Robben Ford Discussion

[BlueRunner]

Hard to beat a concert where you pay only $5, beer is cheap, and a shuttle bus comes almost to your door.

Each July my home town, Santa Paula, puts on its Citrus Festival. Midway rides, food and craft booths, pie-baking and guacamole-making contests, a parade, and all of the other usual small-town festival stuff. And nightly musical entertainment. This year the closing performance for Saturday night (July 15) was Los Lobos. The concert area for the Festival is a baseball field, with a temporary stage set up in right field, a dance floor in front of the stage, rows of folding chairs in the outfield and infield, then rows of picnic tables, and then beer booths. The $5 ticket for the Festival itself covered the cost of admission to everything.

The crowd was around 5,000, which was big enough to make plenty of noise, but not so big that you couldn't move around and enjoy time (a) right up next to one side of the stage, getting the sound from the monitors, watching David Hidalgo's feet hit the effects pedals, and hearing what drummer Cougar Estrada was telling his drum tech about the bad snare that got replaced three numbers into the concert without his missing a beat, (b) right up against the front of the stage, (c) right in the middle of the dance floor, or (d) back out on the edge at the beer booths. The night was fun, loose, and the music absoltutely great. At least 70% of Santa Paula's population has some sort of Hispanic background, and the predominant live music in local bars is everything from mariachi to norteno to banda. When Los Lobos turned in the middle of their set to some of their traditional Mexican and Central American tunes (with Hidalgo on accordian), the dance floor was filled with couples in their 60's, 70's and even 80's. Los Lobos had played Santa Paula only once before, about eight years ago, at a free concert in another park sponsored by a community group, but there's a real affinity around here for the band. Touring drummer Cougar Estrada is the son of one of the Estrada Brothers, a Latin band from nearby Oxnard that has been playing around Southern California since the 1950's, and even though Cougar lives in a town that's 15 miles away, Santa Paulans think of him as "one of us."

It was loose enough that for the finale (before one encore), the band encouraged folks down front to come up onto the stage and dance and sing along for "La Bamba." Intonation wasn't exactly perfect, but at least 30 of our friends and neighbors were up there singing along, dancing, and playing miscellaneous percussion instruments the road crew passed out.

After over 30 years of doing this, Los Lobos still doesn't just phone it in. Every time I've seen them, they've put their all into the show.
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- BlueRunner