative deal than Slash could offer--a claim that the band’s management denies.

With the situation resolved, Los Lobos finally made it into the studio to record “Colossal Head.”

“We realized at some point that time was slipping away,” Berlin says. “We were trying to sort out our business affairs and watching all these wheels turn. Then we looked up and realized that if we didn’t get going, we might not have an album out until ‘97, which would have been a tragic mistake. It’s nice to give your fans a break, but [more than] three years is plenty.”

With its blues and ‘60s pop influences, “Colossal Head” is a simpler, more elementary record than its predecessor. It was written almost entirely in the studio.

“It’s a natural evolution from ‘Kiko,’ ” says Peter Standish, vice president of product management at Warner Bros. “It’s not that different, but it’s not the same. There’s clear continuity, but there’s also growth.”

Standish says he is confident that “Colossal Head” will find a place on adult-alternative stations such as Los Angeles’ KSCA-FM (101.9), which was not yet on the air when “Kiko” was released.

“It should be a perfect fit,” says Merilee Kelly, music director at KSCA. “This is a highly anticipated album for this format for stations all over the country.”

Limited radio airplay may have hurt “Kiko,” which sold only about 255,000 copies despite its rave reviews. “Just Another Band From East L.A.,” which features the best material from the group’s first 20 years together, has sold only about 100,000 copies.

In support of the new album, the band is heading back out on the road for a lengthy tour. Outside projects have been put on hold.

“It’s the nature of this business,” Berlin says. “It’s not a 9-to-5 job, and you can’t treat it that way. You have to work really hard while the opportunity presents itself. There’s no easy way to pull it off.”