[left to right] Louie Pérez, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Conrad Lozano & Steve Berlin
[Phil Reser] How did a white sax player from Philadelphia end up in a band with four Mexican-American musicians from the barrio in East L.A.?
[Steve Berlin] We were kind of brothers musically before I joined the band. The cultural aspect of joining with Los Lobos just made it more interesting. Culturally, there wasn't any kind of hurdle that I had to climb in order to understand where they were at because by the time I joined the group they were ready to be a rock n' roll band. The learning curve on my end of the deal was just getting Tex-Mex stuff down which has always been maybe a quarter of the show but by no means everything. And the culture that I grew up in on the east coast in Philadelphia, the guys that I played with were involved with a little bit of everything and that's how I grew up. So, I looked at playing with Los Lobos has just another musical challenge in a different genera.
[Phil Reser] How did you become involved with producing records and how do you balance that gig with your recording and travel responsibilities with Los Lobos?
[Steve Berlin] It's something I've always enjoyed, in every band I was always in, I was always recording the band anyway I could, it's something that I liked to do from the beginning. I just kind of developed it over the years. I produced the first couple of Los Lobos albums because when we started, there was a level of discomfort with the guys being in the studio and just interpreting what the technology was all about. But these days, Los Lobos feels very good about being in the studio and certainly takes that on. The last record, we produced ourselves and now I don't anticipate that changing and going back to someone else coming in and taking control of that. It's a complete comfort zone for us now. With producing it's interesting because it may not be your songs or material but it's your job to make it really happen to the absolute best it can possibly be and some times it's great fun and at other times it's a lot of work. How it's going to turn out in the end is always different. Every day you go into the studio and it seems like a brand new project, but when you finish it's a fascinating thing you've created. To maintain our sanity with Los Lobos, so to speak, we try to keep a relatively balanced schedule. If we're on the road for three or four months, then we'll try to stay off the road for the same amount of time. What I try to do is fit my producing time into those holes and I've been fortunate enough to find projects that fit into our time frame. So, I've been able to work it out. Normally, we don't do a lot between Christmas and Easter, so I usually jump into another type of work during those times.
[Phil Reser] What type of influence does an outside producer have on the success of an album and what are the challenges for a band when it self-produces?
[Steve Berlin] Everybody, every record and every experience is different. There's every style from complete micro-management where a producer comes in and controls every atom and molecule of a record. Then there's guys who show up and are more or less spectators. We have worked with both kinds. It is kind of difficult for someone to produce without anything to work with. A producer cannot really produce someone with out any talent. But when you look around out there, I'm sure it happens every day with a lot of these teen acts where there isn't any talent there and someone is trying to put some together. In the Los Lobos world and in my world, you are starting out with something good and the idea of producing is to make that better, better and better, at each step in the process. With us there are really no rules. We start with a taping at the beginning of the day and hopefully, by the end of the day, we've created something magical.
[Phil Reser] After the success of "La Bamba," how did it affect the band's creative plans?
[Steve Berlin] That recording and the music with the movie was sort of a sense of discovery for us because it was different than anything the band had been doing. We had released an album around that same time and when "La Bamba" was released and climbed so high on the charts, we felt there was somewhat of a misinterpretation as to what our band was all about. So we immediately went into the studio and created an acoustic traditional type record to correct the idea of our identity and what we were about.
[Phil Reser] Can you explain how the unpredictability of the type of music that Los Lobos produces with each record has played a part in the band's continued success?
[Steve Berlin] That's the talent part, our artistic selves. We have a low boredom threshold and a pretty high bar in terms of what we consider to be representative of Los Lobos music, so we work really hard at creating a record each time that we have never done before. I think the reality of being together for this long helps us in that process. We don't have to think about it that much; we just get right to it. It's still challenging and we never know from record to record what is going to happen. To be specific, one of the reasons why that happens is because don't have a lot of planning or rehearsal for the records anymore, we just kind of show up. I don't recommend this for people who are just starting out but a band that has been together as long as we have, the part that engages us is the discovery part. We like having things just entirely creative not meshed out some particular way. It makes it challenging for people that work with us on the technical side. It's like fishing. We caste a lot of lines and don't necessarily get a lot of strikes. But if we're patient, we catch something that is special to us.
[Phil Reser] How does the band compose its music?
[Steve Berlin] It's not like a jam session type thing for us. There will be a musical style idea or a collective idea for a song and we sort of just amplify that idea, work with it, change it and put it back together again. It depends one hundred percent on what the starting point is. Sometimes we will create a song that ends up being close to what the demo of the original tune was when we first started on it. It may sound so great that we just let it be. Conversely, with a lot of songs, we will just cut them up in pieces and different ways and wait until we find the right results that we like. Now days, we're just trying to make records full of cool performances and that move us emotionally.
[Phil Reser] What younger musicians and newer styles or mixes of music has Los Lobos been impressed with lately?
[Steve Berlin] It's hard for me to speak for the group on that. A lot of the band is locked into a certain time zone so we don't really pay as much attention to what kind of stuff is going on all around out there. I probably pay more attention to that then anyone else because of the other projects I work on. That doesn't make me any smarter; it's just kind of where I'm at all the time. I think that there's some great stuff going on out there; especially in Latin music and we feel a kinship with many of these younger groups.
[Phil Reser] Over the years, have you sensed a competitive Latin rock movement between southern and northern California?
[Steve Berlin] Ever since I arrived on the west coast, I have continued to see a different ethnic growth on both ends of California with rock n' roll and the particular styles that developed from those music scenes. There's definitely a difference, you can hear it and tell it's a band from one end of the state or the other. I think that it's one of those deals where you define sound from the energy that is coming out of a specific location. When we started out in East L.A., there was a type of sound and energy happening with local bands and now, it's the same with bands like Ozomatli. It's kind of a fascinating thing, it's almost like there are two different countries to a certain extent. It's like the Dodgers and the Giants.
[Phil Reser] What do you think of the jam band scene?
[Steve Berlin] We're kindred spirits with that scene, however, the one place where we divert is that we're slightly less inclined to explore the virtuosic solo. And I think that's the one place where we're just ever so slightly to the right of the jam band ethic. We like to move on and go to other places in other songs and stuff like that. We have the two very different songwriting capabilities David and Cesar, so to a certain extent with us, we're very bi-polar that way. If we're on one side too long we want to go to the other side. I do think that scene is the healthiest trend in music, it's where the coolest things are happening.
[Phil Reser] With the current pop music scene on radio and MTV, how can a band like Los Lobos keep surviving?
[Steve Berlin] Well, I think the current musical environment is poisonous. People are very consciously and clearly realizing that it's just ridiculously awful garbage. I'm hoping that the next trend will be respect for players, honest music, guys who jam and guys who play jazz and guys who play stuff well."
[Phil Reser] What has the band not done that it has always wanted to?
[Steve Berlin] We've had the opportunity to do almost everything or at least taken a shot at it. In terms of stuff on the horizon, we have two or three months left on the touring schedule and then we're suppose to go into the studio, late fall or early winter and start a new record. In terms of new things, we're just trying to keep things small and easily realized. We're not the type of people who sit down and plan our future. It becomes too confined that way.
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