Concerts

Hear the howl of the wolves when Los Lobos arrive at City Winery

The ever-intriguing, never-disappointing Los Lobos will play in Boston Dec. 16-17.

Los Lobos. Piero F. Giunti

2 minutes to read

I first heard of Los Lobos in early 1987 via “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes” on MTV. I didn’t love the song, but I liked it and the video was cool.

Little did I know at the time that that song’s album – “By the Light of the Moon” – was the band’s fifth LP and that the band from East L.A. had been recording for more than a decade.

So imagine my surprise a few months later when Los Lobos’s version of Richie Valens’s “La Bamba” topped the Billboard Hot 100, and the soundtrack to the biopic of the same name – to which Los Lobos contributed eight tracks – was simultaneously atop the Pop Albums chart. (Both “By the Light of the Moon” and “La Bamba” were nominated for Grammys that year.)

While that would be the extent of Los Lobos’s time in the commercial spotlight, it hardly resigned them to the fate of the typical one-hit wonder. In fact, their next album – 1989’s all-Spanish language “La Pistola y El Corazon” – would win them their second Grammy, for Best Mexican-American Performance.

Cape-based journalist Ryan Bray summed up the group’s situation beautifully in a 2016 A.V. Club article titled “Beyond ‘La Bamba’: Los Lobos is the best rock band nobody’s listening to.”

“Headline-grabbing superstars they’re not,” Bray wrote, “but if we’re to judge the best band in America strictly in terms of body of work, Los Lobos has proven itself over the past 40-plus years to be underrated-but-well-deserving contenders for the crown … [They] have quietly but steadily built one of the most impressive catalogs of any American rock ’n’ roll band in the last 30 years.”

But it isn’t like the band’s efforts have gone completely unappreciated. Between 1983 and 2021, Los Lobos has been nominated for 12 Grammys in nine different categories (including Best Musical Album for Children), and won a total of three in two categories.

Los Lobos’s 2021 album “Native Sons” includes covers of songs by familiar L.A. artists like The Beach Boys, Jackson Browne, Buffalo Springfield, and War (their version of “The World is a Ghetto” features vocals by Boston legend Barrence Whitfield), and several who are lesser-known to pop audiences, including Lalo Guerrero y Sus Cincos Lobos, Willie Bobo, Don & Dewey, and the Jaguars, as well as one original, “Native Son.”