LOS LOBOS (WITH JOHN HIATT)

CASINO REGINA

FRIDAY 3

Keyboard and horn player Steve Berlin is a moving target — at least for this interview, conducted over the phone while his band, Los Lobos, embarks on another tour that will bring the band to Regina during the Labour Day weekend, touring behind their 19th album, Tin Can Trust.

 

Prairie dog: Where does the album title come from?

 

Steve Berlin: It’s a metaphor for being broke. It wasn’t much of an overarching concept behind it.

 

PD: Talk a little about the recording process. Did you do anything different from your last record [The Town and The City]?

 

SB: In the last 10 years we built a studio in our guitar player’s garage that was very effective and useful, but it was small. We couldn’t fit in more than two or three musicians — never all of us together. For this album, we found a studio in the East L.A neighbourhood the guys grew up in [Berlin was born in Philadelphia]. Kind of a different experience — we haven’t done that in 15 years or so.

 

PD: This album comes out at a time — at least from here — when there seem to be pretty great political ramifications for the collision of cultures between the Mexican-American and Anglo communities in the south-eastern United States (the recent Arizona state search-and-detain law that, in practice, makes every Mexican-American subject to arbitrary arrest as a suspected illegal immigrant, for example). How much of that, if not explicitly, then by osmosis, came through during the recording of Tin Can Trust?

 

SB: I would say our last record [The Town and The City] was a lot more specific — it was actually very specifically about that process. The news from Arizona isn’t new news to anybody here (in California): it’s just an uglier, and stupider, version of a process that’s been playing out for a long time.

 

PD: If there’s a difference [between The Town and the City and Tin Can Trust], it’s that you have two different stories. Immigration and jingoism is the larger story, where the new album may talk about a stratified underclass, and a stratified over-class, and wonder about why, at least in America, you have to make sense of that, why it has to be that way.

 

SB: The concept behind the title, Tin Can Trust, is being so broke that you have nothing but love to give. Going back to the old neighbourhood, seeing what’s happened to East L.A. — I don’t want to misrepresent it; it’s a middle-class neighbourhood, but you can see the signs of the struggles people are having to make it today.

 

PD: You were a member of The Blasters [the highly acclaimed Los Angeles-based roots-rock band founded by the Alvin brothers in the late 1970s] when you were invited to play onstage with Los Lobos, and after a couple of years, you joined the band full-time. Could you describe what the L.A. music scene was like in the late 1970s, early 1980s? It seemed like it was an exciting time.

 

SB: It really was. Great music everywhere, so many great bands. Every night of the week you had your choice of seeing so many great bands — The Blasters, The Go-Gos, X, any number of bands that, sadly, have gone by the wayside.

 

Los Lobos predates that L.A. scene, but the band didn’t emerge until 1981, when they opened for The Blasters at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go, which is where I met them. I remember everybody being blown away by this band, who grew up maybe 15 miles from the Whiskey and yet, to us, may as well have been a thousand miles away. It was like finding a tribe of Indians living under a bridge somewhere.

 

PD: But The Blasters and Los Lobos were in a similar musical milieu — what we call roots rock today. The Blasters were coming from a folk and rockabilly base, while Los Lobos were doing it based on their culture.

 

SB: That might be an oversimplification. The Blasters were record collectors — it was hard to top their knowledge of the bizarre and arcane. But it wasn’t as if Los Lobos was focused on one kind of music — they had, and still have, an encyclopaedic knowledge of Aztlan music — but they also had a knowledge of R&B and soul music. One of the things that attracted me to the band was their knowledge and experience which allowed then to pull off a rhythm and blues song just as well as they could play a 200-year-old Mexican-American folk song.

 

PD: Final question: In 1997, when you were doing the Another Roadside Attraction Tour with the Tragically Hip, Wilco and other bands across Canada, MuchMusic went backstage and Los Lobos was hosting a barbecue. One of the band members at the grill — I think it was David [Hildago, guitarist and songwriter] …

 

SB: No, it was Conrad [Lozano, bassist].

 

 

PD: I stand corrected. He said the secret to his barbecue was a marinade comprised of orange juice and beer. What’s the recipe? Or is it a family secret?