Steve Berlin talks as carefully and to the point as he plays keyboards and saxophone with Los Lobos. A member of the band since 1984 when he left The Blasters, Berlin has filled spaces and elaborated on melodic and improvisational ideas in such an understated way it’s sometimes possible to forget what an integral part of this band he actually is.
In part that’s because he’s not one of the principal songwriters for Los Lobos. Berlin is, however, a key element in how their recordings are arranged and produced as well as how full they sound when they are playing live. Berlin had encountered the band as labelmates on Slash before co- producing (w/T-Bone Burnett) their EP And A Time to Dance in 1983, becoming a full-fledged member for such memorable works as Kiko as well as the constant roadwork the group engages in year in year out.
In his conversation with Doug Collette, Berlin talks frankly and to the point about the creative process in general and in specific, dispelling any misconceptions about the means by which Lobos has created such memorable works as This Time and The Town and The City. In this age of iTunes, he may betray an old school mentality in referencing the concept of sequencing an album, but there’s no denying his passion for the process and the end result of music-making, especially when it comes to his bond with the other band members.
It’s little wonder a tangible sense of community arises so effortlessly (and equally) from a Los Lobos concert or a studio recording: the group is so deeply enamored of playing together, the mood is infectious, the connection that of music lovers seeking and finding insight into the mystical realm of this greatest of all the arts.
Tin Can Trust is the first Los Lobos album that’s hit me this fast since This Time in 1999. Is there any similarity in the way the two albums were recorded?
In one sense, there is one. This Time is the last one we did in a studio that’s big enough for all of us to play together. Everything we’ve done since This Time we did in a studio we built at Cesar’s (Rosas, Lobos singer/songwriter/guitarist) house, which worked fine for what it was, but there was never enough microphones or headsets or preamps, whatever to have the entire band set up. It’s interesting you would pickup on that, because I think that informed the recording in an interesting way more than anything we’ve done since then.
That may be the thing that caught my ear. You guys can record so sparsely yet impeccably: you fill every space, but nothing ever seems cluttered. Are you conscious of that as you put together the arrangements and the recordings?
On this recording, it had a lot to do with the room we were in. I think what happened is that once we got set up and began to play, we discovered this big warm spaciness and when we knew we had the sound, then everything else began to fall into place
I noted in some material I read that a couple of the guys mentioned that in recording Tin Can Trust, in comparison to some of the recent albums much of the material got worked up from scratch rather than the individual composers bringing in finished songs.
Was that true for most of the material?
That would be true for almost all the material. We had put time aside for songwriting, but they didn’t use it (laughs). So we ended up in a place we’ve been a number of times: in a studio needing to come up with a whole album of sons from scratch. But we do it. There’s been a couple times; we did it on Colossal Head and we did it to a certain extent on Good Morning Aztlan, though I think we had a few more ideas for that one
Does that put a lot more pressure on the band at all, in terms of the guys who come up with ideas? Or does it make it easier in a way that you’re starting fresh and everybody has some input?
I would say there’s nothing easy about doing it this way. You have no ability to plan, you have no ability to figure out how you want to do stuff. As the ideas enter the room, you more or less have to go after them and turn them into songs. It’s far from an ideal way of working, believe me: it’s very nerve-wracking in a lot of respects, but we must like that adrenaline rush because we keep doing it. I don’t know why we do it that way, but we do and it kind of works out for us.
You would have, I would think, a fairly unique vantage point on the process of writing because you don’t write a lot of material. Do you feel like you have a certain different kind of objectivity than Cesar, Louie (Perez, Lobos singer/songwriter/guitarist) and David (Hidalgo Lobos singer/songwriter/guitarist): they offer ideas on the material and you can chip in with your comments and ideas from your perspective?
That would be the case for everybody, songwriters or not songwriters. When we say “Produced by Los Lobos,” that’s kind of what that means. An idea will come and, depending on how developed the idea is, we all throw something into the mix or find a part or see what works or doesn’t work. That’s kind of the process: I don’t think I have an advantage on anything really.
You guys never seem to include a throwaway on any of your albums- something done just to fill up space or done off the cuff and included just to fill up space. (although on the new album “Do the Murray,” it’s really cool to hear you guys just work it out without singing.) But are there songs that you compose, taking into account this nerve-wracking process, that just don’t work and you throw them out and leave them for another time?
Yeah that happens, I think on this one there were like three maybe that didn’t quite make the cut. It’s not like the ones that show up are the ones that get done: certainly there were a couple of what I thought were really strong ideas that could’ve been cool songs that didn’t turn into something.
But there’s something that happens where we just get a bizarre sense of what the record is. There was one point where we thought the record was done and we hadn’t at that point done “The Lady and the Rose.” We were thinking about it and, I think it was Louie and Dave who said, “There’s one more song we need that we do live in the room; there were a couple songs that were done from Dave’s demos, (like “27 Spanishes” and “Main Street” and “Do the Murray” that have a certain sonic character) and we though we needed another live track, something more acoustic, that was different from anything that we had done. That’s where “The Lady and The Rose” turned up. That’s one of my favorite songs.
It’s one of mine and too. As you mention the progression of the album, after I listened to this about three times, it seemed as though the songs told a story about, not necessarily the same characters all the way through, but a certain idea and certain theme arose, just as palpable as the one that you guys developed on The Town and The City. Did that hit you guys as you worked on the record or did you have that in mind when you started it? Or did it just evolve from the work you did together?
I think it always evolves. Even with The Town and The City, that turned into a thematic unified thing, but when it started, it started very much like this one: there was really no clear idea. I don’t think we were as bereft of material as we were on this one, but it wasn’t like we had a full bag either: we had one maybe two more than fleshed out ideas at most. It’s not like we had five or six songs to pick from—there’s never any luxury like that—so we just discuss things as we go and the thing reveals itself to us as we go.
With that one, The Town and The City in particular, we were having a lot of trouble trying to piece that record together; it wasn’t coming together and it was taking a really long time and it was turgid, moving at a much slower pace than any record we’ve ever done, annoyingly so, frustratingly so: we just couldn’t seem to get any headway and then we realized we had been fighting what the songs were telling us, which was they we unified as a thematic piece—it’s about something—a lot of the tempos were similar and dark, all the sounds were depressing and dark. Once we perceived there was some higher power, we just let it go, we went “oh ok, well this is obvious.”
With this one, I don’t think there was anything really similar. I think it was more like “Another cool song just happened! “Jupiter and The Moon” (that’s an amazing track) and “Tin Can Trust.” And a lot of these songs, as opposed to The Town and The City, which seemed to take literally forever to do, a lot of these went really fast. There was a couple first takes, like “Tin Can Trust,:" when I say first takes, I mean we would run it through enough to learn the chords, then push the ‘RECORD’ button—it wasn’t like we had never played it—but that’s what it was. We had a sense of how the song went. (Grateful Dead’s)”West LA Fadeaway” was like a first or second take. WE had a lot of luck and a lot of good mojo I guess as it went, so it seemed like this one went along faster certainly, than The Town and The City.
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Certainly if you feel like you’re on a roll with the songs, it must carry over into the playing and what you just described explains why everything sounds so alive on this record. Even some of the mid-tempo and slow tempo stuff, like “Jupiter and The Moon” there’s a sense that you’re catching the song and the performance at just the right time. Was the recording of “The Lady and The Rose” what really clarified what was going on with this album? Was that the song that constituted a sort of tipping point?
I don’t think that was the one, only because it was so late- it was the very last thing that we did-so it wasn’t like “oh my God this song is incredible,” this song shows up last. It just sort of added icing to the cake. We knew the record was pretty f%^&*ing good already, that was just an amazing way of capping it off.
The one that opened the floodgate was “Jupiter”: that was fairly early in the process and we still weren’t sure if we were ok or not, we weren’t sure if it was going to work. And whether this whole notion of not having any material was a good idea, although we’ve done it a number of times, every time we do it, it doesn’t seem like a good idea because it’s very scary and there are stretches where it seems like it’s never going to happen. But once that song happened, it was like “that’s a record right there!” That’s as good as it gets. I mean we wouldn’t do that, but we could put eight pieces of s&* on there and we got that song and we still got a good record. That one showed us it was going to be ok and this is going to be a cool record. And what’s more, that was the time we fell in love with this recording studio and the way it sounded.
But it took a while to get acclimated. It took a little while to get comfortable and figure it out, it’s such a bizarre space. It’s just a big warehouse with piles of stuff lying around all over the place, crap everywhere and drywall, so it wasn’t like you could walk in and go: “ok, drums go there, and singer goes there.” We had to figure out so much of that stuff, move stuff around a little bit and just find our comfort zone and I think just hearing how the drums and bass and piano all sounded on “Jupiter and the Moon,” it was like “Wow!” We had no reverb we had very little outboard gear to speak of at all and yet on that track it sounded like it had this beautiful, amazing church-like space. So we said, “ok, I think we’ve figured out how to make the room sound good now.”
It was interesting to hear you talk about the process for The Town and The City and how so many of the songs seemed to be somewhat down and not so much upbeat and positive, but I recall that album well, ending on a positive note. This album too seems to be somewhat about struggling to keep up and make sense of things, but the album has things like”27 Spanishes,” where Cesar sings of making music to keep getting along. You guys always seem to be able to find ways to keep optimistic. Are you conscious of that as you’re recording daily and in a large sense, working together after all these many (thirty-seven) years?
I think yes. But nothing is ever said out loud that way. We don’t ever say “This is to be more hopeful” There’s nothing ever overtly spoken and yet at the end of the day –I don’t want to speak for Louie because I didn’t write those lyrics– but I think yes he is a hopeful guy and I don’t think he wants to say this is pointless. The message is, and I think it is with this record, if there is one, then it’s “Ok I know we’re broke, but we have love and we’re cool.”
Exactly. You have love and you have your vocation.
Yes…and it’s kind of true for all the records really. But specifically and most notably in this one. That’s what Tin Can is all bout. There’s a number of songs where that’s kind of what they’re really all about.
Was there a sense of being more optimistic than usual perhaps, more good things happening than usual, as this was the first project you did for your new label Shout Factory?
I really don’t think so. At this point, the time we were recording, in this context, the label was just a complete abstraction. I mean we knew they were out there but we hadn’t really interacted with them much. I don’t think we really knew anybody—I mean I did because I had done a record with them—but he rest of the guys couldn’t have picked them out of a lineup. Since the record’s come out, I think we’ve gotten close to a place where we’re as close to these guys as any label we’ve ever been on. They’re great, really cool people. They’re obviously committed to making this record a success. Now we know who they are and we like them very much, but certainly not as we were making the record. There’s never been a record where what the label thought factored into anything we did. Maybe in the early days with Warner Bros. and Lenny Waronker and Mo Ostin, they might’ve made a suggestion and we might’ve listened to them, but I can tell you that’s probably the last time we paid any attention to what a label said. It doesn’t really mater, you know? Like at the end of the day, it’s us and it’s our songs and we’re not songwriting machines. What you’re getting when we do these records is the best we can possibly do. The label’s thoughts or anything really aren’t going to help much of anything. What we do is more about the human condition than anything else.
Certainly at this point, you guys are what you are and while so many of us think that’s a great thing, for somebody at a label or in the business, they might not be able to appreciate that. It must’ve been gratifying then to get to know the people at the label, having recorded this and having it come out so well, that you had something to be proud of that you could hand off them to work on to make a success.
Yeah, that’s true. You kind of know what you’re going to get with us. You’ve got nineteen records to listen, to so it’s not like anything we do should be a surprise at this point. There was a day when they first heard it, when we played four or five songs in a row. They didn’t expect it, we hadn’t set it up, we were shooting the album cover and we did it just down the street where the studio was in east LA and I just said,”Well, they’re here, let’s give it a shot!” We brought them over to the studio and they got to see and hear and feel the vibe, which ultimately was really helpful. They could really tell the story themselves. It would be one thing to read about how funky the place was and see “Hey, this is nice!" So this I what they’re doing? That makes sense.”
The serendipity of offering them a listen on a moment’s notice was right in line with how you did the whole album, so that made perfect sense. You must’ve felt you were really on to something at that point, that you could be that open abut it and not worry about what the reaction would be. You probably would’ve gone on and kept doing what you were doing at that point anyway, it felt so good…
To be honest with you though, you never know. In regards to what you were saying before, we never know as we’re making it, if it’s good or not. A lot of times, things are only good in the context of the times in which they exist; how many records have you gone back to and realized they were great but at the time they’ve weren’t perceived as great? There are so many things that go into the perception of whether a record is great or not.
What I was saying was how amazing it is, having done it a hundred or some times, how delusional the aspect of recordmaking is. Oftentimes you think something is incredibly great or incredibly horrible on any given day and you realize a couple minutes (or days or a week later) that you were a hundred and eighty degrees from where you thought you were. This is actually very good or actually really, really good and you were just in a bad mood or hearing it funny or whatever. I know for me sometimes I should be in a wheelchair. It’s just part of the process: you really truly never do know much. I know when we were playing those songs for the label guys, I thought they were pretty cool but they could’ve just as easily said “This sounds like s^&* or “This wasn’t what people like” or “Why are you playing this?”
That is true. That’s the advantage of being a music lover. You can miss something that you’re listening to because you’re not in the proper frame of mind to really receive what’s being transmitted. And then you turn around and the thing hits you like a bomb. I remember an album of yours, Colossal Head, hit me like that: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it the first couple times I listened to it and then just playing it in the background while I wasn’t consciously ‘listening to it’ I just became so absorbed in it, I found myself sitting down and going “There’s really something magical going on here. I want to start this all over again and listen to it all the way through.”
There was a wonderful Aerosmith documentary on the record they did with Bruce Fairbairn, it had a million hits on it like “Love in an Elevator (Pump), it was just a great record, whether you’re an Aerosmith fan or not. To me it would’ve been like, if here was anybody who knew they were delivering it would be that record and those guys. And the documentary just shows them jus sweating bullets like they’re thinking they’re done, that they suck and the songs suck. It was so graphic to me that we’re all in the same boat, buddy, nobody knows shit, everybody’s just sweating every take every song and every record.
It was a great illustration of how lucky we are to be in this place to do this because you know, it’s not like movies where even if it’s shit, you can pre sell it to make money. If the record sucks, and if it really sucks in this case, then you’re kind of fucked. Especially these days because you know you don’t get that many chances.
One thing I notice happening to myself a lot and it happened to a friend of mine when I gave him this record, is that the way you put things into iTunes, unless you go in and reorder it, a lot of times it goes in backwards; the sequence is the opposite of what the artist intended. For an album, it’s like “What the hell were they thinking?” Talk about a way to misunderstand a great record!? I know the time I spend sequencing these records, if you listen to this one last to first, you have no idea the way it’s supposed to be.
That’s the way it is though if you listen to a lot of music and albums rather than individual songs, you do recognize the flow of an album and, in particular, the sequence whereby it leads to its conclusion. If you were to start listening to Tin Can Trust with “27 Spanishes,” that’s not quite an introduction there, and “Burn It Down” is a hell of a way to end an album. I spent a lot of time putting stuff into I Tunes this weekend and was very conscious of putting things in the right order because it really matters.
It really does.
