The sounds of the Latin Playboys are born in a kitchen and headed for the streets.
It is an odd sound, not entirely moored. A brooding, slippery weave of a sound, almost blues and almost mariachi, with footsteps and babies crying and bicycle bells woven through, as if someone had sampled the sounds of a sweaty barrio summer. It is elusive, this sound - the music seems to start and stop at odd intervals; the melodies life like fog - but you keep coming back to it.
If you think the Latin Playboys are makers of strange sounds, then have a gander at them standing four in a row. Start where the music starts; start with David Hidalgo. If all you had to go on was that damn ephemerality of sound, then you would have to assume Hidalgo, who plays guitar and accordion and writes most of the music late at night while sitting at his kitchen table, must be some scrawny virtuoso always alone with his genius. Except that Hidalgo is far from scrawny and rarely alone. He lives in a crowded East L.A. neighborhood with his wife and three kids and has spent a good chunk of the past quarter century touring the world. His height rises into the middle sixes, his weight rises well into the 200 range and, really, he looks like a flannel-clad warrior in need of a nap. Beside him, nearly in opposition to Hidalgo’s size and style, stands drummer and lyricist Louie Perez. Perez looks like a Latin Playboy. His hair is slicked, his features handsome. He favors designer clothes and designer glasses and designer shoes, and when he speaks it’s with a casual eloquence. What of keyboardist Mitchell Froom, the next Latin Playboy? He’s a Jewish New Yorker who looks like a Jewish New Yorker and a keyboardist who isn’t usually a keyboardist. Usually he’s a music producer and arranger, who has worked his magic for the likes of Elvis Costello, Sheryl Crow, Richard Thompson and Paul McCartney. And what of bassist Tchad Blake? He looks like a swarthy Christopher Lloyd lost in the mad science of Back to the Future. Blake is neither Latin nor Jewish nor a bassist. In fact, the last time he played in a band was just after high school. Blake’s a sound engineer who was worked with Tom Waits, Soul Coughing, Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan, T-Bone Burnett and the Pretenders. All of which is to say that the Latin Playboys’ appearance fits their music in that it doesn’t, at least not in any normal way.
If you want to understand the Latin Playboys, it helps to explore the roots of another band, Los Lobos, of which the Playboys are an offshoot. This means you have to go back to 1974, that last rainy Nixon year, when Hidalgo, Perez and two other musicians (Conrad Lazano and Cesar Rosas) formed Los Lobos. It was just another East L.A. band at a time when being just another East L.A. band meant meeting the musical needs of the community. According to Perez, “If you are Mexican American and got married in America sometime between 1973 and 1981, we played your wedding.”
After the wedding years, Los Lobos played polkas and punk and their old Latin numbers, and the music evolved into a kind of happy ska and power pop. In 1987 the band hired Froom and Blake to remix one of their songs, and that song became an unexpected hit. That would be “La Bamba.” Yes, semicheesy “La Bamba.” The song was huge. Too huge. “We had the biggest hit in the country,” says Perez, “and it was this hundred-year-old Mexican folk song, and all any of us could think was, ‘Well, here we are, firmly on the road to selling Doritos for the rest of our lives.’” But the band has made reinvention a significant part of its story. Soon it released La Pistola y el Corazon, an album of traditional Mexican music that the studios called career suicide but that proved to be a harbinger of the salsa movement to come.
A few years later, the first melodic scent of the Playboys began to emerge. The band rehired Froom and Blake to produce the Los Lobos album that would change all the rules: Kiko. Its music, slower and softer and deeply soulful, was close to something Hidalgo had been thinking about for a long time. He had been listening to old blues and Middle Eastern music, and after Kiko came out, he didn’t stop. He instinctively refused to listen to anything contemporary. “After Kiko I just kept working in that style,” says Hildago, “It was a sound I wasn’t done exploring. So I worked at it on my own for about three years. I recorded about ten songs on this broken four-track in my kitchen.”
Hidalgo sent the raw tape - “they weren’t even finished songs; it was more like ten ideas for songs” - to Perez, who added some lyrics and some music, and together they forwarded it to Room and Blake, who loved it from the get-go. Froom and Blake had a different take on Hidalgo’s four-track recording. Instead of hiring musicians to re-create the sound of the tape they decided to use it as the master track. “At the time,” says Froom, “the thinking in the industry wasn’t anything like that. Nobody used found sounds and accidental recording, but Tchad and I were already moving in that direction, so it made sense.” It made more sense to Tchad, who, back in high school, used to carry a tape recorder around to capture the day’s mundane activities. “I’d come home from school with about ten ninety-minute tapes. They had no real use. Just my day. What can I say? I just liked the sound; I was a lonely kid.” What he can say now is that all that loneliness and all that time listening to found sound trained his ear and his sentiment for the sound of the Latin Playboys.
The four persuaded Lenny Waronker, the head of Los Lobos’ original lable, Slash, to let them go into the studio. “We got twelve days, and we had no idea what we’d get,” says Froom. “I figured, worst-case scenario, we’d have demos for the next Lobos album. When we were done, it wasn’t a Lobos album; it was something else. So we took the thing to Lenny’s office and played it. There was complete silence the whole time. No criticism, no enthusiasm - silence. In the middle of it, I got a piece of paper and wrote ‘You’re dropped’ and showed it to David. Afterward we told Lenny we really liked this record and we wanted to put it out there. We didn’t need publicity; we didn’t care - whatever.”
Lenny said OK, and OK was all they got. The first Playboys album was released in 1994 without press of fanfare or a tour, on a budget most major rock bands consume in a day. Nonetheless, the album sold some 35,000 copies in the United States and was featured in various moves. Everyone who heard it, from critics to college hipsters, rallied in its praise. It took five years for the Playboys to find the time to release their brand-new album, Dose (Atlantic), and if the first album is the product of random experimentation, the second album is the product of deliberate experimentation. What was Hidalgo’s quiet obsession has become of a way of music, with Hidalgo’s crappy four-track machine replaced by a functioning eight track. Still, the music on Dose never pigeonholes and never settles, and if you ask any of the Playboys for a short summary of its contents, all they can tell you is the album feels like freedom.
“With the Playboys,” says Perez, “there’s very little editing and censoring. Our whole approach to the songwriting process is deconstructed. We’re able to lose ourselves completely in it. Like when Tchad captures the sound of the tape running out or things in the studio being turned on and off - when other bands try to do this, it sounds like a gimmick, but when Tchad does this, it sounds like the noises grow from the music itself.”
“The Lobos is a great band,” says Hidalgo, “but it’s got five members, and everyone has an opinion and each of us knows exactly what our sound is supposed to sound like. It can be limiting. No one knows what the Playboys are supposed to sound like, so we can push things a little farther.”
Here they are, these fully liberated Playboys, about to head onto the road for their first tour. David Hidalgo and Louie Perez, consummate road veterans, ready to play small gigs in small rooms for the first time in more that fifteen years. Mitchell Froom playing keyboards live, though his only concert experience has been playing guitar with Suzanne Vega. Then there’s Tchad Blake, who has never toured, who hasn’t played an actual instrument in an actual bad since right after high school. The collective decision to wing it, however, is directly in line with the Playboys’ mind-set.
“See, when we look at what we do,” says Froom, “in its highest form, it’s a folk art, not a fine art. People who look at pop music as a fine art get themselves into deep shit. The whole thing has to be a folk art. If you trace the development of pop music, it’s a long tradition of guys playing on the street.”
Which is why, in the end, the Latin Playboys aren’t so strange, why their sound isn’t so odd, why the music is the music of the street, every street, every little barrio byway you’ve ever wanted to walk down.