Los Lobos - La Bamba - Alternate Version (1987)

I've always considered "La Bamba," the soundtrack to the 1987 movie about Richie Valens, a de facto Los Lobos album. However, I've had a couple of problems with it. One, it's rather short, at only 31 minutes long. And two, it has 12 songs, and four of them aren't Los Lobos at all, but other musicians featured in the movie. So I made some changes.

I don't consider any of those four songs by other artists essential, especially the imitation of Jackie Wilson by a fairly obscure singer. So I cut all four of them. This made the album only 20 minutes long. Luckily, it turns out that Los Lobos did a number of other 1950s covers around this time, even if they weren't Richie Valens songs per se. Two songs come from a Los Lobos box set, and I was able to find five more from soundboard bootlegs of concerts from 1985 to 1987. I also included another Los Lobos cover of a Richie Valens (see the explanation below.) Adding those songs doubles its length, to 42 minutes, and makes it a real, all-Los Lobos album.

Well, almost all Los Lobos. One of the four songs I discarded from the original soundtrack is a remake of "Who Do You Love" by Bo Diddley. It turns out that after the soundtrack was released, there was a concert filmed for TV in which most of the artists on the soundtrack played their songs. The others went on their own, but Diddley was backed by Los Lobos when he did "Who Do You Love." I've included that, so really you're only missing three songs from the original.

Note that this post has been updated on December 28, 2018. Originally, there was one song I wanted to include, but I couldn't find: the Los Lobos version of "That's My Little Suzie." It's an actual Richie Valens song, so it couldn't fit the theme of this album any better. I wasn't able to find it at first, but now I have, so the zip file and song listing have been updated to include it. I found it on an official but extremely rare live album called "Chuy's Tape Box, Vol.1." Apparently, this was meant to be the start of a series of official bootleg releases by Los Lobos, but so far they've only released the one, which is of a 1984 concert.

01 La Bamba (Los Lobos)
02 Come On, Let's Go (Los Lobos)
03 Ooh, My Head (Los Lobos)
04 We Belong Together (Los Lobos)
05 Framed (Los Lobos)
06 Donna (Los Lobos)
07 Charlena (Los Lobos)
08 Goodnight My Love (Los Lobos)
09 Who Do You Love (Bo Diddley & Los Lobos)
10 That's My Little Suzie (Los Lobos)
11 Rip It Up (Los Lobos)
12 I'm Gonna Be a Wheel Someday (Los Lobos)
13 The Town I Live In (Los Lobos)
14 Walking with Frankie (Los Lobos)
15 Farmer John (Los Lobos)
16 Buzz, Buzz, Buzz (Los Lobos)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15262425/LosLbs_1987_LaBmbaAlternte_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I just used the original cover, but I erased the names of the other artists on it, since they no longer appear on the album.