On the Road to Stardom--and Lovin’ It : This 25-year-old singer from Santa Ana with the fashion model’s face and street-dancer’s moves might be the Next Big Thing

Jerry Greenberg, president of WTG Records, found himself in a Philadelphia warehouse a few weeks ago, watching his prize rookie in action.

Louie Cordero, the Santa Ana-based singer whose stage name, Louie Louie, was pinned on him during his days as a teen-age dancing flash in Orange County nightclubs, was singing to a crowd of warehouse employees, youngsters whose job it is to pack shipping crates full of records destined for retail shops. What Greenberg heard was music to a record executive’s ears.

“They were screaming by the time he was through,” Greenberg recalled over the phone from his Los Angeles office. “One girl yelled out, ‘I’M going to throw out my Bobby Brown records! From now on, Louie, you it.’ ”

The scene underscored what Greenberg and others at CBS Records (WTG’s parent company) suspect about this 25-year-old singer with the fashion model’s face, athlete’s physique, street-dancer’s moves, and--in a genre where many a success story is all window-dressing and no substance--the ability to write snappy songs an dsing them with authority. Louie Louie just might be it.

“The Latin world has never had an Elvis, a Prince, one of those totally unique artists,” said Bobby Colomby, the former Blood, Sweat & Tears drummer who, as a CBS Records executive, has served as Louie Louie’s coach and mentor. “This may be it. He may be the guy.”

While Louie Louie’s just released debut album, “The State I’m In”, won’t challenge early Elvis or prime Prince on anyone’s list of groundbreaking records, it is state-of-the-art dance pop that might well induce the fans of a star like Bobby Brown to set their favorite albums aside (if not throw them out) and give this part-Puerto Rican, part-Irish contender a spin.

What they will hear is a record that incorporates rock, funk, rap and Latin music while painting story-sketches of love and sex that manage to go beyond the deadening cliches of much dance music. The early signs are that Louie will get more than a fair hearing: An initial shipment of more than 100,000 copies of the album has been sent to record stores, according to Greenberg, and the single, “Sittin’ in the Lap of Luxury,” which featuers trumpet flourishes from Dizzy Gillespie, is being added rapidly to radio play lists.

As for Louie, he doesn’t appear to have been caught off balance by the touting of highly placed backers or the onset of great commercial expectations. Far from falling into the spotlight, Louie has been courting stardom all along. It is what he has pursued for the past six years--deliberately, aggressively, and in the face of setbacks.

“He’s a person who walks in the room, and every head turns,” Colomby says, his I-love-Louie rap slipping into high gear. “There are a lot of attractive people out there. He has an intrinsic charisma that’s magical, and he’s a good kid. He’s not one of these maniacal people who spends his life trying to think of how he can step over other people to make it.”

In person, Louie Cordero turns out to be one of those people who can charm almost without trying. Looks play a part in that: With his copper skin and high cheekbones, he has the chiseled appearance of a young Indian brave. Streaks of blue ribbon running through his black hair lend a touch of the exotic that is further embellished by the patch of dyed-blond hair above Louie’s neckline, and the rap-fashion cornrows furrowed into his temple.

During a recent interview at a Costa Mesa restaurant, Louie was self-assured without ever seeming arrogant, overbearing, or too full of himself. Most of the time Louie would lean forward, fixing a listener with brown eyes locked in concentration. But thornier questions about such issues as the inner motivation behind is arena-size ambitions would prompt a commentary retreat. Louie would ease back in the restaurant booth, slumping a little, as if to huddle with himself. Lifting his right hand to his mouth, gnawing the thumb lightly as he thought, he seemed to be making an earnest effort to render an honest accounting for a drive that must by now be so internalized that he never much considers it.

“I guess I need gratification constantly,” Louie offered after a long pause. Stardom “is the most incredible thing that could ever happen to somebody. Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to be on TV or in the movies. I t attracted me because if you’re famliar to everybody in the world, it seems safer. I have this thing, I always have to perform. I don’t think people know me unless they see me perform.”

Louie’s introduction to pop stardom came from the radio. When he was a boy, he would spend Sunday mornings listening to Casey Kasem’s weekly “American Top Forty” show, paying special attention to the informational tidbits about the performers that Kasem would sprinkle through the program’s countdown of hits.

“My mom would buy a lot of music magazines, like Hit Parader,” Louie recalled. “They’d be lying around and I’d read lyrics of songs.”

Louie said the family hopscotched from town to town in Orange and Los Angeles counties, until he ultimately graduated from El Toro High School. His father, Louis Cordero, was a businessman who ran liquor stores and markets, then went into car sales; he and Louie’s mother divorced when Louie was in his teens. The second oldest in a family of four boys and two girls, Louie got a day job as a car salesman, but his real goal was to be persuasive on the dance floor. “I always wanted to be a singer, but I didn’t think I could . . . (so) I pursued dancing.

“You need confidence. As soon as you get the confidence to sing, you can sing,” Louie said, offering the first of many maxims about show business that he readily drops.

“Singing was exactly what I wanted to do,” Louie said. “So I was scared. It’s like you had the perfect girl, and you shy away from her because you don’t want to get married.”

But Louie wasn’t shy about holding the spotlight on the dance floor of local nightclubs, where he would perform in baggy ‘40s-style Zoot suits or ‘50s rockabilly regalia. He became a regular competitor in club dance contests, vying for prizes decided by audience response.

“You have to have a point of view, a style,” Louie said (another maxim). “I think I had that before my music did. I developed a character and a stage presence before I had the music. The contests were part of shaping it. The Red Onion is harder to perform at than the Forum. The people at the club didn’t come just to see a dance contest. So I learned how to work an audience, connect with everybody in the room.”

Louie’s dance club successes led to auditions for dance-oriented films being shot in Los Angeles around the time of the break-dancing craze. At one of those auditions, he says, he was spotted by a director who was preparing to shoot a video for a still-emerging singer named Madonna. Louie wound up playing the leading man’s role opposite Madonna in the 1984 “Borderline” video. The song became the first Top Ten hit of her career.

Louie says that for a time he squired Madonna around Los Angeles on dates.

“We were just driving down the 10 Freeway and a song came on the radio,” he recalled. “I started singing, and she looked at me in amazement: ‘My God, you can sing too.’ ” At the time, he said, he had never sung in public.

Louie said that Madonna’s manager, Freddy DeMann, took an interest in him and encouraged him to start writing songs.

“I had all these big people telling me I had something,” he said. “It was like an awakening. It kept me going.

Then came a ruder awakening. “I was going to go on tour dancing with Madonna, and it didn’t work out. That was let-down No. 1. She had hired a choreographer, which was the right thing for her to do. But (the choreographer wanted) jazz dancing, not street dancing, and that’s not what I’m about.”

Louie says he lost contact with Madonna as her career took off. But Ron Weisner, who had been part of her management team, continued to take an interest in him “because of his persistence.”

“He was very serious about his career,” recalled Weisner, who now manages Paul McCartney and Steve Winwood. “I told him it’s a frustrating business. I told him at the time, ‘You’ve got to be able to deal with people saying no to you’ . . . (but) he’s serious about what he’s doing--and he’s a nice guy.

“Sometimes,” Weisner continued, “you see people who have talent, and you put them together with somebody who might enhance that.” Weisner helped Louie hook up with Giorgio Moroder, the successful disco-era record producer. Louie says he sang at some 1985 recording sessions produced by Moroder and his studio assistants. But Louie and Moroder never reached a formal business agreement that might have led to a record release.

That fruitless episode led Louie to his next important patron: his own father.

“When I first got into music, he was absolutely not supportive,” said Louie, who quit selling cars after his “Borderline” break. “I kind of was away from my family for a year. But when he found out Giorgio Moroder was working with me, that I was serious about it and it was not another whim, my dad gave me money.”

Louie says his father equipped him with home recording gear and gave him the use of a house he owned in Santa Ana. Louie began to build a band, which at one point featured the dancer Cat, who later went on to perform in Prince’s band. His current lineup, which will begin touring this summer, includes dancer-percussionist Sam Masarani, singer B.J. Smith, percussionist Gino G., drummer Herb Graham and bassist Tony Ruiz.

The next stop on Louie’s climb was the La Habra recording studio of Jon St. James, whose work with Stacey Q and Bardeux had made him Orange County’s most commercial successful record producer.

St. James, who began working with Louie in 1987, found him to be a natural performer, willing to communicate his musical ideas in the most elemental way: by just getting up and singing them.

“Louie’s very flamboyant, and if you give him a chance to shine, he’ll take over,” St. James said. “He’d walk in and start singing a cappella at the top of his lungs. He’d come into the studio and say, ‘Jon, you’ve got to hear this,’ and he’d start singing and dancing around.”

That lack of inhibition carried over into Louie’s stage act, recalled Romi Marie, St. James’ assistant at the time. The consensus around St. James’ Formula One Studio was that Louie’s outrageous shows weren’t helping him.

“In all honesty, a lot of people (in the music business) didn’t take Louie seriously,” said Marie, who first brought the singer to St. James’ attention. “His type of dancing was like exotic dancing, real risque. He had Spandex pants that were cut up, with holes all over him. A lot of people were saying, ‘It’s too Chippendales.’ ”

Louie recorded one single with St. James, “The Girl Who Seduced the World.” The song, written by St. James and released on the Synthecide/Enigma label, was roundly ignored.

“When he wanted to do a second record (Enigma) wasn’t committed to it,” St. James recalled. “They said, ‘Wait and see.’ Louie got an attorney and got out of the (recording) deal. I don’t blame him for it. He’s very impatient. He wants to be a star overnight. I think anybody who has that quality wants to be. That’s how they get there. I envisioned him as another Prince.”

“I felt constantly let down,” Louie said of his string of early disappointments with Madonna, Moroder and St. James. “I always blamed it on myself, that I’m not that good, that I had to get better. But I kind of like to fail. You have to have a lot of humbling experiences, because then you know where you come from.”

Though Louie didn’t get a hit out of his tenure under St. James, he did acquire a manager, Kelly Newby. Louie’s script for stardom required somebody cast in the Freddy DeMann patron role, and Newby filled it.

“I was looking again for somebody to say the (encouraging) things that Freddy said, “Louie recalled. “You need people to believe almost more than you do to get to the next level.” By late 1988, Newby’s contacts as a former film and television agent had moved Louie to the level he wanted: a major label recording contract.

Colomby, a friend of Newby’s, saw Louie and his band play in Los Angeles and agreed to work with him as musical adviser (Louie refers to Colomby--who previously had coached Richard Marx, among others--as “like a navigator”).

When pop singer Martika, a former television client of Newby’s, saw Louie she became so enthused that she called Tommy Mottola, president of CBS Records. Mottola, based in New York, asked WTG’s Greenberg to take a look. Greenberg, seeking acts for the newly formed subsidiary label, liked what he saw.

Louie, meanwhile, was beginning to realize that the more extreme moves that had won him acclaim in the Los Angeles and Orange County dance clubs might not go over as well with the mass audience he wanted to reach.

“I toned it down,” he said. “I took a lot of the sex out of the show because people were coming for that instead of the songs. As the songs got better, I wanted to concentrate on the songs.”

Despite his dance floor beginnings, Louie wanted his songs to do more than recycle the usual dance cliches.

“Anybody can write a song about that, about pushing to the groove, or moving to the beat,” Louie said.

“I think songs about sex and dancing (aren’t enough). There should be a lesson in every song. I think my album is like an emotional roller coaster. It takes you up and down, and around.”

To be sure, the album has its share of sex songs, but Louie typically manages to weave a narrative situation around his romantic-encounter material. “Sittin’ in the Lap of Luxury,” for example, embellishes the story of a young gigolo with a bit of psychological underpinning for the character’s life of luxurious sin. Louie also gives the song a happily redemptive, true-romance ending. It isn’t exactly Bob Dylan, but compared to such dance-pop competitors as Paula Abdul and Milli Vanilli, Louie’s method seems adventurous and complex.

The album’s best song, “The State I’m In,” moves from nervous urgency to gospel-tinged celebration as Louie sings about the pressures he encounters in the outside world, and his own determination to find an inner balance that will let him rise above it. The song is a catchy, propulsive rallying cry for positive change.

Jerry Greenberg figured that Louie’s debut held enough promise to merit some unusual promotional attention. The veteran music executve, formerly with Atlantic Records, left his label president’s desk and shepherded Louie around the Northeast on a recent pre-release jaunt aimed at winning over radio programmers, journalists and buyers for record store chains.

Greenberg said the last performer he had personally introduced in that way was Jason Bonham, son of the late drummer for Led Zeppelin, a band Greenberg had worked with in his Atlantic days.

“We don’t do it for every artist, but every once in a while there’s somebody special like Louie Louie,” Greenberg said.

What all this means is that highly placed people in the music business are seeing Louie in the same light in which he has always seen himself.

“Forum-level concert shows,” Louie replied when asked the extent of his ambitions. “It’s so big that it doesn’t have any boundaries.”

Amid the release of more than 100,000 copies of his just-released album, “The State I’m In,”