Goodman and Clark sent Trevino his song, “Ojitos Traidores”, a traditional piece that would have fit on either of the two previous LS7 albums. Trevino was game, even though he now understands his track and his duet with Freddy Fender on “Cupido” are more like wild cards among the rest of the material.
“It’s Dan and Rick’s feeling,” Trevino says. “They wanted to be a more central part of the project this time. ‘This one is going to be in English.’ I didn’t understand it. This one would seem it’s not Latin at all, but more Texas. It celebrates music in general. It originated with Mexican music and it seems to be much more…shit, I don’t know,” he chuckles.
Trevino is one of those cast members too young to have heard border radio in its original form, but he gets the eclecticism. If any single player has taken advantage of Los Super Seven’s forays into traditional borderlands folk music, Latin world music, and now the hidden Texas roots, it’s Trevino.
“I’ve always had a rebellion thing against Tejanos and Tex-Mex, even though I am Mexican-American from Texas,” he says. He chalks it up to his father’s history of playing in Tejano bands and achieving regional notoriety with the Houston-based big band Neto Perez & His Originals.
Trevino reconnected with those sounds on the first LS7 album. The second album introduced him to Cuban music, which he has embraced enthusiastically. “I think it’s because of the piano,” he says. “That’s my first instrument.” He’s become best friends with Alberto Salas, the California keyboardist well-versed in Cuban son. This time around, he’s embraced the mariachi influence. “Again, it’s Rick and Dan,” he says. “It was a good call. This is an educational tool for me; I’m always learning more styles of music.”
For Trevino, Los Super Seven solves the dilemma of who he is and who he’s performing for. “It’s crazy, who your audience is and what they want,” he observes. “A lot of people were offended when I first started recording because I wasn’t singing Tejano. There was a larger majority who were proud I was singing country. But there’s always a few saying, ‘He’s too good to sing his heritage.'” Los Super Seven allows Trevino to delve into his heritage while keeping his country straight up, four albums down, playing for largely Anglo crowds, while managing to sneak “Mi Ranchito” sung in Spanish from the first LS7 disc onto the song list when he plays dances.
Joey Burns and John Convertino and the rest of Calexico came to the dance through an MP3 of “Ojitos Traidores” they posted on their website. Clark and Goodman heard it and called them up. The Tucson-based group signed on and brought along their friend John Contreras and Mariachi de la Luz. Genre-jumbling was nothing new to them. “The band has three players in Tucson, one in Nashville, and two in Germany,” explains Burns. “We’ve always crossed over, to Afro-Cuban, Mariachi, Ennio Morricone spaghetti westerns, adding lap steel to something that sounds Latin, dabbling in traditions and German electronica at the same time. We’ve been doing all that since ’96.”
Burns embraces the idea of trying to push traditions in a respectful way to go somewhere new, but he was wary of a backlash with the third album’s shift in direction. “I knew a lot of people considered the first two records a side project of Los Lobos,” he says. “I’m a huge fan of all the musicians involved with those records. I’m a big fan of the Latin Playboys. But it’s important not to try to repeat yourself. This one definitely does not.”
Joe Ely can see what I couldn’t: a consistent thread running through Los Super Seven. “Each went in a whole different direction, but the two I’ve been involved with have had the same setup: Show up and play with a band that’s been holed up in a house,” he explained over a bowl of tortilla soup on the patio of Central Market South in Austin.
“The first time it was Cesar and David and Joel. This time it’s Calexico and Charlie. You could tell they’d been living there. There was shit scattered everywhere. It was like being in an environment, not like a studio — same as the first one felt at Cedar Creek. Musicians love coming to a place where it feels like they’re not working.”
Ely says he opted out of the second LS7 album by choice. “It went way far south of the border. They showed me what they were doing and I told them I didn’t know anything about that.” On this one, though, he played a crucial role in articulating the vision. “The Flatlanders were playing a concert in London with Los Lobos a few years back, and after the show, I talked to Steve Berlin about how great it would be to do old border radio material — blues, Mexican, swing, country — mixing it all up. I think that’s where this one came from.”
Producers rounding up songs and players for a one-off album is becoming a more common way of making records, Ely believes. “Getting people from different places but with a common mentality and plug ’em in and see what happens — these are the projects I love to work with most,” he says, citing the I-10 Chronicles project he did a few years ago with Adam Duritz, Flaco Jimenez, Bill & Bonnie Hearne and others, and a recent tour he did with Guy Clark, John Hiatt and Lyle Lovett. “You work all your life and play a million places, but it’s great to get together with other people who’ve played a million places and you sit down in a room with them and you don’t know what’s gonna happen.
“This is a real interesting combination of people. Everyone had that old border radio station roots side in their sound, even though very few people today know what border radio is. It wasn’t just a radio station. It was the source.”
For all that it is and isn’t, between “Song Of Everything”, “I’m Not That Kat Anymore”, the West Side Horns and all the other compadres involved, Heard It On The X is the best Doug Sahm album since Doug Sahm left the building, an all-star tribute to the same honky blues, spacey jazz, groovy rock ‘n’ roll, and bouncy Tex-Mex he liked to mix up.
Like Charlie Sexton put it, “This project has so much, yet nothing to do with Doug Sahm.” It’s not the same as Doug doing it, but it’ll do. It has to. Because Sir Doug’s gone, border radio’s gone, so are roadhouses and the rootsy funky sounds of Texas that were made in them. Tejano radio is on the ropes. Conjunto is losing favor. Even the dancehall is fading.
But the band that never existed and never sounded anything like this before managed to summon the ghosts, invoke the spirits and rustle up some of that old energy and put out an album to remind us of what once was, when Texas music really was wild and renegade.
Joe Nick Patoski is a Doug Head from the git-go who loves any excuse to write about Texas-Mexican music. He authored a biography on Selena and is contributing text to the book Conjunto Pictures by photographer John Dyer to be published by University of Texas Press this fall.
