Los Lobos bringing 40 years of music, memories to EarleFest

EarleFest, which started as a small benefit in the backyard of Santa Rosa’s Earle Baum Center in 2008, has become a major festival at the SOMO Village Event Center, headlined this year by Los Lobos.

Also performing Saturday are California Honeydrops, Tift Merritt and local folk singer Nina Gerber. Several other Sonoma County musicians will be featured on a smaller second stage.

The goal of the event is two fold: elevate the profile and raise money for the Earle Baum Center of the Blind, which assists sight-impaired people.

Known for music that ranges from Mexican traditional (“the soundtrack of the barrio” as they call it) to folk, rock, blues and R&B, Los Lobos formed in 1973.

Founding members David Hidalgo and Louie Perez met in high school in East Los Angeles and honed their skills for about a decade before Los Lobos released its major label debut, 1984’s “How Will

the Wolf Survive?”

It was the band’s cover of the traditional song “La Bamba” for the hit film of the same name about Latino rocker Ritchie Valens that rocketed Los Lobos to fame.

Steve Berlin, who plays the saxophone, flute and harmonica, joined Los Lobos a few years after the band’s inception and co-produced “How Will the Wolf Survive?” with T Bone Burnett.

In a phone interview with The Press Democrat, Berlin noted this year marks the 30th anniversary of Los Lobos’ “La Bamba,” which reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 100 chart.

And it’s the 25th anniversary of the groundbreaking album “Kiko,” when Los Lobos showed the world that they really weren’t just another band from East L.A.

During concerts, “we try to touch on every record,” Berlin said. “But there’s no limitation about where the set goes,” he added, as the band often veers away from its list.

Berlin recalled that the success of “La Bamba,” both the 1987 film and the Los Lobos soundtrack, was unexpected.

“Nobody ever thought we were going to make a No. 1 record,” he said. “It was the furthest possible thing from our minds.”

Los Lobos recorded the soundtrack as “a favor to Ritchie’s family in Santa Cruz - they’ve always been very, very close to us.”

In the band’s early days, when Los Lobos played Santa Cruz, Berlin said, Valens’ family would “always feed us and sometimes house us.”

The film, starring Lou Diamond Phillips as Valens, a heartthrob rocker who died at age 17, was a sensation. Suddenly, Los Lobos was on top of the world.

“The whole experience was remarkable and extraordinary and rather incredible,” Berlin said. “The whole world got to know who we were, I guess.”

But the fame didn’t last.

“When it was over, we were more or less right back where we’d started and a little bit frustrated,” he said. “It was really more about the movie than our music.”

After the release of Los Lobos’ next record, “The Neighborhood,” the band embarked on a major tour that was “way beyond where we were actually at,” Berlin said.

“We had two trucks and a lighting guy - we thought we were a much bigger deal than we actually were,” he said.

“We ended up broke. We had never lost money on a tour, ever. But there we were, supposedly big stars, and we’d lost a lot of money.”

That frustration led Los Lobos (“the wolves” in Spanish) to make their next record, “Kiko,” on its own terms. “We were not going to listen to anybody’s advice.”

They enlisted Mitchell Froom, who produced Crowded House’s impeccable first three albums, and renowned engineer Tchad Blake.

Froom and Blake “made it safe for us to take chances and go as far out as we wanted to go,” Berlin said. “So they deserve an enormous amount of credit. It wasn’t long before we realized that we were doing something pretty cool.”

From the opening song “Dream in Blue” to the title track, the album has a spare, rootsy sound that incorporates everything from Southern blues to African rhythms, enlivened with bright horns.

Los Lobos’ most recent album, 2015’s “Gates of Gold,” deals with themes of immigration and belonging and is a testament to immigrants’ contributions to the United States.

The title track wonders “what we’ll find behind those gates of gold” in a land which is “so close but still so far.”

Like Los Lobos’ earlier albums, “Gates of Gold” reveals Perez’s extraordinary songwriting skills, which have long been complemented by Hidalgo’s virtuosity on guitar.

Most band members were born in the Los Angeles area to parents who emigrated from Mexico and remain deeply connected to the immigrant experience.

Berlin is the exception - he grew up in Philadelphia, moved to Los Angeles in the late 1970s and soon joined the Blasters, fronted by brothers Phil and Dave Alvin.

In his spare time, he’d sit in with Los Lobos, started producing their records and by the early 1980s was a full-time member of the band.

Los Lobos has no new album on the horizon; Berlin said the band is “between labels.”

The record business “has changed so much,” he said. “So it’s like, ‘Do we really need to make another record?’ I don’t know.”

Asked how Los Lobos has survived for 44 years, Berlin said, “It’s not a picnic –– we have our issues and squabble like any other family.”

But he noted Los Lobos had about a decade of relative obscurity and became “fully formed adults” before hitting it big.

“I think another part of it is just the people we are,” he said. “Everybody is on his first marriage, we’re all grandfathers now. We are committed to being in all the relationships in our lives for the long haul.”

Los Lobos has a longstanding relationship with the Bay Area, especially the North Bay.

“We have a lot of good friends up there - in a lot of respects it’s more home than home,” Berlin said. “We’re really looking forward to getting back.”

And he said the band enjoys playing benefit concerts: “We really do realize how lucky we are to get to do this for living.”

Michael Shapiro is the author of “A Sense of Place” and writes about travel and entertainment for national magazines and The Press Democrat.