To El Vez, the King Will Always Be ‘El Rey’

He wears a sombrero and a garish jumpsuit with the Virgin of Guadalupe embroidered in sequins on the back. He sings such songs as “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Chihuahua,” “En el Barrio” and “Huaraches Azules.” One newspaper headline dubbed him “Elvis for Aztecs.”

He’s El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, and he’s got a pretty good gig going.

You want marketing? El Vez offers a full product line from compact discs to packaged, authenticated locks of his hair.

You want camp?

“My favorite color is gold,” he declares. He sports gold lame suits, loud mariachi outfits, a pencil mustache and Aztec headgear. At performances, his El Vettes gyrate behind him.

You want sociopolitical import? El Vez has transmogrified Elvis songs into explorations of immigration rights and other social issues (“Suspicious Minds” becomes “Immigration Time,” while “Little Sister” is now “Chicanisma,” about the empowerment of Latinas).

His performance at the Cal State Fullerton Pub today will mark the timely debut of an original song, “Cinco de Mayo,” which he describes as a Clash-like history lesson on the holiday.

El Vez--who in his less gaudy moments answers to Robert Lopez--has often been called the most intelligent of the Elvis impersonators. That may be an example of damning with faint praise.

“Yeah, in the company I’m in, that’s not saying much,” Lopez said recently in a phone interview from his Los Angeles home base. “Most Elvis impersonators don’t put that much thought into their show. But then, Elvis himself said, ‘I’m just an entertainer, not a politician.’

“What I’m trying to do is taking the Elvis idea and putting it into the ‘90s, because everyone needs to think more now,” Lopez said. “You can’t just be passive, as in the past. The power needs to be back in people’s hands.”

That’s a pretty big change to effect, even for a man with a gold lame cummerbund. Lopez, 32, doesn’t want for bravado, though. His 1988 debut as an ersatz Elvis was a baptism of fire.

Lopez had managed a Mexican folk-art gallery in Los Angeles, and one of its openings had featured several Elvis impersonators. A veteran of Southern California punk-era bands the Zeroes and Catholic Discipline, Lopez thought he could do better than they, and came up with the El Vez character.

Then he took a plane to Memphis, Tenn., during “Elvis Week,” which commemorates the anniversary of his death each August. El Vez made his first performance in front of rabid Elvis fans at an impersonators contest near Graceland. They liked him.

His Latino slant helped his performance stand out amid the karate-posing competition, the national wire services reported on his act, and El Vez was an instant celebrity. Lopez now makes his living as El Vez, touring the United States and Europe and sharing stages with acts as disparate as Linda Ronstadt and the Sugarcubes. He still returns to Memphis for “Elvis Week” appearances every year.

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Lopez says his persona is freer artistically than other Elvises and such novelty acts as Dread Zeppelin--which got its start doing reggae versions of Led Zeppelin songs--and traces some of that to the way he started out.

“The nice thing was when I started it, it was all on a dare to myself. In going to Memphis, I figured, ‘If I make a fool of myself, it’ll be in Memphis, where they won’t know who this fool is.’ I started off with a real what-the-heck attitude. That’s what made it fun, because I was taking chances and didn’t care.”

One example of his stylistic freedom, he said, is his “Cinco de Mayo” single. Rather than a reworking of an Elvis song, it’s an original, musically rooted in the Who, the Clash and the Dils, with no particular nod to Memphis.

“I’m really lucky that I can nod in any direction I want to. . . . The neat thing about being El Vez is people at first think, ‘Oh, you can only do this,’ but when you’re Mexican and you’re Elvis, combining the two kind of nullifies everything, and your artistic range is free to go wherever you want.”

Though he plays free and funny with the Elvis image, he says it’s done with respect.

“People who don’t know my shows think it’s all parody and making fun of Elvis,” he said. “But if you see the shows, you’ll know I do love Elvis. My whole house is full of Elvis stuff. I don’t think you can do this unless you love and admire Elvis. This isn’t some fat-man-on-pills Elvis parody.”

Lopez said that when he was growing up in Chula Vista, he always thought Elvis was Mexican.

“They invented the velvet painting of Elvis and made many busts of him,” he said. “And when I was a kid in the ‘60s, I had uncles with continental slacks and slight pompadours in that Elvis style. I thought Elvis looked like my uncles. He looked Latin. The first movie I ever saw him in was ‘Fun in Acapulco.’ I found out later that wasn’t even filmed in Mexico, but on a sound stage.”

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Despite that cinematic deception, Lopez used the “Fun in Acapulco” soundtrack cover art as the model for his Spanish-language El Vez album “Fun in Espanol.”

The same songs appear in a more anglicized form on his album “How Great Thou Art, the Greatest Hits of El Vez.” Both are released on the Long Beach independent Sympathy for the Record Industry label.

On the albums, Lloyd Price’s “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” becomes “Lordy Miss Lupe,” with a somewhat less secular subject. One verse proclaims:

I said Virgin de Guadalupe

I’m so glad that you came to me

You are La Nuestra Senora

And you’re brown like me “En el Barrio” takes a tongue-in-cheek look at inner-city crime, with an equally specious escape from it:

Out of East L.A.

With no more gangs and no more crime

To the promised land

Out in Anaheim . . . Near Disneyland.

On the album, El Vez freely mixes musical quotes and styles. Along with “In the Ghetto,” “En el Barrio” also sojourns through Traffic’s “Dear Mr. Fantasy” and the Beatles’ “I’ve Got a Feeling.”

A new album, of which the “Cinco de Mayo” single is a harbinger, is expected in June. It will include the politically astute “Immigration Time,” “Chicanisma” and a remake of the amorous “Baby, Let’s Play House,” with cautionary ‘90s lyrics about playing safe.

To the best of his knowledge, his “Cinco de Mayo” is the first pop or rock song about the holiday, though he has heard corridos and folk ballads that address it. The album will also include mariachi staples such as “La Negra” performed in a rock-band context.

“It’s like a cross between Gary Glitter--big pounding ‘70s guitar and drums--and the traditional melody and guitar,” Lopez says.

“We also do a rockabilly-Western swing version of Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland,’ only I change it to ‘Aztlan,’ the idea of California, Texas, Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona all being one big area before the Mexican-American war. It was all occupied by Mexicans and governed by Mexicans. It’s the idea of a Chicano space, what was ours, a self-governing, self-supporting land. It’s about the Chicano trying to find one’s identity.”

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As a songwriter whose clever lyrics often tickle listeners’ funny bones, Lopez doesn’t think he’s precluded from getting to their hearts.

“I think it’s the other way. Since the ideas are presented in a novel way, people are more receptive to laugh. And when they’re laughing, the ideas about immigration rights, safe sex and all that gets right in there.”

Recently, Lopez unveiled another character at some L.A. venues--Raul Raul--whom he describes as “a real angry Chicano beat poet. I enjoy it because he’s a solo act with no props or dancing girls to fall back on. It’s almost the opposite of El Vez, who is always so happy and positive-thinking. Raul Raul is yelling, spouting, finger-pointing at the ‘white devil slave masters’ and all that. But it’s really humorous.

“Both he and El Vez are totally different from Robert Lopez. I’m pretty mild-mannered and nondescript. I think it’s really therapeutic. As Robert Lopez, I have to account for my beliefs. But as a character you can just express ideas and let someone else have to sort through them.

“I’m open-minded and can see both the right and wrong in things, where Raul can only see the wrong and El Vez can only see the right,” he said. “But I guess there’s something in me that’s like them, that makes me be happy and dance as El Vez or angry like Raul Raul.”

And what does make him angry?

“Homelessness, everything. Why isn’t there more money spent for (fighting) AIDS? Why isn’t there better education for all these kids who are coming out of school not knowing anything but gangs? We need self-pride for kids so they don’t get into gangs just to feel bigger, so taggers have other forms of self-expression so they don’t need to write their names 10 feet high on a wall just to feel they’re somebody in this town,” Lopez said.

Amid that, El Vez is a display of hope, he said.

“I think he’s a real message of pride and a real positive idea of what America is: Elvis Presley being the greatest American entertainer success story, going from nothing to being one of the richest entertainers in the world.

“The idea of El Vez is you can do that also, and you don’t have to be a white man. It’s for blacks, Mexicans, women. Anyone can be a superstar. El Vez is the idea of the melting pot, and everyone’s welcome,” he said. “It’s Elvis as the American dream.”

* El Vez plays today at 1 p.m. in the Cal State Fullerton Pub, 800 N. State College Blvd., Fullerton. Free. (714) 773-3501.