you were smart enough to buy one for ten bucks, you could have resold it for $50 ten years later, for only a thousand copies of the vinyl record with the bright yellow cactus cover were ever pressed. Only now, twenty-two years later, has the album been available on CD (Hollywood Records reissued it in September). If you took that album home in 1978 and dropped a needle on it, you would soon realize it wasn a typical Mexican folk album.Yes, all the vocals were in Spanish and all the guitars were acoustic, but the songs came not just from the heartland of central Mexico but from everywhereuba, Bolivia, northern Mexicond there was even an original from the lead guitarist. Moreover, the tunes were played not with the patient fatalism of real folk music, but with the impatient, rhythmic push of North American rock �roll, despite the absence of drums and amplirs. Consider, for example, ielito Lindo,�a staple of Mexican tourist bands.The Los Lobos version begins with the clinking beer bottles, party chatter, and drunken sing-along that typify the loose informality of the session. It starts out as a very traditional folk number, but halfway through, David Hidalgo leaps in with a slashing dle solo; the guitars stiffen, and the song becomes more urgent, more modern. The whole disc is reminiscent of another unheralded debut folk album, one from an el refugee from northern Minnesota, 1962 Bob Dylan.That, too, was an all-acoustic affair with mostly traditional material, but Dylan banged from his hollow guitar the rock �roll rhythms he had learned from playing piano with Bobby Vee and from singing Little Richard songs with his high school band, the Golden Chords. That rare combination of deep folk roots and rock �roll immediacy would serve Dylan well for the rest of his career. It would do the same for Los Lobos.鈻�鈻�鈻�Geoffrey Himes2They hadn started out as folk musicians. Like most children of immigrants, David Hidalgo, Cesar Rosas, Louie Perez, and Conrad Lozano had been eager to put the Old World behind and to embrace the New.While students at Garld High School, they had listened to the same kind of music as any other Southern Californian teen: Ray Charles, the Beatles, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, the Grateful Dead. In fact, you can hear songs by all e of those artists on Los Lobos�new box set. By the early 1970s, they were all in local rock bands. Rosas led the eleven-piece, horn-and-B3 R&B ensemble Fast Company; Lozano anchored the hard-rock combo Tierra; Hidalgo and Perez helmed a group called Checkers.They all dreamed of resurrecting that late-�0s, early-�0s era when East L.A. produced such rock stars at Ritchie Valens, the Premiers, Cannibal & the Headhunters, and Thee Midnighters. Instead they ended up lding requests for songs by Cream and Sam & Dave. Frustrated with being stuck in bar bands doing covers, the four friends sought an escape valve and found it in the old Mexican songs their parents
