The date of that unforgettably bizarre gig was May 4, 1980. Clad in guayaberas, wearing their hair unfashionably long, acoustic instruments in hand, the four hirsute Hispanic musicians arrived at downtown L.A.'s derelict Olympic Auditorium, to serve as an incongruous opening act for Public Image, Ltd. Making their local debut, the English band – the first post-Sex Pistols venture of vocalist John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten -- had drawn the cream of L.A.'s punk faithful to the seedy boxing and wrestling venue, and the surly crowd was in no mood to hear traditional Mexican folk music, as purveyed by an unknown Chicano band. The punks threw everything within reach at the stage. "We held our own for five, six songs -- we didn't play all that long," recalls Cesar Rosas. "but when the bottles started flying, that's when we knew, 'We'd better get out of here,' I remember seeing this big ol' wad of newspaper-- it was as big as a basketball, and it was wet, I mean it was drenched. A huge, giant spitball just coming straight for us, flying right over and it hit Dave right in the face." Among the appalled witnesses in the audience was Steve Berlin, a young emigré saxophonist from Philadelphia who was then breaking in with a variety of punk-oriented bands on L.A.'s West Side. "I just remember the sort of weird Roman Colosseum-like vibe of that place," Steve says today. "It seemed like the Christians and the lions, and they were the Christians. I remember them standing there somewhat impassively, just taking fusillade after fusillade of crap from the audience. Spit and bottles and cups." "We just kept playing until the real serious projectiles started flying," says Louie Perez. "then we had to split, and we walked off the stage and our friends and family were in tears! They thought that this was the worst thing that ever happened to us. but for us we felt this weird sense of elation it was kinda like being in a pit at a punk rock show, There's danger, You feel so charged -- it's the negative and positive mixed together that creates this strange high." David Hidalgo remembers feeling similarly energized: "It was scary, it was weird, but also got us all pumped up. It was like. 'Whoa man, what was that!' -- like trying to fight your way out of a brawl or something . Even though it wasn't a positive reaction from the audience, we got a response, not like playing in restaurant where people just sit around and get drunk. They got fairly pissed off, cause didn't want us there, but at least something happened." The Lobos had secured this strange date through one of Louie's contacts, the Mexican-American actor-performance artist-musician Tito Larriva, whose punk band the Plugz were also on the PiL bill. (Prophetically, the Plugz's self-released 1979 debut included a revved-up, rewritten cover of Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba," and the group's future members included Steve Berlin.) But the band was soon exploring the fringes of L.A.'s energetic punk scene on their own, with deepening interest. "You could feel that there was a scene, that something was brewing, something was happening that hadn't been there before," David says. "Louie and a couple other friends of ours started going to the Vex [Willie Herron and Joe Suquett's club on Brooklyn Avenue in East L.A.], and some of the other punk rock shows on the East Side. That started the curiosity." "We had started to make our way over to the scene in Hollywood to check out bands after listening to some of the stuff that had made it into the record bins in east L.A. says Louie. Once we decided to make the trip, we became regulars at the Blasters and Plugz' shows." The tenor of the times and the Lobos' own impatience with their musical direction set the quartet on a new creative compass point. While the group had remained true to its acoustic folk orientation (and would continue to remain true to it at heart), its members all were grounded in a panoply of rock 'n' roll, r&b, and blues influences, from east L.A.'s own Thee Midnighters, The Premiers, and Ritchie Valens to sources as diverse as Frank Zappa (whose title for the mothers of invention album "just another band from L.A." inspired the handle of the Lobos' 1978 folk collection "Just Another Band From East L.A."), Freddy King, Don & Dewey, and Howlin' Wolf, to name only a handful. A yearning to turn up the juice ultimately culminated in some electric shows played at one of the Lobos' regular gigs, at a Mexican restaurant, Las Lomas, in Anaheim Hills. David Hidalgo says the Lobos' '80s electric incarnation developed there, essentially piece by piece. "My nephew left a guitar at the house," he remembers. "I think it was a Telecaster. We had already begun playing Ritchie Valens songs and old rock n' roll on our acoustic instruments. So I plugged it into the restaurant's PA, and it sounded cool. The next week Conrad [Lozano] pulled out his Fender Jazz Bass, and since there was a kit there already, Louie started playing the drums. Out of boredom, we got this electric thing happening, with accordion, guitar, bass and drums, mixing traditional Mexican music with rock n' roll. It was fun until we got fired for playing too loud." Los Lobos began to formulate the idea of presenting their Hispanic roots music in an electric format -- a notion that jelled perfectly with the roots-punk music on the ascendant at that very moment in the Hollywood clubs, where the Blasters -- a Downey-based band led by the Alvin brothers, singer Phil and guitarist-songwriter Dave, were then burning up the stages. David says, "We had taken the Mexican music all the way from the really hardcore regional music of Mexico, and we worked our WAY to the Tex-Mex and the East LA [rock 'n' roll] stuff. and when we heard the Blasters and we thought, 'There's a connection here.'" Louie adds, "We really dug what the Blasters were doing. One night We made our way backstage at a show at the Whisky, and introduced ourselves. We told them we were from East LA,' and the first thing that came out of Phil's mouth was, 'Oh yeah? Cool! We're from East LA, too.'" The Alvins quickly became friends and sponsors of the East L.A. group, and thus, in January 1981, Los Lobos were invited to open a show for the Blasters at the Whisky A Go Go, the venerable rock 'n' roll showplace in Hollywood. The band, whose memories of the Olympic Auditorium remained fresh, accepted nervously. We didn't know what to expect, says Louie, I guess somehow that PIL show was still on our minds, so when we went out on stage we were nervous and the songs were a little faster than usual, I would say that fear definitely propelled us that night. Steve Berlin -- who by this time had become a member of the Blasters, and shared the stage with the Lobos for the first time that night -- remembers, "We thought we were cosmopolitan, but I remember it being somewhat exotic that there was this band all the way from the East Side opening for us - to me east L.A., could have been a light year away -- and even though we'd hung out all over town, there just wasn't, at that point in my life, any reason to go to East Los Angeles. Prior to the show, I was thinking, 'Oh, this should be interesting.' "Then they just blew the place away. Literally, overnight, everybody was talking about them, everybody was talking about how great they were, how this band with real vision and talent had sort of sprung up out of nowhere. It was like finding a tribe of Indians living under a freeway overpass. How could we have missed them? They were here the whole time." In virtually no time, Los Lobos found themselves embraced by basically the same audience that had greeted them with such hostility at the Olympic. The band quickly became a fixture on the L.A. punk rock scene. Animated by the same do-it-yourself ethic as the punk groups, they produced two self-released singles in 1981 that gave a good idea of their artistic reach. One mated a cover of the Premiers' "Farmer John" with the traditional two-step "Anselma"; the other showcased the Mexican ballad "Volver, Volver" and a version of the Drifters' R&B evergreen "Under the Boardwalk." The band found themselves increasingly torn between their new turf and their old stomping grounds in East L.A. Louie says, "We had to make a decision between playing like a wedding in East L.A. that would pay us four hundred bucks, and playing for 50 bucks at the Cathay De Grande...All our friends and fans and the [East L.A.] community couldn't understand what the heck we were doing [in Hollywood]. The only thing they ever heard about is what they read about or they saw on the news -- you know, punk rock riots on Santa Monica Boulevard or something." "The people from the East Side were wondering what was wrong with us," says Conrad. "They didn't want follow us over there. They were thinking we were crazy for trying to play in front of a punk rock audience and we didn't have any idea what was going to happen.'" Cesar recalls both the vitality of the Hollywood scene, and also its somewhat forbidding and foreign undercurrent: "I remember the camaraderie between the bands, and how everybody felt that they were contributing to something that was good. The spirit of the music and being able to express yourself musically, and also the whole rebellious thing behind it, was a positive thing. I remember being slightly intimidated by the people who had big spiked hair and purple hair and all that. But eventually, when you started talking to people, you realized they were just like anybody else, and that blew my mind." By 1982, Los Lobos were established as the most unique and hard-rocking entry on the L.A. roots-punk scene. Their friends in the Blasters had mounted a campaign to get them signed to Slash Records, the Warner Bros.-distributed label offshoot of the like-named L.A. punkzine that also boasted the Downey band in its roster. "Dave and Phil [Alvin] and [Slash publicist] Susan Clary, just kept beating on [the label]," says David. "Finally [Slash president] Bob Biggs made it to one of the shows and saw a pretty good response ,so he agreed to start us off with an EP. because I don't think he exactly knew what he was getting into." When the group entered the studio to cut what became their debut Slash EP "...and a time to dance," they sported a new full-time member. Steve Berlin -- who had been splitting his time between the Blasters and Los Lobos for months -- had been brought into the fold. "I just remember going to extreme lengths [to play the Lobos gigs] just because they were so much fun to play with," Steve says. Work on the EP was quick and dirty ("That was just more or less, 'Let's try to get it as live as possible,'" says Steve). The finished record, which was released in 1983 and included a cover of Ritchie Valens' "Come On Let's Go" and a new version of the crowd-pleasing "Anselma," got a generally positive response from hometown fans. But no one could have anticipated that on Feb. 24, 1984, "Anselma" would receive the very first Grammy Award for "best Mexican/American performance" from the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences. Certainly the band, which was then in New Orleans in the midst of an extremely low-budget tour, was taken totally by surprise. "It was the coldest night in the history of New Orleans," Steve says, "and we were staying at the crappiest hotel, in a way only New Orleans hotels can be awful. We got to the room -- and in that era we would only get one room, and everyone would either sleep on the floor or someone would sleep on the box spring -- and there was a bouquet of flowers saying, 'Congratulations.'" Flushed with this unexpected triumph, the band moved towards the completion of its first full-length album. While the record's songs were penned in the same roots-rock vein as those on the EP, their lyrics offered evidence of a new depth and highly personal resonance. Steve was especially struck by one song, an anthemic number called "Will the Wolf Survive?" He says, "I remember thinking, 'Wow, this is really special, This is not a cool blues-based song, this is something different. This is gonna change things.'" "We knew it was an opportunity to express our viewpoint," David says. "And we've always felt that responsibility to our community, playing the folk music. So we just carried that on -- we tried to write something that had some meat to it, something that meant something at least to us. We didn't want to alienate ourselves or anyone by making it this hardcore, militant Chicano thing. We were finding out ourselves from going across the [L.A.] river, meeting other people, most folks are more alike than they are different. There are common things that we all share, just the common day-to-day grind, the stuff that we all go through. We all have problems, love, all that stuff. So that's what we went on." With equally strong contributions from Cesar Rosas and the Hidalgo-Perez writing team and punchy production by Steve Berlin and Texas singer-songwriter T-Bone Burnett, the 1984 opus "How Will The Wolf Survive?" endures as one of the most accomplished albums of its era. Unfortunately, it would be three years before Los Lobos would release another studio album: "By the Light of the Moon" followed in 1987. "At that point," Conrad says, "I think we still were somewhat overwhelmed by the whole process of the studio, and the formula, and having to work out songs, going to rehearsal, and doing all that. We were pretty much trying to be recording artists by the manual: 'This is how you do it. OK, fine, here we go.' So it took a while for us to put that record together." In the middle of the arduous recording process for "By the Light of the Moon," Los Lobos became involved in another project: a biographical film based on the tragically short life of '50s rock 'n' roller Ritchie Valens, who died at 17 in a plane crash with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper in February 1959. The Valens saga was a natural for the Lobos, on a number of counts. Valens -- who was born Ritchie Valenzuela -- was. of course, an East Side homeboy who was born in Pacoima; he was the first major Hispanic rock star, bred right in L.A. by local label operator and producer Bob Keane. Valens' music had been integral to the Lobos' live sets even before hit the Hollywood scene. His story was to be told on the screen by stage and film writer-director Luis Valdez, whom the members of Los Lobos knew well as the artistic director of the noted Hispanic theater troupe of the '70s, El Teatro Campesino. (Valdez had later made a splash with the Chicano historical drama "Zoot Suit," which was successfully produced at L.A.'s Mark Taper Forum and filmed by the director in 1981.) Valens' family -- who saw Los Lobos play a show in Santa Cruz, Calif., not far from their home in Watsonville -- insisted that the band was the only group to interpret the music of the singer-guitarist. The Valenzuelas made that clear to the group members when they visited their Watsonville home. "We sat in their living room," Louie remembers, "AS they were of bringing out, records, photograghs and things that belonged to ritchie. "We were amazed, then his sister came out of the bedroom holding a soda pop in one hand, and a clothes hanger with one of Ritchie Valens's stage outfits in the other and tells Cesar, "Why don't you try it on?" Cesar just stood there trembling, his knees knocking." "It was the family's call," says David. "They were the ones who really wanted us to do it. And we said, 'Of course. We'd be honored.'" However, because the group was laboring to finish their official studio album, work on the soundtrack for the film, eventually titled "La Bamba," proceeded virtually as an afterthought, according to Steve -- who, was producing the Valens' songs for the movie. The soundtrack recording, he says, "didn't seem at the moment to be the important thing at at the time...'By The Light Of The Moon' was like basically mining diamonds, and literally right across the hall [at Sunset Sound in L.A.], I was working on 'La Bamba'. The track that became the most important single number of Los Lobos' career was basically knocked off at the last minute. Cesar says, "After the soundtrack was already in the can and the movie was already done, getting ready to be release-- we were asked to go back into the studio. They were thinking about putting out a soundtrack album so they wanted to know if we do a single. we had already recorded 50-60 different versions OF La Bamba for the movie, SO we just went back in there and cut it in a couple of hours with the little time we had between tours. That's when we first met Mitchell Froom -- he produced the session. It was like the old days -- badda-bing, and we were outta there." By the time "La Bamba" hit theaters in the summer of 1987, "By the Light of the Moon" was near the end of its unimpressive run, having peaked at No. 47 on Billboard's Top Pop Albums chart. There were only modest expectations for the Columbia Pictures film or the Slash/Warner Bros. soundtrack album that accompanied its release. "We didn't think anything was really gonna happen," Louie says. "We were proud of it, we thought that here's another thing to kind of raise awareness of who we are and where we come from, and the significance of our music and Ritchie's legacy. Never had a clue anything would happen." And then the miraculous happened. The film, with actor Lou Diamond Phillips miming David Hidalgo's performances of Valens' classic rock 'n' roll songs, became a summertime sleeper hit thanks to glowing reviews. The picture's smash status lofted both the band's single version of "La Bamba," which climbed to No. 1 on Billboard's Hot 100 Singles chart and stayed there for three weeks, and the soundtrack album, which also soared to No. 1 and ultimately went double platinum. As with the Grammy in '84, the Lobos, who were on the road overseas when "La Bamba" was released, could not have been more surprised by their good fortune. CONRAD says, "We got home after three weeks of being in Europe, and everybody was staring AT US when we got home, and people were patting us on the back, We asked, 'What's up?' and they looked at us and said 'Well, you got a No. 1 record, you know? all we could say was, 'You know what, we gotta get some sleep. Can we talk about this later.?'" "It was just a very strange duality, to be celebrated as the men of the moment," says Steve. "But it was fun, and obviously it put us on the lips of America. It was just one of those weird cultural tsunamis where we had the entire attention of the country, pretty much, for three months." While the enormous and unanticipated success of the 'La Bamba' single and soundtrack catapulted Los Lobos to immediate national stardom, the massive popularity of their sudden mega-hit served to limit the public's understanding of who the band was and what the band did. The group often found themselves taking the stage to encounter an audience that knew little about their earlier records and wanted to hear Valens' material - and very frequently little more than that. "We were the guys that played 'La Bamba,' and nothing more, and it concerned us," says Louie. "And we didn't really know what to do at that point. So we ran home. We ran back to who we were, and asked ourselves, 'ok now, who are we?' The only way to find out was to open up that trunk in the attic and dig out everything." Sensing they had reached a true crossroads in their career, Los Lobos convinced Warner Bros.' sensitive and highly receptive president Lenny Waronker that the best way the band could establish its post-"La Bamba" identity was by making an album of acoustic Mexican folk songs. "La Pistola Y El Corazon," issued in late 1988, was the result. "A lot of the people who used to follow us figured they'd lost us to the commercial world," notes David, "and the new audience didn't know anything about where we came from, so we were nowhere for a while there....To do 'La Pistola' was a way to get back, go all the way to the beginning, for the audience to hear that, and also for us to re-focus and go on." While "La Pistola" sold a fraction of the "La Bamba" soundtrack, peaking at No. 179 and lasting only four weeks on the charts, it was a crucial spiritual refresher for the depleted band. It was also another aesthetic triumph for Los Lobos as well: In February 1990, it brought the group its second Grammy for best Mexican/American performance. The making of "The Neighborhood," the 1990 album that succeeded "La Pistola," was a creative experience that rivalled "By the Light of the Moon" in difficulty. While the album featured some superlative new songs, like "Down on the Riverbed," "I Can't Understand," "Be Still," and the title tune, the band members and co-producer Larry Hirsch, their longtime engineer, were dogged by uncertainty throughout the recording process. "We were groping around," David says. "We knew we had to do something and we knew we wanted to do something different, and I think we could almost hear what we wanted to do, but didn't know exactly where to go." Steve adds, "We tortured that record to death. It was non-stop, it just went on until we ran out of money, more or less." The lengthy tour that followed the release of The Neighborhood found the band playing big venues and cranking up the sonic juice; Conrad remembers the shows on this road trip as the loudest of the band's career. The tour left the group enervated. Los Lobos had pursued their rock muse into a cul-de-sac and now sought a new direction to refresh themselves. "It was a weird time, a weird time for everything," Conrad says with finality. Los Lobos' experiences during this period taught them a lesson that would guide the rest of their creative existence: Standard operating procedure wasn't for them. "Everything that happened from 'La Bamba' through 'The Neighborhood' more or less informed the decisions we made for 'Kiko,' which I think changed everything," Steve offers. "Every time we tried to do anything by the book, by the historical rock wisdom, it turned out to either be a sick joke, or A real kick in the ass. We learned through trial and error that nothing that applied to whatever we thought the rest of the rock world did, or however it was that they existed, made any sense to us. And it wasn't worth our trouble or consideration. "Everything we tried that wasn't us, that didn't feel right to us, turned out to be utterly useless to us," he continues. "So all we could do at that point was basically entertain ourselves, and make the kind of music we wanted to make, and use the instruments we wanted to use, and just completely ignore everything and everybody. And that's more or less the vibe we went into 'Kiko' with. It was like, "Nobody's gonna tell us shit.'" Louie strikes a Zen-like note: "At that point I realized that you gotta surrender. You just gotta give it all up for it to actually take on its own life. You can't try to be the center of the creative universe -- you have to move over to the shotgun side and let somebody else drive. And that's exactly what that record did to me -- it completely said, 'These are the possibilities when you have that kind of mind.'" As the band members tell it, the process of making the next Los Lobos album -- what became the pivotal 1992 release "Kiko" -- involved a return to intimacy, simplicity, and directness in all facets of its creation. "David and I went back to sitting down face to face and writing songs together," Louie says. "We rented a little room behind a bookstore in Whittier; we met there every day and wrote songs and just got back to being friends again. And when it was time for us to make another record, it was like, 'Forget about rules. Rehearsal -- no. Take the songs on the road -- nah. Let's just go in there and FIND OUT what it is.'" "We thought we'd just go into the studio," says Cesar. "I had ideas. Dave and Louie had ideas. We just booked the studio and went in there and just started rolling tape. We started experimenting with different sounds in the studio, different ways of recording" "The core of the song was there," David explains,' the band would listen to it and then run to our instruments. We'd capture that first impression and a lot of times it would be the run-through of the track, but it had a feel to it -- I don't know, it was something we'd never had before...I realized why I loved Jimmy Reed so much, or Howlin' Wolf -- because that was the way they did records. Nobody knew the songs; they came and did them in one or two takes, 'cause they weren't gonna waste their time thinking, and they had to move on to the next song. So that's why they're so fresh." While the Lobos began "Kiko" on their own with their friend, engineer Paul Dugre, they soon turned to Mitchell Froom, producer of the single version of "La Bamba" and the "Neighborhood" track "Angel Dance," and his creative engineer/collaborator Tchad Blake to facilitate the studio work. Steve says of Froom and Blake, "They both deserve enormous credit for more or less allowing the experimentation of 'Kiko' to exponentially increase. They just had a perfect symbiotic relationship...Mitchell is a\ brilliant arranger, Tchad is a brilliant engineer and it just made the whole thing a real pleasure." "We went in there " says Louie, "and just allowed it to take on its own life. When we finally sat down to hear the final mix, at Ocean Way [Studios in Hollywood], and listened to it all together, all sequenced for the first time,I don't think anybody said a word. I remember everybody just stood up, walked out, got into their cars and went home. Because it was so damn powerful. The energy that suddenly becomes released when you just get out of the way. It was an amazing thing, something I had never experienced. Indeed , in its sound and methodology, the sublime "Kiko" pointed the way for Los Lobos' work -- both as a group and in some of their musical sub-units -- for the immediately ensuing period. If the band's previous music had been primarily influenced by Mexican and American roots music, their latter-day style appeared to spring from the inspirations of such Latin fabulists as Jorge Luis Borges or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Cesar also cites the studio necromancy of the Beatles as another influence. "It's very dreamy," Cesar says of "Kiko." "It's sort of like that state before you go into deep sleep, when you're half awake." The dreamscapes of "Kiko" were followed by two further entries in what Louie views as an artistic trilogy: "Colossal Head" (1996) and "This Time" (1999). (Between those two albums -- owing to massive personnel changes at Warner Bros., which saw the departure of Lenny Waronker and many other executives -- Los Lobos left their longtime label home for new digs at Hollywood Records, the Walt Disney Co.'s rock enclave.) In 1994, Louie and David attempted to further extend the creative reach heard on "Kiko" with Latin Playboys, a side project they undertook with Froom and Blake. While this side project (which produced a second album, "Dose," in 1999) produced some of the most outré music ever formulated by the Lobos' members, its cultural underpinnings successfully, and surprisingly, connected very directly with at least a segment of the band's core followers. Louie says, "I remember playing this little show down in San Diego and going backstage. It was a Lobos show, and we were having fans coming back to get autographs, and these three Chicano homeboys full-on, with their buzzed heads and gangster attire, came up to Dave and myself and said, "Hey, homes, can we get your autograph?" And they handed us the Latin Playboys record, and Dave and I looked at each other peculiar, and we looked at them, and one of them said, "Hey man, we call it the jalapeño record, 'cause OF chilis on the cover, y'know, ese?" Dave and I whispered to each other, "this is way weird.' we then realized what this thing could do." Says David -- who also put together Houndog, a similarly skewed avant-blues project with ex-Canned Heat member Mike Halby, in 1999 - "Latin Playboys was all for the enjoyment of it, for the love of the music, just to do something, just to play. Same thing with Houndog. It was like being a kid again. Stretch, go out as far as you can, then you could be as dumb as you wanted to be. Like Weird Al says, dare to be stupid, y'know?" The band members continued to stretch the boundaries of traditional music as well in their side projects. In 1998, Cesar, David and Steve (who produced) collaborated with Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, Rick Trevino, Joe Ely, and Ruben Ramos on the all-star Tex-Mex project Los Super Seven, which collected a Grammy award as best Mexican American performance. The following year, Cesar released his first solo album, the rocking, rootsy Soul Disguise. Featuring 10 songs either written or co-written by Cesar, the album effectively fused the bedrock influences that have powered the singer-guitarist's music for Los Lobos over the years - blues, r&b, rock 'n roll, and a host of Mexican and Tex-Mex sounds. Over the course of their remarkable time together, Los Lobos have assumed many musical incarnations -- Mexican-American traditionalists, roots-punk standard-bearers, rock 'n' roll chartbusters, arch-experimental magical realists -- and have experienced astonishing career highs and vertiginous declines. Yet, no matter what face they have shown to the world, or whether they have soared or crashed to earth, they have maintained an indefinable style that is uniquely their own. Louie Perez, the band's resident philosopher, goes to the heart of things when he says, "We've gotten to a point after 27 years where, no matter what we do, there's something that is ALWAYS Los Lobos...even if we tried [to be someone else], even if we got the sounds, and did the grooves, and everything. The way it comes out of our bodies, through the fingers, onto the fret board, something happens, and it's us."