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Five reasons to see Los Lobos in Clearwater Wednesday

Los Lobos, it’s estimated, has played 100 or more shows every year since the early 1970s (during the “La Bamba” era – read on – they probably played more gigs than they had days off).
And although the California quintet, appearing Wednesday at the Capitol Theatre in Clearwater, once titled a compilation Just Another Band From East L.A., their trajectory has been anything but ordinary.
Here are five reasons why.
1
Integrity: It’s been the same five guys since the first full-length album, How Will the Wolf Survive?, in 1984. That’s 40 years, with zero defections, deaths or personnel changes. And the four founding members – Mexican Americans David Hidalgo (guitar and lead vocal), Louie Perez (lead vocal, drums and guitar), Conrad Lozano (bass) and Cesar Rosas (lead guitar, vocal) – have been playing together for 52 years (Hidalgo and Perez met in high school), originally as Los Lobos del Este (de Los Angeles). Philadelphia sax, piano and accordion player Steve Berlin, from the Blasters, co-produced the band’s major label debut EP, and joined Los Lobos soon after.
2
Los Lobos (translation: The Wolves) is a unique rock ‘n’ roll band in that the steel-hard music is deftly combined with Tex-Mex, blues, R&B and even folk and country. The rule has always seemed to be: Whatever serves the song best. Hidalgo and Perez are the two main songwriters – on record, perhaps the best example of their range as writers (and musicians) is 1992’s Kiko, produced by Mitchell Froom. It’s an ambitious (and beautifully rich) musical smorgasbord. Hidalgo, Perez and Froom formed the nucleus of the experimental offshoot Latin Playboys.
3
The band members embraced their “barrio” roots, as an acoustic Mexican Tejano/mariachi band, with the Spanish-language album La Pistola de La Corazon and dozens of individual tracks on compilation albums, film soundtracks and even the band’s 1995 children’s record, Papa’s Dream, and their 2019 Christmas album, Llegó Navidad. They’ve been known to break out the acoustic instruments for the occasional mini-set in concert. Oh, and their cover songs cut a wide swath: From the Grateful Dead to Marvin Gaye to “I Wanne Be Like You,” the monkey rave-up from Disney’s The Jungle Book.
4
Los Lobos has won four Grammys (out of 12 nominations), most recently for the 2022 release Native Sons (it was named Best Americana album, proving once again that Los Lobos is a band that defies precise categorization). Ironically, Los Lobos’ breakthrough hit, a 1987 cover of Ritchie Valens’ “La Bamba,” was nominated for two Grammys but did not win. It was, however, a No. 1 single around the world (as a tie-in to the movie of the same name), and something these guys will have to play in every show for the rest of their lives.
5
Integrity No. 2. They’re on Paul Simon’s iconic Graceland album … but don’t ask them about it. The entire band plays on the closing song “All Around the World or the Myth of Fingerprints.” Invited into the studio by Simon, as Berlin told several interviewers years later, the band was dumbfounded when the singer/songwriter had nothing prepared for them. When Hidalgo, for something to fill the awkward silence, started playing a new song the band was working up for their next album (By the Light of the Moon), Simon perked up. Together, they ran through the song, which had no lyrics and no title. Six months later, Graceland arrived, and the song bore the credit Words and Music by Paul Simon. “We should have sued him, frankly,” Berlin said. “I would have loved to have seen what would have happened. But I guess in a weird way, we just naively started fooling around with a song — a song we didn’t have a pre-existing recording of — and I don’t know if we could have proven in a court of law, at the end of the day, that he stole it.”
Tickets for Wednesday’s Clearwater concert are here.
