Some Jalapenas A Six pack Of Lone Star And Thou

Just another Holiday Inn Friday night in Harlingen, Texas. Downstairs in the El Cid Lounge, Dapper Bobby Denisio chinks his way through “Honey” on jaundiced Steinway keys as travelnumbed citrus buyers and Margaritagiddied steno queans evanesce in the dim. At one a.m. the El Cid will shut the bar and the last local television station will sign off following some creep’s attempt to get every insomniac in the Valley hot for Ezekiel 26:20. Upstairs in Room 216, however, the night is yet moist from the womb.

“Man, I just love sittin’ back and watchin’ everybody get fucked up like this,” Johnny Rodriguez smiles at a -glass of Texas ratio Smirnoff and soda. Across the room stands Andy Anderson in a $150 Nudie shirt, sucking into his «th drink of the evening. Andy has composed songs for such Texas crooners as Gene Autry and Spade Cooley and stunt-ridden in just about every fifties B Western to hit the screen. Earlier tonight he had come in from nearby McAllen to accept^ a Western Hall of Fame Award from Johnny during the half-time entertainment segment of the Rio Grande (make sure you voice that e, glitter fag) Valley Rodeo. Sitting on a coffee table, road manager Phil Jones chisels out a conversation with two Corpus Christi girls who had travelled down for just such an experience. A jeweler from Arizona and his wife, her spine straining under the $850 Edsel of Mexican silver and turquoise that hangs from her neck, listen raptly to some crasher pretending to be national rodeo star Larry Mahan tell about his toughest rides. Les the gofer, pianist Rick Durrett (formerly of Pacific Gas & Electric) and yours truly are trying to horn in on Esmeralda, a Mexican girl who had shipped her labia into town for a penile how-ye-do from Johnny Rod. Someone named Red just sort of stands there telling no one in particular about the best goddam nigger to ever play high school football in the entire goddam state of Texas. Roy, a representative from Miller Boots assigned to present Johnny with a $300 pair/of anteater skin pointy-toes, floats in grasping a half-empty fifth of Canadian Club. A short, sweaty guy conceals himself alternately with trying to tune in country station KSOX and pleading with room service for some munchies. Yolande, the best looker in the room, quietly sips Jack Daniel’s, secure in the knowledge that hers will be the softness chosen to scrunch the tubesteak of the star later this evening.

Somehow Rodriguez discovers that the guy he’s been introducing around as Larry Mahan really isn’t Larry Mahan. Set to punch face, he dashes out in search of the imposter, who has disappeared about two bottles ago. During Johnny’s absence, Andy Anderson, intent on getting his tail caught in a crack before the night’s out, makes his move on the coveted Yolande, who, presumably the victim of a sour mash-induced stupor of karuna, waxes compliant. The two broads from Corpus Christi, meanwhile, have been scooped up by Phil Jones and Johnny’s Colonel Parker, land baron Happy Shahan. Consequently, fair Esmeralda withdraws her lovely pantyhosed narthex from our charming company and attaches self onto Johnny. Les the gofer hits upon a heretofore unseen Mexican nurse and stumbles off with her muttering something about his life being nothing but a series of hangovers. Johnny smiles at Esmeralda, fixes himself a fresh drink and pans the thinning crowd. “Hell, I’m just gettin’ ready to roar” Not bad for a guy who spent the previous night drinking it up and dancing in the street with his drummer across the border in Matamoros. i

The next morning, whisking off hangover haints around a table of coffee and ice water, we chortle over Johnny’s ill luck with Esmeralda of the Pantyhose. “I didn’t get anything last night, man! I told her, ‘OK, come on, let’s get down to it.’ She says, ‘Is that all you’re interested in?’ I say, ‘Fuck yeah!’ So she goes on home. Meanwhile, ol’ Andy’s in his room with that Yolande. Damn!” Johnny can afford to laugh, though. At the age of 23, he is the first bona fide male sex symbol in the fifty-year history of country music and suffering no drought of carnal oompah.

The night before, Yolande had told me that the only male-type country singer before Johnny’s time who came close to being a sex symbol was Merle Haggard. There just aren’t too many girls around in their teens and twenties, she said, who are pining away with a desire to muss up the sheets with Porter Wagoner or Slim Whitman. Merle has the voice and the raw elan, but Johnny, he radiates it straight from the garban^ zos.

A few years back, Johnny Rodriguez was just another beer-drinking Tex-Mex teenage punk, one of 1500 inhabitants of the village of Sabinol. After busting him on a sheep rustling rap, Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson was impressed by the boy’s behind-bars singing and picking. An old friend of Jackson’s was Happy Shahan, whose 22,400 acre spread in nearby Brackettville included, among other things, Alamo Village, a huge western Texas tourist attraction and filming location for such flicks as The Alamo, Two Rode Together and Bandolero. (Shahan, by the way, is also the emcee for both the annual World Chili Cookout and the Texas State Chili Cookout.) Thinking that Happy might be able to use the singing sheep rustler as part of Alamo Village’s entertainment roster, Jackson brought the two together. Shahan, in turn, was also impressed by Rodriguez1* bilingual renditions of country standards and decided to take the boy under his wing. For the next few months, Johnny made his home inside the Village’s Alamo complex. In 1971, Shahan, brought Tom T. Hall down from Nashville to hear Johnny. Hall liked what he heard and agreed to take Johnny out on the road with him. Bob Neal, Hall’s booking agent and former manager of Elvis Presley, felt that Rodriguez’ price should start out relatively low. Happy, on the other hand, wanted a minimum of $1000 per show from the very outset. Neal thought it was insane but put him on the road with Hall anyway. Within a year, Johnny had gotten too big to share second-billing with Hall. In March of 1973, he split a Carnegie Hall card with Tom T. and, prompted by Happy, left his guitar backstage for the first time and went out there shaking his Spam a little. From that point on, Johnny Rodriguez, the first male country singer with a bad thing, was on his own. By the winter of 1974, he had three albums, at the top of the Billboard country charts at the, same time, and wherever he sang, soft, young, jujubenibbled girls screamed, swooned and moaned for the intra-uterine laser — something that just wasn’t supposed to occur at country music shows. And down here, where the Rio Grande pours into the Gulf of Mexico and Texas tapers off and dips to within 200 humid miles of the Tropic of Cancer, Rodriguez’ pistil-fans pulse with an especial fever.

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Fifty years ago, the Rio Grande Valley of Texas was one of the last remaining frontiers in the West. Brownsville and Rio Grande City were its only settlements at the turn of the century; the Valley remained a thorny sauna of cactus whisky and .45 rhetoric at a time when most of the country had gone over to Model T’s, the Ziegfleld Follies and Coca-Cola. Harlingen in those days was Six-Shooter Junction. Although God-fearing citizens have since renamed the town after the Dutch village of Van Harlingen, erected Holiday and Ramada Inns, and imported at no small cost that internationally huzzah’d fountainhead of chic, Dapper Bobby Denisio, Harlingen, like the rest of the predominantly Mexican populated Valley, retains a certain degree of cultural panache,, one aspect of which can be witnessed at the Rio Grande Livestock Show and Rodeo held each year in Mercedes.

Johnny has played other Texas rodeos, up in Houston, San Antonio and such, but down here things are a little different. The ubiquitous screaming girls are slightly more ubiquitous. When Johnny goes into “Born To Ldse,” drifting smoothly from English to Spanish to English, 16-year-old girls bay for impletion — which means something’s going on. Not only were these girls but mere rises in their daddies’ Levis when the original Ted Daffan version of the song hit the waves, but, for the most part, they’d rather listen to Mountain albums than George Jones any old day.

Down here, more than anywhere else in Texas, there is a true Tex-Mex culture: boredom, beer joints and the eternal farming of grapefruits is pretty much what it’s all about in the lower Rio Grande Valley. When Johnny Rodriguez happened along with his beer angel voice and sexy looks, the grapefruit girls of Texas latched onto him the way pale Jewish girls from Queens latched onto Mick Jagger a decade ago. In both cases, there was something bigger than life — Rodriguez is no future citrus farmer stuck like an anemone to some drear, hot Texas hamlet just las Jagger wasn’t that pimply, homeworkmoiling dryhump artist with a future in computers. Kris Kristofferson hails from Brownsville in the Valley, blit there’s just something about an Oxford-educated Rhodes Scholar that rings a little too tinny down here. Rodriguez, on the other hand, is much more accessible. It should be testimony enough to his character that he remembers hard-top convertibles with an emphatic “Man, those things were fuckin’ cool\” It should be further testimony that he has no compunctions about juxtaposing songs like “Born To Lose” and “Faded Love” with stuff like “Ramblin’ Man” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” As far as songwriting abilities go, cop an aural on “I’ve Never Had a Thing that Ain’t Been Used” on My Third Album, a song inspired by a Printers Alley barmaid’s reference to her many suitors’ membra virilia. And, although Happy Shahan plans to have Johnny and the boys headlining Vegas before too long, the band has managed to forebear the wearing of funny suits (“golf suits” Rick Durrett calls them) for all but the most nazoid engagements.

When asked if being a country superstar on the ascent has altered his life at all, Johnny thought for a moment and then declared, “Yeah, in a way. I used to be able to go all these country dances and bars and get all fucked up and fall on my face in public. Can’t do that anymore.”