preview / By Bob Doran

Two Wolves

Louie Perez and David Hidalgo

(Jan. 12, 2012)  At the heart of the Los Angelino rock band Los Lobos is the songwriting team of guitarist/vocalist David Hidalgo and lyricist/multi-instrumentalist Louie Perez, friends who have been crafting tunes together for around 40 years.

Both grew up in East L.A. — Perez in a household where his mother played ranchero music on the radio and took the kids to see Mexican bands in downtown theaters.

David Hidalgo and Louie Perez PHOTO BY ANNA WEBBER

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“When I was about 10, she saved up the dough and went to Milan’s Music Store on First Street in East Los Angeles and bought me my first acoustic guitar. That was it,” he said, calling from his home in Orange County.

“By the time I was 14 or 15, my life had been wrecked by Jimi Hendrix,” he added. Up until then he’d been attending Catholic parochial schools, but as he put it, “Half-way through 10th grade they politely asked if I would maybe go to another school.”

He went public. “I arrived at James A. Garfield High School part way through the school year. That’s when I met David, in art class. Music was the connection for us. His brother was a musician, a drummer, so he’d always had instruments around when he was growing up — electric guitars, drums. His father, Joe, was into music by The Ink Spots, Cab Calloway, that sort of thing. I had a more traditional music upbringing.”

They became friends through comparing notes on common themes in their record collections — both had LPs by Fairport Convention and Ry Cooder’s Into the Purple Valley.

“I was the new kid at school, and in this art class we’d sit at the back and hide behind the easels and talk about mutual tastes in music. We were kind of hippies — our group of friends were known as the freaks at school — we were the kids who smoked pot, listened to Firesign Theater and watched The Muppet Show, all that kind of stuff.”

Perez was a year ahead. When he graduated, he moved into the Hidalgo home and slept on the couch. “We’d play guitars and started putting songs together. This tour we’re doing is really a celebration of 40 years of writing songs together.”

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