The Chinese calendar may dictate otherwise, but 1999 looks set to be the Year of the Wolf. At least, that is, if the wolf in question runs with the pack of renowned East L.A. musicians known as Los Lobos. Following in the wake of last year's Grammy-nominated side-project Los Super 7 (a Lobos-heavy all-star collaboration of Mexican and American artists playing traditional Spanish folk music) are a slew of albums from the twenty-six year-old band, including a new Lobos album proper, a second effort from the avant-garde off-shoot Latin Playboys and lead Lobo David Hidalgo's newest diversion, Houndog. But first out of the gate is Soul Disguise, the debut solo effort from Los Lobos' perpetually shaded blues aficionado Cesar Rosas.

"People were saying, 'We like the Playboys stuff, but when are you going to put a solo record out yourself?'" says the singer/guitarist from his home in Los Angeles. "I think fans put a bug in my ear about it. So I started messing around with the idea of it, and I had a little bit of material we weren't using for the Los Lobos record, I got together like half a record of material and took it to Warner Bros." Rosas got the green light to continue, but he shelved the album when his point man at the label left the company. It's taken three years for Soul Disguise to see the light of day, now on Rykodisc.

Whereas Hidalgo and Louis Perez have used the Latin Playboys to further explore the experimental waters first tested on Los Lobos' eclectic 1992 album Kiko, Rosas has taken the opposite approach on Soul Disguise. Namely, its allowed him to take a giant step back to the straight-up, twelve-bar blues that he grew up with.

"I've had the blues, man, since I was a kid," laughs Rosas. Like many Americans of his generation, he was introduced to the blues by English doppelgangers -- namely, Cream and Led Zeppelin. "You grow up listening to that stuff and then you start going, 'Hey I just found this blues record and it's exactly like this Led Zeppelin song, but it's done by this guy who sounds real evil and his name is Howlin' Wolf.' You start realizing a lot of the rock stuff was covers of old songs. And for the fun of it, you start collecting the originals. For me rock & roll music is all blues. Blues is in all that stuff. It's just something that hits home for me. It's who I am."

Assisting Rosas on the self-produced album was a random assortment of friends, relatives and associates (including famed accordion player Flaco Jimenez of solo and Texas Tornadoes fame and Leon Preston of Asleep at the Wheel, who co-wrote four tracks with Rosas). "I didn't really go out of my way to sound different from Los Lobos, blah, blah, blah, blah -- I just go on instinct," he says. "It's corny, but musicians really make up a certain sound, and the fact is that if I call up Larry Taylor to play bass instead of Conrad [Lozano, of Los Lobos], it's going to sound different. It's just a fun project. I just kinda wanna rock sometimes, and sometimes Los Lobos don't wanna rock that hard. I just said 'To hell with all that!'"

Rosas plans to continue getting his solo kicks on a short club tour in March. But he has no intention of leaving his day job and will rejoin Los Lobos when it comes time to tour behind their just completed new album, tentatively slated for a May release on the band's new label, Hollywood Records. Rosas describes the album, Lobos' first since 1996's Colossal Head, as "a little more like our live shows; a little more open."

And although the myriad side projects swirling around Los Lobos might seem like a recipe for familial tension, he's come to see the extra-curricular activities as healthy endeavors. "We've become each other's fans, like when we were in high school," he says. "Eventually we'll get to the point where we take it out on the road and open up for each other. We will take Los Lobos and have Latin Playboys open up and Cesar Rosas will do the middle, and eventually we'll all join up as Los Lobos." Los Lobospalooza, if you will.

"The only problem I see right now," Rosas continues, "is that these projects -- my record, Latin Playboys, Houndog, the new Los Lobos -- are going to be coming out in succession, right after each other." Meaning a lot of Lobos fans with empty pockets?

"Yeah," laughs Rosas, "Or something else is going to happen. It's going to explode."

RICHARD SKANSE

(February 2, 1999)