The New Latino Wave Rocks

The House of Blues was howling the night Los Lobos played. A packed and eager crowd--from young Latino college couples to middle-aged Anglo hipsters--had come to see the legendary Chicano roots-rock band perform last month at the West Hollywood club.

But for one unexpected moment before the band took the stage, fans got a rare glimpse of the percolating promise of the Latin alternative music scene in Southern California. Quetzal, the fine Chicano fusion band from East L.A., was finishing its set when Los Lobos’ David Hidalgo and guitarist Raul Pacheco of the world-fusion group Ozomatli joined them for their finale. The enhanced band delivered a thrilling rendition of the classic “El Cascabel,” rejuvenating the old folk tune from Veracruz with an electrified intensity cultivated in barrios ranging from El Sereno to San Fernando.

Many fans might have missed the meaning of the moment. But for L.A.’s underground army of anonymous Latin musicians, it encapsulated decades of dreams and aspirations, which suddenly seemed attainable.

These three bands--Los Lobos, Quetzal and Ozomatli--today represent the best of a new wave of Latin alternative bands working throughout Southern California. It has taken two generations to put this kind of Latino talent on stage here simultaneously.

But for the few bands that have made a name in the business, there are dozens of other unheralded outfits practicing in their garages, from Oxnard to Anaheim. They save money to make their own recordings and pay for their own tours. They have no managers and no record deals. But what they have in abundance is energy and the drive to have their music heard.

Southern California has witnessed an explosion of bands in the Latin alternative genre in the past decade. The scene is heating up so fast, says the normally understated Hidalgo, that he can’t keep track. It reminds him of the 1980s heyday of the L.A. rock scene when Los Lobos shared bills and friendships with bands like X and the Blasters.

“It’s like it was in the ‘80s, when we played around town and we’d go to each other’s shows and support each other,” says Hidalgo, whose two sons play in a local punk band. “It’s alive again, but it’s more in the Latino community now.”

The bands are everywhere, yet they are invisible to the mainstream record business. They get no radio play and little publicity. They are rarely offered a chance to open for the big-name alternative bands from Latin America they idolize.

To find the local bands, you have to search them out. You’ll see them at community halls in Boyle Heights and dark coffeehouses near Venice. They play in barrio bars next to trash-strewn lots in El Sereno, and in a low-rent mini-mall in Westchester. Occasionally, they’ll pop up at trendy clubs on the Sunset Strip, but mostly on weeknights when the venues need to fill their calendars.

Today, L.A.’s alt-Latino bands come in many styles. They are bilingual and monolingual, all-male and all-female, recent immigrants and longtime residents, politically active and apathetic. Their art can be as course as cursing or as refined as classic poetry. They play everything from folk-rock-salsa fusions to raw punk, thrash metal, rap, reggae and ska. Their names are as varied as their sounds.

There’s a band called Calavera, which means “the skull,” and another called Skalavera, the skull that plays ska. The band Las 15 Letras is named after a bar where Pancho Villa killed a traitor. Quinto Sol, a multicultural reggae group, takes its name from the doomsday Aztec myth of the Fifth Sun. There’s Horny Toad and Maria Fatal. Los Abandoned and Los Villains (featuring Los Lobos’ offspring). Aztec Underground and Arkestra Clandestina. The Blues Experiment and Burning Star.

There’s even diversity among the all-girl bands: Femi-Tabu are stand-up rockers, while Cihuatl Tonalli (Circle of Women) play indigenous instruments sitting down.

Most of the bands admire Los Lobos, but few come close to that level of composing and playing--not yet. The majority of local bands lack experience and an original identity. Their sound can be raw, their presentation unpolished. Their events can be a little flaky. Sometimes the bands don’t show. Sometimes, there are almost more bands than fans.

At the recent Aztlan Fest, an annual, daylong marathon of local Latin rock held in the large parking lot of the Grand Olympic Auditorium, just a few hundred die-hard fans came and went during the day. Yet band after band played punk and thrash as if they were stars of arena rock.

A small group of young men dressed in gothic black started a mosh pit at one point, but they were too few and too scattered to create the critical mass required. They just marched around in a circle, occasionally speeding up to push and shove one another, as if they were driving bumper cars, without the cars. Nearby, only scattered customers approached booths selling CDs and T-shirts with the clashing images of Zapata and Iron Maiden.

“Nobody is innocent,” shouted the lead singer of the Mexican metal band Garrobos to close its set. “Todos somos criminals” (We are all criminals).

That pearl of subversive rock wisdom was delivered with such conviction you could imagine the missing roar of the masses.

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Los Angeles has always enjoyed the lively presence of some forms of Latin music--from the Afro-Cuban dance bands of the mambo era to the excellent mariachi ensembles of today. But this region has lagged in the pop and rock arena. In fact, Los Lobos, which next year celebrates 30 years as a group, is the only major band to emerge from L.A.’s Latino community in the past two decades. Skeptics say that predictions about the potential of L.A.’s alt-Latino scene are as old as Los Lobos themselves.

Indeed, during the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were so many local bands in the barrios that they created their own style. The so-called East L.A. sound was popularized by groups such as Cannibal and the Headhunters, which opened for the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl in 1964, and Tierra, which had a brief stint on the pop charts in the early ‘70s.

But it all went nowhere. In fact, the surge of the ‘70s was followed by the empty ‘80s. In the ‘90s, ironically, L.A. became an important consumer market for Latin alternative music from other countries. And it is now home to two of the most important figures in rock en espanol: famed Argentine-born producer Gustavo Santaolalla and talent manager Tomas Cookman, who co-organizes the annual Latin Alternative Music Conference in New York, where he was raised.

Neither of these heavy hitters expresses much faith in L.A.’s current crop of bands, struggling to compete with the big acts they represent. Santaolalla, who has produced albums by Juanes and Cafe Tacuba, says Latinos in L.A. simply don’t suffer enough to create truly great music like their counterparts south of the border, who daily deal with poverty, political violence and corruption.

“Alternative music nurtures itself with context,” says Santaolalla, who has his home and studio in Echo Park. “That’s why we have such exciting music coming out of Latin America, because the reality there is so harsh. It’s not the same thing to be a starving musician in Los Angeles [as] to be a starving musician in Montevideo.”

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Please don’t preach to Giovanny Blanco about what it’s like to be a struggling musician in L.A. The singer-bandleader-VJ was 12 when he first saw Los Lobos on a cable network in the Dominican Republic, where he was born and raised. It was a revelatory moment for a kid who idolized Queen’s Freddie Mercury. Blanco was thrilled to see “Latin dudes doing rock!”

Back home, Blanco became part of a teeny-bop group named Mermelada, which sold 50,000 albums, “and I didn’t see a dime.” After a move to the East Coast, a car crash that left him in the hospital for six months at 17, a breakup with his girlfriend and the breakup of another band, Blanco headed to L.A.

In 1997, he became a founding member of Viva Malpache, a new band influenced by Mexico’s Maldita Vecindad and Argentina’s Fabulosos Cadillacs, which both represented the fusion of rock and native Latin styles. It took a year to record their first self-financed album, “Los Greatest Hits de Viva Malpache,” using leftover studio time at 2 a.m. after paying bands went home for the night. “We were on a mission to get recognized,” says Blanco. “We wore black suits with black ties and Mexican masks we bought in Tijuana.”

Blanco recalls one early show at a swap meet in West Covina, attended by only 300 fans. Because of the competitive jostling for position in the lineup, Viva Malpache kept getting bumped. They finally went on at midnight, the last band of the evening.

Then they were told to keep their set short. But when Blanco’s mike was cut off after just one song, the band furiously kept playing. So the singer jumped into the crowd of some 50 stragglers, who then stormed the stage and started overturning speakers.

“You’re not going anywhere in this town,” the angry soundman later threatened.

“I didn’t do anything, man, but what I came here to do,” answered Blanco.

A year later, Viva Malpache opened for the legendary Maldita Vecindad --and the same soundman remained silent.

Blanco, 31, has struggled to keep the band together. He has started a respected side project named Spigga, a “trippy jazz” duo along with his friend Jaswho?,who’s dabbled in house, funk and reggae.

Does Blanco think L.A. bands have potential?

“Without a doubt,” he says over a hobo omelet at a diner near his cramped Echo Park apartment. “First, we need to get a little more organized. And second, we need to get out of here. We’ve all hit the ceiling locally, and what we need to do is prove that we can rock crowds out of the country.”

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The members of Pastilla, another veteran L.A. band, were headed to Mexico City last month. But first, they had to raise the funds for the tour.

Formed in the early ‘90s by two brothers and their high school buddies from Pomona, Pastilla was once the sensation of the local scene--the only home-grown, rock en espanol band to land a record deal with a major label, BMG of Mexico. Everybody thought it was the big breakthrough that would finally put L.A.’s Spanish rock scene on the map. But after two albums, Pastilla’s rock-star pretensions had far outstripped its record sales.

It’s been four years since Pastilla’s last record, “Vox Electra,” which contained an unusual bilingual song that played in Spanish on the left speaker and English on the right. (Listeners turned the balance dial to avoid stereo babble.) Still with three of its original members, the quartet headlined a show at the Westchester Sports Grill on one recent Friday night. The funky, ‘50s-style bar, located in a strip mall near the airport, has become a low-rent venue for weekly rock en espanol shows.

The place is far from glamorous, with its white rock walls on the outside and fake wood paneling inside. A big eight ball adorns its retro sign out front, dominating the coin laundry and tortilla factory next door. The crowd is young, 16 to 25, tops. They’re mostly Latino, dressed as hip as their immigrant means allow.

“It’s a hungry crowd,” says Juan “Da Bomb” Rodriguez, a key local promoter of rock en espanol events. “These people who come out to the shows are the ones who want something big in L.A.”

The kids are so well-behaved that Pastilla’s singer at one point berates them for acting as if they’re at a wake. Smokers casually linger outside within a roped-off area in the parking lot. Inside near the bar, young men shoot pool, using cue sticks occasionally to play air guitar.

Near the stage, a table draped in a Mexican serape is set up to take donations for the band’s then-pending, two-week tour to Mexico City. A small, resealable sandwich bag served as a kitty for the collection. By midnight, it contained just a couple of dollars and some coins.

With no label support, touring becomes too expensive. So to help send Pastilla to Mexico, the three other bands on the bill--Fanatic, Uztar and Curanderos--have agreed to play for free. The take from the $10 cover charge all goes to the cause.

“I hope you guys do good, because we’re coming right after you,” shouted the singer for Curanderos, which will need its own fund-raiser to help pay for its upcoming Mexican tour.

The concept of creating a circuit between L.A. and Mexico is being backed by Spanishrockla.com, Juan Da Bomb’s Web site, and Al Borde, a weekly newspaper that promotes the local scene. Recently, the newspaper also sponsored a series of workshops at two coffeehouses that also feature local acts, Cafe Bolivar in Santa Monica and Angeles Bohemios on Sunset Boulevard. The topics included how to produce your own record and how to copyright your work, a protection local musicians virtually ignore, though songwriting is often their greatest strength. (Pastilla has 45 new songs in the can for its next album.)

So much work, so little payoff. Don’t these people get disillusioned?

“No, I’m excited about being in L.A., because there’s a whole scene here and people come out to support the bands,” says Grant Goad, Pastilla’s manager, as the band starts grinding through its midnight set on the club’s crackling sound system. “Our goal is to get a new album out and go on the road, and if the major labels don’t want to help, then we’ll just do it ourselves.”

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In L.A., the promotion of local Spanish rock has always been a grass-roots effort. One of the original marketing plans was unwittingly started by two close friends, with only a stack of index cards and a lonely passion for the music.

Yvonne Gomez and Flora Tapia founded the Club Rock en Espanol in October 1989 at their homes in Monterey Park and Southgate. They were on “an eternal search for cool Latin rock music,” says Yvonne, who now is manager for Santaolalla’s Surco label.

Recordings were almost impossible to find in those days. They figured there must be other fans like them in Southern California. But there was no way to connect. Until one day, a story about the girls appeared in a local magazine, along with their home phone as a club contact.

They were flooded with calls. They soon had 3,000 names and addresses of fans on those index cards, and the major labels latched onto them as the only marketing tool in town for alternative music, Gomez recalls.

They soon became known as Las Chicas del CREE, the club’s acronym, which is Spanish for “believe.” Eventually, they started promoting local shows and managing the emerging bands.

Across town at UCLA, student and alt-Latino fan Mariluz Gonzalez began booking acts on campus. Hard-core devotees also braved muggings and police raids to attend underground shows at an empty warehouse in South-Central, a place fans nicknamed La Bodega.

But by far the hottest spot for the nascent scene was Hong Kong Low, a now-closed restaurant on Broadway in Chinatown that once featured punk bands. That place was “lo maximo” (the best), recalled Gonzalez, who recently borrowed $4,000 from her credit union to start a new indie label, SourPOP Records.

Every Friday night, the Chinatown shows became like a family gathering of musicians and their fans.

“They were all L.A. bands,” Gomez said. “They were our bands, and they were our friends. It was like we were all joined together by this music, and it didn’t really matter where we were from or what language we spoke. We were all just roqueros.”

At around the time Las Chicas del CREE were getting organized, Tony Estrada started his band, Voz de Mano. He was 20 at the time, still single. Now 32, he’s married and has two daughters, one born just last month.

Estrada, a guitarist and songwriter, still has the band, which has released three independent albums, attracting critical praise but few sales. In the early days, he thought for sure they’d be big stars by now. Estrada, who works for the Pasadena Water & Power department, says he still loves what he does and has no intention of giving it up. Music is “kind of like therapy for me,” says the native of the Mexican coastal state of Nayarit, who moved here at age 4, with his parents and siblings all cramming into a single hotel room.

Sometimes, says the soft-spoken musician, he’ll hear a melody in his head while he’s at work or running errands. So he calls home and hums the melody into his message machine.

“What is that thing you left on the voice mail?” his wife asked one time.

“That’s my next song,” answered Estrada. “Don’t erase it.”

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Agustin Gurza is a Times staff writer.