ANAHEIM, Calif. — Sometime in the ’80s, singer Exene Cervenka of X says she pitched the idea of a tour with X, the Blasters, and Los Lobos, all of them friends and fellow travelers in the Los Angeles music scene of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

“I always thought it would be great if we could tour America,” she says. “We would try to get promoters to take it, but they would say, ‘No, because you’re all headliners and we don’t want to squander the tickets. The same people who would come to that would come to see you separately.’”

Years passed, and the idea gathered dust.

Then, one day not long ago, Cervenka was hanging out with Louie Perez III, the son of Los Lobos co-founder Louie Perez Jr., and a singer for the Chicano punk band Manic Hispanic.

“We were talking about Los Lobos and X, and I added up and found that we had together 99 years,” she says of Los Lobos, which was founded in November 1973, and X, which started in February 1977. “I said, ‘Man, if we go on tour next year, we could say we’ve got 100 years of rock and roll.

“Then I went, ’99 bottles of beer on the wall,’ and thought, ‘No, we better do it now.”

So Cervenka asked Louie Perez Jr. if Los Lobos was interested – they were – and the 99 Years of Rock ‘n` Roll Tour was born.

“I thought it would be a great thing to take on the road,” she says of the tour, which couldn’t include the Blasters due to singer Phil Alvin’s ongoing health issues. “So we got two out of three.”

Crossing the river

On a recent weekday morning, Cervenka and Los Lobos’ saxophonist Steve Berlin met by the traffic circle in Old Town Orange. Sitting on a park bench by the fountain, they talked about the tour, but also about the long history their bands share, and memories of the birth of one of L.A.’s most significant music scenes.

Of course, some memories fade, Cervenka and Berlin realized as they tried to figure out when and where they first met.

“Were you at the Flesh Eaters sessions at all?” asks Berlin, referring to the punk band formed by Chris Desjardins, who for his second album brought in bassist John Doe and drummer D.J. Bonebrake of X, guitarist Dave Alvin of the Blasters, and Berlin, then in in his pre-Los Lobos role as as the Blasters’ sax player.

“In the studio? I don’t think so,” says Cervenka, who’s missing in the credits for that Flesh Eaters album but recognized for contributing “bracelets and 8 ball” on the previous one.

They’re sure, though, that they would have met at a Blasters gig in L.A. at some point. And as for Los Lobos, the first encounters remain vivid.

“I think the first time I saw them, they were doing more of the folklore stuff with long hair,” Cervenka says of the band’s early Latin roots music. “That was really compelling stuff. I think it was probably Dave Alvin that kind of merged everybody together as usual.”

She and Berlin also realized they both attended what Berlin calls “the infamous Public Image Ltd. show” at the Olympic Auditorium in May 1980, where Los Lobos, still playing traditional songs on traditional instruments, opened for former Sex Pistol John Lydon and his post-Pistols band.

“For seven or eight years, they never really crossed the river,” Berlin says of Los Lobos’ roots in East L.A. across the Los Angeles River from the Hollywood scene in the late ’70s. “They fed their families playing five times a week, six times a week, all around the neighborhood, two times a day, three times a day.

As Berlin remembers it, John Lydon reached out to Tito Larriva from the band the Plugz and asked him to book Chicano bands to open the show, which is how Los Lobos signed on. “Tito was aware of them, and he was the one who put them on the bill.”

“My memory was it was a clarion call of all the various tribes of Los Angeles to come see the mighty prince,” Berlin says of Lydon’s first-ever appearance in Los Angeles, the Sex Pistols having imploded in 1978 before reaching Southern California.

The Olympic had been a famous arena for boxing, wrestling, and roller derby, and by the early ’80s was also a rough-around-the-edges home to punk rock shows, too.

“For some reason, they thought it would be a good idea to take the seats out, so you were literally standing on a hill trying not to slide down,” Berlin says. “The floors are like a river of effluvia.

“These four dudes with hair down to their ass, playing these little instruments come out,” he says of Los Lobos. “It was like a toreador waving a red flag and the bulls just going, ‘Rawr!’ It was like target practice. They started playing, and everything that could fly was flying: cups, bottles, quarters. This fusillade of stuff being thrown at them, and they’re just playing these beautiful songs.

“They stood there, and they took it for 20 minutes,” Berlin says. “They were just standing there like, ‘Oh, really, that’s all you got?’”

By January 1982, the Blasters had worked their way up to their first headlining shows at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood, a four-night run with different openers, including a Los Lobos that had shed the long hair and traditional instruments for loud, fast rock and roll.

“I thought, ‘Nah, it can’t be the same band … well, maybe?’” Berlin says of the sensation that Los Lobos created that night. “My memory was that for the next month, that’s all anybody talked about. Like the old old black-and-white movie where all the newspaper headlines are, ‘Los Lobos! Los Lobos!’ It was literally overnight.”

The LA punk family

As punk rock defined itself, or was defined, in those early days, Cervenka remembers some fans questioning why X would share a bill with a band like Los Lobos.

“People would say, ‘Why are you playing with them? They’re not punk,’” she says. “And it’s like, ‘We aren’t either – but both of us are?’ Because people don’t understand that punk meant the Go-Go’s, Los Lobos and X were punk.

“The scene was a rock and roll scene, so they fit right in,” Cervenka says of Los Lobos. “If the punk rock scene hadn’t been happening, I don’t know that they would have, as you say, crossed that river. They would have been destined for greatness whatever they did.”

That openness to different kinds of bands and music was a hallmark of the scene then, Berlin adds.

“It was this giant family base — there was no dividing line,” he says. “Like we would open shows with Black Flag and [folk singer] Phranc. There was no definition of what was punk. We just loved playing with each other.”

As for similarities between X and Los Lobos, whether lyrically or in their music, Cervenka and Berlin differ slightly in their views.

“I think Los Lobos and the Blasters have a lot more in common that way,” Cervenka says. “Like Dave Alvin, the great songwriter of Americana. I think we all did that kind of film noir-ish writing. Or I wouldn’t say film noir, but the pulp fiction, the James M. Cain novels.

“We were all writing these L.A. stories, and in that way we were similar, but our styles are completely different, for sure,” she says.

“Can I just say one thing? I know that Louie studied the X canon,” Berlin says of Perez, Los Lobos’ main lyricist. “I mean, we worshipped X. And I know that his writing style was profoundly influenced by Exene and John, what they were, what they wrote. Like the way their songs would kind of jump cut scenes.

“I didn’t have the pen in my hand, but I know that Louie worshipped at their altar, like that’s where he wanted to get as a lyricist, where they have always been,” he says.

“Well, now I can die happy,” Cervenka says, drawing a laugh from Berlin.

Wolves and Knitters

The night Berlin met Los Lobos, they invited him to play sax with them whenever he wanted, and for the next few years, he was in the Blasters but also played with Los Lobos when the schedules allowed.

But the pull of Los Lobos grew stronger and stronger. In 1983, Berlin and T-Bone Burnett co-produced Los Lobos’ EP “… And a Time to Dance,” and as Los Lobos began work on the album that would become “How Will the Wolf Survive?” he continued to play with them in rehearsals and shows.

“I remember the day we were rehearsing at our friend Gary Ibanez’s garage, and Louie brought in “Will The Wolf Survive?” Berlin says. “I just remember, OK, everything’s different now. That’s going to change everything, a song of this quality, in this voice.”

At the same time, the Blasters weren’t using horns as much as Los Lobos. Almost literally, Berlin found himself at a crossroads.

“There was one day where the Blasters’ bus was going one way, the Los Lobos bus was going the other way, I got on that one,” he says. “There was no moment, no farewell speech. I didn’t get a watch, you know? I was just like, ‘I’m going to get on this bus.’ It was like, ‘OK, cool, no problem.”

Around the time that Berlin was drifting into full membership in Los Lobos, Cervenka and Doe of X accidentally landed in their own side project, playing rockabilly, country and folk music with the Blasters’ Dave Alvin as the Knitters.

“How I remember it, there was a benefit at Club 88 to buy [punk/R&B singer] Top Jimmy new teeth or some other medical thing that was going on,” Cervenka says. “They asked John and I to do a duo thing, and we’d always practice doing Hank Williams’ songs. I learned to sing from him playing those songs on acoustic guitar, because it’s a lot easier to sing a song like that than a full-on X rehearsal.”

Dave Alvin was backstage, and Doe invited him to join them for the three or four songs they planned to play, she says. Then the manager of Club 88 stuck his head in and asked what name he should use to introduce them.

“Dave said, ‘The Knitters,’” Cervenka says. “He said, ‘You know, like the Weavers,’ and we went, ‘All right, we don’t have time to argue.’”

The Knitters did a few more gigs, never planning for it to become anything serious. Then inspiration struck.

“X and the Blasters were both very difficult to agree to doing benefits,” Cervenka says. “And at the time, it was nothing but benefits. The Pittston Miners, baseballs for Nicaragua, or guitar strings for El Salvador or vice versa. It was one person sick after another, and one club closing after another. It was endless.”

So she, Doe and Alvin decided to make the Knitters a semi-permanent band. X drummer D.J. Bonebrake joined to play washtub and a snare, and Jonny Ray Bartel came on to play bass.

“We’d only play benefits and then X and the Blasters could make our living, because once you play a benefit you can’t play a show,” Cervenka says. “If you’re playing five benefits a month, you can’t play five shows a month. You can’t make a living because no one’s gonna book you.

It’s fun, let’s do it

Joining Los Lobos, forming the Knitters — like so much in the music scene of the early ’80s, it was loose and free and fun, Cervenka and Berlin say.

“Like everything back then, it was just like, ‘It’d be fun, let’s do this,’” Cervenka says. “And then people would just do it.”

And their tour this summer and fall hopes to capture some of that too, both say.

“All the stuff you’re asking about, this is as close to being there then as we can get you,” Cervenka says. “And we’ll try to really pack (the tour) full of that sensibility.

“Maybe we can do some songs together,” she says to Berlin.

“It really did come from what Exene just said,” he replies. “Like, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun?’ I mean, that’s literally how this started. Louie came to us like, ‘Hey, would it be fun to do this?’ I was like, ‘Hell, yeah.’

After the show at Pacific Amphitheatre on Sunday, Aug. 3 – which also includes Ozomatli, whose 2001 album Berlin co-produced – X and Los Lobos take a break until September, when the full tour begins. That run of shows also includes dates in San Diego on Nov. 13 and in Riverside on Nov. 14.

“I’m just a fan like anybody else,” Cervenka says of touring with Los Lobos this year. “I’m excited about doing sound check and then going out and watching them.”

“It’s always fun,” Berlin says. “Just the backstage hang, which is a big part of the experience. People we know telling stories, and just like that the movie’s on and it goes on and on.

“So that part, especially when there’s so much of your history, I’m going to be looking forward to that,” he says. “Trying to remember all the stuff I forgot. The socializing part is pretty awesome.”

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