As the Los Angeles band Ozomatli prepares to celebrate its 30th anniversary on the road this summer, bassist Wil-Dog Abers acknowledges the anniversary is stirring up feelings for him and the five other members of the band who’ve been there from the start.
But what those feelings are, well, that’s harder to say.
“Thirty years, it’s surreal,” Abers says a few days after the tour kicked off with a pair of Colorado shows. “I never thought about this moment in the beginning, obviously. But who does in their early 20s? Who ever thinks you’re going to be 52 years old one day?
“There’s so many bands that haven’t done this,” Abers says. “Is it hard to keep a group together?”
He laughs.
“I guess maybe it is.”
The 30 Revolutions Tour includes shows in Del Mar, Los Angeles, Fountain Valley, Ventura and Fontana between June 11 and June 28. The band swings back through Southern California a month later for performances in Marina Del Rey on Aug. 2 and Costa Mesa on Aug. 3, the latter as opener for fellow L.A. bands Los Lobos and X.
Though the group has sometimes had as many as 10 members, Ozomatli’s core six members have been there from the start: Ulises Bella, Raúl Pacheco, Jiro Yamaguchi, Asdru Sierra, Justin Porée and Aber.
As a band, Ozomatli is known for both its eclectic musical inspirations – hip-hop, funk, and rock and roll fit seamlessly alongside salsa, reggae, cumbia and other international influences – and its political and social activism – the band formed out of a workers’ strike and sit-in in downtown Los Angeles and has used its platform to advocate for positive change ever since.
“I think about all the reasons why we stayed together and there’s hundreds,” Aber says. “If you ask each one of us, there’s a different reason. But the feeling, I think it’s just gratitude. Gratitude that the music we’ve created has allowed us to go around the world and connect with so many people.”
Building a band
The seeds of Ozomatli blossomed from the ashes of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.
Aber and original drummer Antone Morales worked at the time for the Los Angeles Conservation Corps, but instead of planting trees or painting over graffiti, which the corps often did, they were part of a team assigned to create art to beautify and educate the city in the wake of that uprising.
“Carmelo Alvarez, who was the leader of the downtown L.A. team, sent us to the library and had us research the reason for the rebellion in 1992,” Aber says. “He said we’re going to create a play, and each one of you is going to play a character in this play; we’re going to perform it at the L.A. Theatre Center. So we did that.”
A year later, after a nudge to be less political led to a play about earthquakes, the conservation corps workers decided to unionize, going on strike and organizing a lengthy sit-in at the building they worked out of in downtown Los Angeles.
“Whenever you open yourself up to do art, it opens your mind to do other things as well, right?” Aber says. ‘So there was a connection from being creative to fighting for your rights.”
A month and a half later, mediation led to the strikers losing their jobs but gaining control and use of the building, which they decided to make a community cultural center called the Peace and Justice Center. Aber and Morales were put in charge of organizing a band that could help raise money for the center, and after a single rehearsal, Ozomatli made its live debut on April 1, 1995.
“I had just met Raúl – was playing bass for Raúl for some recordings because Anton was friends with him,” Aber says. “Antone was also in a band called Yeska that Ulises was in.
“I was in a band with Jurassic 5 rapper Chali 2na and DJ Cut Chemist at the end of high school, where we were just doing drum, bass and DJ with rappers,” he says. “It was kind of like we just called all of our friends to come down and jam for the center.”
Each brought songs they’d worked on individually, several of which, including “Como Ves” and “Cut Chemist Suite,” ended up on the band’s 1998 self-titled debut.
“We didn’t have a lot, so we would have these 10-minute jams or whatever,” Aber says. “And then little by little, we would play more, rehearse more. People started hearing about us. We started getting asked to play at like art galleries in downtown L.A.”
At one of those art gallery shows, the booker for the Viper Room in West Hollywood caught their show and booked Ozomatli to play that well-known room in January 1996, which, in addition to expanding their fanbase, provided the band with a live tape of their show.
Aber, who was more or less the unofficial manager of the band in those early days, rounded up students he worked with as a teaching assistant at Fairfax High School to copy tapes of that Viper Room gig and put them together in a press packet to mail out in search of more gigs.
“I think what really did it was I went to 7/11 at the beginning of ’96 and there was a free magazine that was all of the festivals in Los Angeles,” Aber says. “It was this big and it had everything – Watts drum festival, Santa Monica art and crafts, Korean Festival, Chinese New Year. I sent (a packet) to every single one. I made hundreds and sent them and logged them and called.
“You know, ‘Hey, this is Wil-Dog from Ozomatli, call me back,’” he says. “And then it was get a message, ‘Hey, I got your package, we’d like you for this date.’
“Within a few months, like that summer of ’96, we were gigging five times a day on a Saturday. Like Pomona literally to East L.A., Riverside. It was just bananas.”
A musical mélange
Unlike many bands, Ozomatli never felt pressure, or succumbed to pressure, to pick a single sound. Like a chef using anything and everything on hand, the band threw together genres, added different flavors, and came
“It was always, ‘I want to do this,’ and nobody knows what that is,” Aber says. “People were like, ‘OK, cool, let’s just do it.”
Imperfections were often left untouched in the pursuit of something special and new.
“I bring in an idea and I want it to sound like A, B and C, and the person next to me is playing it wrong,” Aber says. “Even though my brain is saying that’s not how it’s played – because I love this music and I know this music, but the other person doesn’t – that’s part of the magic in a way.
“People have their expertise in the band and none of us share that expertise they have,” he says. “And in some ways, none of us are interested in being an expert of that thing.”
He laughs. “So we end up playing it wrong, and it ends up sounding cool to other people.”
Those Saturdays racing back and forth across Southern California eventually led to a weekly residence at the Opium Den in Los Angeles, where the party vibe of Ozomatli cooking on stage attracted more and more attention.
“Within a few months, Hollywood was there,” Aber says. “Bill Maher would be there and Salma Hayek and Drew Barrymore, and so it became like a thing. We would sell it out every Tuesday.”
A move to the Dragonfly led to more packed shows, with so many people attending that the fire marshals would sometimes shut it down, he says. Around that time, a rep for Almo, a boutique label started by Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss after they sold A&M Records, took interest in the band.
“Jerry Moss came to see us at a festival in Santa Monica, an outdoor free gig,” Aber says. “The guy’s carrying my bass amp out after the gig. I’m like, ‘This is the M of A&M and he’s helping me load out?’ He was like a grandpa that was willing to get dirty. Then he brought us into his office, and he was just really positive.”
The label also sent Ozomatli on the road for a few months before the debut album came out in June 1998, after which they joined the Warped Tour and were on the road for a few more months.
“We did some other touring and then ended up getting Santana for a few months,” Aber says of Ozatmali’s high-profile opening slot for the guitar great. “That’s when ‘Smooth’ came out, when that album broke. That was great.”
Something to believe in
From the start, Ozomatli was willing to take a stand not just for the music it made but for the beliefs its members held.
“Not everybody in the band was super political,” but we all share a lot of ideas,” Aber says. “Raúl was going to go into politics. When he was in college, he was working in Sacramento. My parents were in a really hardcore left organization, so I grew up in what was called the Revolutionary Communist Party. Uli’s dad was, I think, a socialist from Spain.
“But it was always who we were as people,” he says. “We also looked up to bands like the Clash, like Bruce Springsteen, who told stories about people. Who used their music in different ways. That was always something that I knew that I was going to be a part of.”
A new single, “Red Line,” which arrives at the end of July, exemplifies the way in which Ozomatli has always mixed music with meaning.
“That tells the story of working people in L.A. who ride the Red Line,” Aber says of the subway line that connects downtown Los Angeles to North Hollywood. “You can also have metaphors in there of old L.A. and redlining” – the term used for discriminatory housing practices that prevented people of color from getting home loans and insurance. “So it’s kind of both, and it’s a really great song.”
As for Ozomatli’s future, Aber says he hopes the band is around to celebrate 40 years in 2035.
“The thing that I think about a lot is mortality,” he says. “I always think, damn, how more rehearsals, how many more shows do we have together? How many more recordings?”
Los Lobos and X are teaming up for a tour they’re calling 99 Years of Rock ‘N Roll, a nod to their own longevity, Los Lobos in its 51st year, X in its 48th. When they asked Ozomatli to open for them at the Pacific Amphitheatre on Aug. 3, the band said yes immediately.
“People are like, ‘Why would you do that? First of three?’ We’re like, ‘Yeah, duh,’” Aber says of their respect for both of those bands. “But does that it make 129 years? That would be 129 years of rock and roll.
“So we’re pissed off that they didn’t change the name for that date,” he says, laughing. “At 30, I know we’re not as old as you guys. And maybe you can’t remember being 30. But it’s a thing, you know.”