Steve Berlin of Los Lobos

By Mark Whittington

Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Los Lobos seem the unlikeliest of rock stars.

What band follows up its No. 1 hit by releasing an album in Spanish? Or constantly mixes musical styles so that it sounds like your punching the presets on the car radio?

Yet, somehow these homeboys from East L.A. have survived for more than 30 years.

I’ve seen them make farm workers dance in the streets and grown men cry. I’ve heard them wow a crowd of London hipsters and pull ghosts from the walls of a legendary San Francisco nightclub.

So, I was looking forward to a chance to talk with Steve Berlin, the band’s saxophonist and keyboard player.

We talked for 50 minutes — give or take a dropped cell phone call from his home in Portland, Ore.

When I listened to the tape, I was stopped by the emotion in his voice when he described a recent performance of “La Bamba.” It derailed the direction I thought my story would take.

But I couldn’t let go of his comments — about what it’s like to join a tight-knit musical family and the L.A. music scene that gave birth to Los Lobos, about surviving as a musician in the digital age and about politics.

Here are some highlights from the rest of the interview:

How did a sax player from Philly end up in a band from East LA?

It wasn’t as odd it may seem to someone on the outside. I was playing with a band called the Blasters. We were headlining at the Whisky a Go Go one weekend, and Dave Alvin said to me, “Hey, we’ve got this really cool band from East L.A. opening for us called Los Lobos.” I very dimly remembered seeing a band called Los Lobos open for Public Image at this place called the Olympic, which is this horrible boxing arena, the worst place in the world to see music. But that was a couple years ago and they were a Mexican folkloric music band. I thought, “Well that’s going to be odd.” But when they showed up, they were playing a combination of stuff – rock ‘n’ roll and Latin music. Not at all acoustic or folkloric. They kind of blew everybody away that night, including myself.

We kind of just became initially friends and sort of hung out a little bit. And they asked me if I wanted to learn some of their material and I said, “Of course.” ...

What was interesting, they were morphing from a folkloric, acoustic band into a rock ‘n’ roll band. None of the roles were really set. So, the moment I has started hanging around, they were still figuring it out for themselves. So we all kind of basically figured it out together. Like, whether there was room for a sax, which there was. And then how we’re all going to fit in together, which we did.

Basically we all of us figuring everything out together. It kind of a cool time for that. It wasn’t just Los Lobos that was figuring it out. It was a wonderful moment in musical history. There was all this kind of cool stuff going on in LA, not just Los Lobos but everybody was trying to figure out what they were about. What we were doing. It was just a really fun time to be there. And Lobos was right in the middle of it. ...

It does still inform what we do and who were are. I don’t think we can claim to be 25-year-old punk rockers anymore. Certainly we still carry that thing forward. And we’re proud to part of that. We’re still close to all of those guys. Dave Alvin, John Doe, those people still are significant in our lives. I know I think about them a lot.

We timed it out, whether we were aware of it or not, perfectly. (laughs) We were in the right place at the right time – and in many respects continue to be. God knows I would hate to be Los Lobos starting right now.

Why is that?

It’s just a tough time. I think we’re moving toward something that will be beneficial in the long run. We were able to grow and define ourselves and make friends and become who we are in a moment when there was a little more support out there. I think what’s going on now, everybody is kind of an individual entrepreneur and your success may or may not depend on your ability to network your Facebook friends as much as to play well.

I say that and it sounds as if I’m disparaging that. I actually think it’s kind of cool. These are now skills that go along with being a musician. For a long time you could sort of get away with murder when you were a musician. I don’t think it’s a bad that all of us have to multitask a little bit.

But I do think we were able to become professional musicians at a really early stage and we were able to grow and get good and work out our stuff with a bit more of a support system than if Los Lobos were forming today. I think it would be tougher. I don’t think it’s impossible but it would be tougher road to go.

I just think at the end the bands will be better off for owning our own masters, having more rights control and having a lot of stuff that we didn’t have or don’t have that a band that will be coming up today will have — unless they sign a stupid record deal — that will suit them well in the long run.

But for who we were and how we started, we had a great record company at the beginning and through most of the initial stages that allowed us to do whatever our muse led us. We didn’t really have to play a lot of games that a lot of other bands had to play to get their record company to pay attention to them. You know, basically listen to bad ideas.

Now it’s sort of every band for himself, it’s yet another completely different world of trying to make a living in the music business.

With all the changes in technology, what do you see down the road for the music business?

It’s challenging, and a little scary. No one is really making it, other than those people who are selling their songs to commercials. Not a lot of people are making money other than on the road right now. So you are forced to travel and do that much more so than you ever were.

I do think a new paradigm is coming that will be more equitable. I am not going to miss … the record companies, even though we had very supportive ones, were by and large were very much like the Mafia. Basically they loan you money at ridiculous percentage rate. They don’t break your legs if your don’t pay it back, but at the same time they expect a lot for it. You had to play by their rules or not play at all. So I will not miss one bit a lot of that stuff where if you make where if you are earning money, selling stuff, you should get a part of it. It shouldn’t go to pay an open-ended loan fund like many of us have had to deal with. ...

I know a lot of smart people are coming up with a lot of cool ideas. I’m encouraged by a lot of the stuff I see and hear. But at the same time it’s still a ways away. A lot of what’s going to happen may not happen in a timely enough fashion for me anyway. I’d like it to happen yesterday. I think it’s all coming. I’m sad to see a lot of my friends, like people in retail, sort of get swept away. I think it’s a really tough time to be selling stuff that you can get for free on the Internet without leaving your house. I’m not at all happy to see record stores go away, but I don’t see how they get to hang on.

What kind of got me into this stuff is going into record stores and thinking it was a paradise. I really hope that that doesn’t become something like going to a soda fountain for my kid.

I know, it already is. I’m saying that knowing the ship’s already sailed.

That’s the thing I don’t know the answer to. If it’s all digital, which it probably will be, how do you fight that. How do you get paid? How do you compete with free, because a lot of it’s out there for free right now? That’s going to be a challenge for every single artist who’s making anything that can be digitized.

And I don’t endorse suing grandmoms and 11-year-olds. That sure isn’t the way. I think the way forward is, frankly, having a store that sells it at a reasonable price with support and makes the shopping part painless ... I think it can happen. As far as my industry is concerned, it’s going to take a lot smarter people at the top – because those people are idiots.

Do you see an irreconcilable gap in American culture when it comes to immigrants?

I think the volume has been turned down now that we have a president who’s not stirring the pot every day. I think there will always been a disconnect. The Canada experiment is about a close as you can get to many cultures separated both by a common language and a separate language trying to live together

I don’t think it has every been easy, especially in tough economic times, it’s even less easy. One of the things that’s going on now is that we are all in this mess together, the mess of the planet right now. I don’t think that notion of closing the door behind you certainly doesn’t seem to be spoken of as much now. Now I live in Oregon where it’s less of an issue in California. When I was in California and when we’re working on music there, it does seem that there’s an endless hubbub about immigration issues. So I’m probably in a slight remove as far as that’s concerned, But I’d like to think it’s calmer and that the problems that we’re facing surpass the cultural part and that it’s more about everybody just surviving this moment and getting past it.

Do you see Los Lobos as a political band?

I think we are a political band, but I think that one of the things that we learned very early is that we have to be cautious about how focused and specific we speak about stuff only. I know back in the early days when we took more public stands, it would tend to influence how people heard the music. They’d say, “Here’s a song about this subject” and it really wasn’t. But because somebody heard us speak about farmworkers rights they chose to tell – at least from their point of view – what we were thinking.

We’re more careful and more cautious than we were a few years ago about that. But I think that even the fact of our existence, to a certain extent, is a bit of a political statement. We’re certainly trying to break the mold of what the perception of a Latin band is and can be. We don’t think of ourselves as a Latin band, per se. Obviously we mostly are. But it’s never been – like when you asked earlier, who we are and what we are – it’s never been that’s who we are. It’s always been just American rock band.

You have talked about politicians hijacking the language. What did you mean?

I think that the most heinous tool in the tool kit for hijacking and owning a discussion is changing the context of the language. So without pointing too specific a finger, it’s the way Republicans frame every argument in terms that they get people to vote against their self-interest by turning it into something that doesn’t have anything to do with the subject at hand. You know: Tax cuts for the wealthy are somehow good for the working class.

The true mastery is the ability to change to get people to not actually understand what they are talking about but to put it in a way that makes people who don’t look at it closely operate almost as robots. They don’t really ask how does this affect me?

You know, the whole Rush Limbaugh phenomenon, though I think his star has ebbed or is ebbing certainly, where he convinces a whole mass of people to stop using their brains and let him do their thinking. (laughs) Now I’m going to get in trouble with all the Rush fans in Las Vegas.