Viva El Vez, the Mexican Elvis

ELVIS might have left the building, but El Vez, the Mexican Elvis/Chicano activist/cult performer extraordinario, has settled down here in Seattle and is living it up.

Prompting pandemonium at a "Viva Oz Vegas" Halloween show.

Glamming it up while "wrestling" burlesque performer Paula the Swedish Housewife at Neumo's recently.

And swiveling his sequined hips nightly as part of the Teatro ZinZanni extravaganza in a Mercer Street tent.

El Vez unleashes his freak flag like there's no mañana. He's a 150-pound dynamo with seemingly zero body fat (his jumpsuits, despite all the baubles, hide absolutely nothing). Black mariachi boots, proper pompadour, sexy mustache inked with black Sharpie pen.

"It says 'nontoxic' so I'm hoping, after 18, 19 years, it really is, or else my lip would fall off," laughs Robert Lopez, brain and body behind El Vez. El Rey!

Lopez is genteel and soft-spoken, and since it'd be rude to call El Vez middle aged, it's worth pointing out one other envious characteristic: He has inherited that Ralph Macchio/Dick Clark looks-defy-age gene. He may be approaching 50 (he's 47), but he looks closer to 40, which is really the new 30, if magazine headlines are to be believed.

So how did El Vez end up here? And who's the man underneath all the glitz?

Elvis with a twist

In 1988, after a notable stint as a punk musician in L.A., Lopez was running a lowbrow Hollywood art gallery, La Luz De Jesus, when the "El Vez" idea struck. For the opening of an Elvis-themed gallery show — kitschy folk-art galore — he hired an Elvis impersonator. But the man wasn't that good.

"I kept critiquing him. 'Swing your hips more,' " Lopez recalls.

The art show lasted a month, and after so much Elvis-saturation, Lopez dared himself to go to Memphis for the Elvis tribute week commemorating the King's Aug. 16, 1977, death. It was all a whim: whip up fliers with photos of Elvis Presley and a mariachi band from the movie "Fun in Acapulco." Then announce the gimmick: "Elvis is Mexican. El Vez the Mexican Elvis tonight!"

"I handed out fliers that I'd be performing at Bad Bob's Vapors roadhouse, which specializes in Elvis impersonators. Maybe 300 fliers, and they went in 10 minutes."

The following night, El Vez debuted in gold lamé pants and a jean jacket singing "Está bien Mamacita" to the song "That's All Right Mama," "Huaraches Azules" to "Blue Suede Shoes" and "You Ain't Nothing But a Chihuahua" to you know what song.

He was a hit.

"I had meant to do it just once, and it kind of backfired," Lopez says. "And here I am almost 20 years later."

In that time, El Vez, who speaks in Spanish-accented English, has crooned, strutted and winked his dark (sometimes made-up) eyes throughout the world: U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe and Australia. He's opened for David Bowie, Carlos Santana and the B-52's. He's played all the clubs: the Crocodile Cafe, the House of Blues, the Knitting Factory in Hollywood. He's entertained crowds in the thousands (15,000 in Norway), in the tens (about 15 at an Arlington, Va., pizza parlor) and who knows how many in their own homes when someone has popped in his CD. (The official El Vez discography — www.elvez.net — lists 25 CDs, LPs and singles).

Living the vida vibrant

To say El Vez is popular is to say Elvis had charm. Suavecito El Vez inspires rabid applause, flush cheeks, occasional tattoos and elaborate handmade gifts. One such treasure, given to him by a fan and found in Lopez's basement rehearsal room, is an El Vez portrait meticulously constructed out of rice and other grains.

Lopez gives a tour of his North Seattle house, bought three years ago when he moved here from Los Angeles, drawn by the eclectic art and theater scene. (Lopez is also a stage actor.) The house, like El Vez, is full of color and flair, although the Christmas tree is the traditional green natural kind. If El Vez were the one shopping, Lopez says, the tree would be artificial silver and decorated in green, white and red: the colors of the Mexican flag.

Lopez, a film buff, has striped his home media room in orange, purple and green. The bedroom's blue, the living room's pink and the kitchen's yellow with one wall covered in Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) skeleton masks. There are tokens of his art-gallery days throughout: wooden furniture studded with bottlecaps and Elvis Presley gum wrappers; an equally bejeweled Elvis throne; assorted folk art and religious carvings, including a life-sized San Simon, the Guatemalan saint.

If he weren't El Vez, if he weren't a lucky guy making a living doing what he loves, Lopez says he'd probably still be running the gallery.

"What I learned promoting artists, writing up their bios, coming up with catchy phrases for the shows, is what I did to promote El Vez," he says. "That first year was really great. I was just making it up. It was a con. Everyone thought I knew what I was doing, but I was having fun and I had that punk rock 'Do It Yourself' attitude."

Music with meaning

He grew up in Chula Vista, Calif., south of San Diego, and was one of the few Latinos in his neighborhood and at school. By the time he was 16, he was in a pioneering punk band called The Zeroes. Think a kind of Mexican Ramones.

His musical influences are wide: Bowie; Elvis, of course; the rock band Rocket From The Crypt; and Make-up, which blended garage rock with gospel.

Early on, El Vez was largely kitsch and silly, billed as the love child between Elvis and Charo. (Lopez fakes the accent when he performs; he has none in real life.)

And as a Latino co-opting a white musical legend who had appropriated black music, El Vez was unmistakably pushing back on society's broad notions about ethnicity and race.

But then he took it one step further.

"I took on the banner of heralding the Chicano experience, and once I got an agenda under my El Vez belt, the show kind of changed," he says. The silliness and dazzle factor still soar (those flashy, fringe-y costumes), but an El Vez show is also a Mexican/Chicano history lesson, a performance by a thinking man's entertainer.

The El Vez repertoire includes songs (originals and mashups) about immigration, poverty, safe sex, gang violence, Pancho Villa, Aztlan, Cuauhtémoc, Emiliano Zapata and César Chávez, all laced with Spanish and Spanish slang, and all with the cleverest of lyrics.

One of the most personal — about a Mexican-American who can't speak Spanish — is "Soy Un Pocho." (I'm not white bread but I am a sandwich and I don't speak Spanish but I try my best. S-O-C-K-S).

One of the catchiest, currently in the ZinZanni show, is his version of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business," which pays tribute to undocumented workers and has references to day laborers at hardware stores, field workers getting sprayed with pesticides and running from la migra (Immigration agents).

We get up every morning from alarm clocks warning / doing menial jobs around the city / There's a whistle up above and we're cleaning and we scrub/ do your lawns to make you look pretty

And we're taking care of business / Everyday! / Taking care of business / ¡Orale!

"Robert is really great with language and what he's doing is, he's not an Elvis translator, he's translating American culture from a Chicano point of view," says Michelle Habell-Pallan of the University of Washington, who writes about El Vez in her book "Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture."

"As academics we can write papers, but we don't reach audiences at the same scale that El Vez does. He's a public intellectual," she says.

Nothing pleases Lopez more.

His El Vez can enlighten. His El Vez can entertain. Or, if you allow him to, both.

Look for the second, unabashedly liberal, full-blown "El Vez For Prez" national tour next year.

In the meantime El Vez — as Uncle Sam, as Santa, as an impish emcee — is holding court in the ZinZanni spiegeltent as part of the wildly talented ensemble and, mamacita, he's a whole lot of fun.

Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com