No. 059 - Los Lobos' “Saint Behind the Glass” changed my life
Immigrating, serendipity, and the virtuosic sounds that showed John Tsung what was possible
This Song Changed My Life is an independent music publication featuring essays from people all around the world about the songs that mean the most to them. Created by Grace Lilly, supported by readers.
• 8 min read •
The distance between a Mexican-American band from East L.A. and a Taiwanese kid in Houston is as close as one song for me.
Most of the time, the more you love something, the harder it is to see it with any objectivity or clarity, let alone explain to someone else the depths of your affection.
It’s like explaining a mad crush. Where to begin? The tip of the nose? Or the crook of the elbow? The corners of their smile? Or their singular laugh, gimlet eye, brazen wit, or a million other things that become so entangled it seems at once impossible to say?
And that is how I love Los Lobos.
The first time I heard Los Lobos was on television in the 80’s movie La Bamba. My sister, cousins, and I watched the tragic story of the Chicano star Ritchie Valens endlessly on TBS Saturday afternoon reruns. We had just moved from Taiwan to Texas, and basic cable was a sort of home school language immersion class. Flopped on my aunt’s bed in front of the biggest screen in the house, we saw Valens’ ascent from humble beginnings to rock stardom — cut short by an early death — so many times, we had memorized the title song and knew it in a kind of pidgin Spanish-via-remedial-English.
The story of a kid from an immigrant family who, defying all odds, wins the hearts and minds of Americans and becomes a star; it’s not hard to see why a bunch of young Taiwanese kids who crash landed in Texas would find La Bamba so captivating. It was the first time I had seen a Mexican-American-any immigrant–artist portrayed on TV and feted by millions. (Selena had not hit the rerun circuit yet.)
What had an even more lasting impression on me than the story, though, was the film’s music, recorded by Los Lobos. Ritchie Valens’ smirk may have been Lou Diamond Phillips, but his beautiful, glassine tenor belonged to David Hidalgo, the lead singer of Los Lobos, and the tight rhythm section to Louie Pérez and Conrad Lozano.
My favorite part of “La Bamba” wasn’t in the movie, but in the music video and the record. In those versions, the song continues after the rock part ends with a short coda. The band picks up guitarrón, bajo sexto, and other traditional Mexican instruments and plays out the same song, “La Bamba,” recontextualized close to the son jarocho original. The arrangement was, to me, beautiful, melancholy, and too short. With the benefit of hindsight, I can read it as a meaningful reclamation of the song’s origins, but at the time, I just wanted the coda to go on forever.
The second time I encountered Los Lobos was when I was old enough to drive. I had been given the keys to my mom’s sky-blue Toyota Previa minivan, and in the glove compartment, my mom kept a bunch of cassettes, half-melted by the Texas heat, mostly of 60’s folk singers that she loved in college, like Jim Croce and Joan Baez. Tossed among them was a cassette of Los Lobos’ The Neighborhood, their fifth album.
To this day I have no idea why my mom bought this album. It was well after the time the album had been released, and Los Lobos, while well-known, was not a household name in Houston. I asked her about it recently and she said she heard the band on public radio, but I’d never heard her sing the songs or talk about them. She also has a copy of a Gipsy Kings album, which she played in the house all the time, and was definitely an NPR staple in Houston.
I like to think that some exasperated record store clerk, unable to figure out what Spanish language band my mom had half-heard on the radio, gave up and sold her the only two bands they could think of.
Regardless, it was, as we now call it, a canon event.
I listened to The Neighborhood endlessly. By then I was into making music, having picked up my mom’s folk guitar and traded violining for fiddling.
I had gone through many of the Texas blues and country greats, from Albert Collins to the Flatlanders, and started to understand that there was such a craft as songwriting. But the preoccupations of many of these artists were those I associated with America and the West. Of blood and steel and men and women who walked alone with deeply felt passions.
I tried writing songs in the style of my idols, but I felt like I was roleplaying. I don’t think I had the words for it, but I didn’t feel comfortable playing country or the blues the way that the greats did; it didn’t feel authentic. Today, stories about not fitting in or not feeling like one belonged are shorthand for describing the immigrant condition. But for me, it wasn’t so much a desire to fit in as it was finding a way to be me — Taiwanese, Buddhist — and still participate in this great musical tradition.
In that context, The Neighborhood was a revelation. Los Lobos sang songs about love, of course, but also about family and religion, weaving in the sounds and mythologies of their Mexican roots against American blues and rock in songs like “Be Still” and “Angel Dance.” At that time, I’d never been to East L.A. and knew very little about Mexican-American culture. But they painted an incredible picture, using instruments I played — violins, guitars — in a new and strange way, a hybrid of the Tejano and Norteño instrumentation I heard all over Houston and the rock music I was familiar with.
When I listened, it felt like they were writing about themselves and of generations before them. It felt like Sunday right before sunset. Time stood still, and the feeling of being was so vivid I felt like I was welcomed into their world.
The third time I heard Los Lobos was when I knew I was totally head over heels in love with the band.
It was two or three years later, and I think I saw them play on a rerun of Austin City Limits, a local Texas music show that I used to watch a lot since we weren’t allowed out very often to see live music. I had heard about Kiko, the groundbreaking sequel to The Neighorhood that Los Lobos made in 1993, but knew it largely by its striking album cover, a large yellow wooden chair set in a vibrant, hallucinatory purple room.
Nothing prepared me for what Kiko sounded like.
The Neighborhood was an album by a band bringing forth their world through folk and rock song formats. Aided by the production team of Mitchell Froom and Tchad Blake, Kiko abandoned the conventions of traditional songcraft and production techniques and made something entirely new.
From the first deep sub-808-boom of “Angels with Dirty Faces” and the strange, diminished chord horn arrangements of “Kiko and the Lavender Moon” to the distorted, echo-y vocals of David Hidalgo, Conrad Rosas, and Louie Pérez, like prophets from the deep, Kiko was magic to me. Los Lobos had subverted everything I thought had to be done with songs. Entire tracks had no drums, or only drums and claps, or rested on what sounded like loops from 1930’s Westerns. And yet they had, if anything, created an even stronger sense of world and place, of who they were and how they saw their culture.
Here is where I could ramble (even longer than I already have) for hours about Kiko and how it changed my life. I will just say that it was a sonic Rosetta Stone. It changed how I thought about songs, about artistry, and, as a technician, what was possible with sound.
From Kiko, I followed the production team to my other lifelong musical influences, artists like Richard Thompson, Crowded House, Jimmy Scott, and Tom Waits.
As a producer, I stole arrangement and production techniques that I use to this day — the double slap back, tape-loop chamberlain, the microsecond delay stereo field, the Sansamp distortion on drums.
And from Los Lobos, I discovered Los Lonely Boys and eventually made my way to Soda Stereo, Aterciopelados, and Juana Molina, then to contemporary artists like Carla Morrison and Natalia Lafourcade. And full circle to Los Tigres del Norte and Kumbia Kings.
Most importantly, Los Lobos showed me how to combine my twin heritages, how to be bold and uncompromising and loud and forward-looking and generous as an artist, not coming from a place of reaction, but creating anew.
“Saint Behind the Glass” changed my life because it is the song that I think of first when I think of Kiko. The only way I can describe the way it sounds to me is a cross between a fever dream and a holy visitation.
I met Louie Pérez, the lyricist for Los Lobos and singer for “Saint Behind the Glass,” a couple years ago and we became friends. I have not dared to share most of this story with him, out of a concern that it would lead him to run screaming away from me.
But now you know.
Please don’t tell him. ◆
About John
John Tsung is a musician, producer, artist, and writer. His works include songs, scores for theater and film, and art installations. His works have been featured in the New York Times, BOMB, and other publications.
Instagram @johntsungmusic
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