THE WIZARDS OF MOZ

The sound is eerily ‘80s, pulsating from the jingling strains of British popsters The Smiths to the rockabilly-infused licks that Smiths frontman and cult hero Morrissey adopted when the band broke up late in the decade.

But your eyes are seeing something else. Where a Smiths concert would have drawn a crowd of gaunt and pale teenagers with British-government-issue black-rimmed glasses, well-worn poetry books, spiky hair and white gladiola flowers sprouting from their pockets, here the skin is a warm brown and the hair is more likely to be pompadours swept high.

At the Brave Bull in San Gabriel most Fridays, the role of the wry-melancholy Smiths is played by a band called the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, whose own frontman, a Mexican American singer named Jose Maldonado, stands in for Morrissey. He speaks Spanish, a language in which Morrissey is not fluent, to the audience--a handful of twentysomething Smiths fans amid a throng of teenage roots-rock fanatics enthralled by Morrissey’s decade-long solo career. Under the Wild-West-meets-early-rock ‘n’ roll decor--buffalo heads and ox yokes competing with giant airbrushed images of Johnny Cash and James Dean--Maldonado’s pompadour floats like a dollop of chocolate mousse and his silk shirt shines. He takes the microphone off the cradle. “Hola, amigos. Me llamo Jose Maldonado. Gracias por venir. We are the Sweet and Tender Hooligans.” The crowd applauds. Then, in an extension of Morrissey’s well-known acerbic wit, he says in Spanish: “You have incredibly good taste.”

From the Latino enclaves of Boyle Heights, Alhambra, San Gabriel and Montebello they come to darkened clubs and back alleys at independent record stores such as Covina’s Hot Rocks Records to see Maldonado reenact the voice, mannerisms and awkward dance moves of the moody British singer who continues to be a lifeline for the emotionally sensitive. Maldonado, a 31-year-old Los Angeles County lifeguard and TV extra who calls himself the “Mexican Morrissey,” is the link between the pasty-skinned, pensive singer and his surprisingly strong Mexican American fan base in Southern California. He has portrayed Morrissey at scores of shows during the past eight years. He is the resident expert, the super-fan other fans look up to now that they rarely see their hero. Morrissey, now 41, lives in the Hollywood Hills and tours sporadically. And so Hooligans gigs become nights of desperate communion, a chance to demonstrate their love for their enigmatic recluse, who hasn’t produced an album of original music since 1997’s “Maladjusted.”

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COVER BANDS HAVE LONG TROD A CREATIVE LINE BETWEEN cheesy and captivating. At worst, they can be laughable; at best, they become pure time travel. There are the well-known incarnations of Beatlemania and the lesser-known tribute bands such as Wild Child (The Doors), Cold Gin (Kiss), Space Oddity (David Bowie) and Bjorn Again (ABBA). But the Sweet and Tender Hooligans are not just a group of musicians replaying the Morrissey songbook. The band’s almost-exclusively Mexican American fans treat them as Morrissey’s ambassadors, channeling his music directly to L.A.’s most fervent devotees.

But how to explain Morrissey’s enduring popularity? Many of these teenagers and twentysomethings were in elementary school when The Smiths called it quits in 1987 and Morrissey launched a solo career that spawned seven albums of original music. What seems to span the age gap is the way Morrissey, or “Moz,” as the British press named him, speaks to the emotional outsider with his droll, even sarcastic, views on loneliness, unrequited love and jealousy. There’s also a sexual ambiguity that he flaunts that has attracted its own following of boys who watch in rapt adoration. They are fascinated with his professed celibacy, with the books he reads--most notably poetry by Oscar Wilde--and the British “kitchen sink” realism films from the early ‘60s that he likes (his favorite is “Taste of Honey”). They dress in the same ‘50s-style clothes and sport thin-Elvis pompadours identical to the one Morrissey cultivated for the 1991 “Kill Uncle” tour. They recite his lyrics like evangelical preachers quoting Bible passages. Ask about Moz’s view on, say, depression, and expect the lyrics from “Yes, I Am Blind”:

“Yes, I am blind/No, I can’t see/The good things/Just the bad things, oh--God, come down/If you’re really there/Well, you’re the one who claims to care.”

You can certainly shrug it off as the kind of phenomenon that explains why teens today tune in to alternative rock station KROQ’s “Flashback Lunch” to hear “classic” songs from early ‘80s new-wavers such as Haircut 100 and Modern English. It was music played by their older brothers and sisters. But how do you account for the ethnic crossover? Could this be a generation’s protest against Mexican culture’s macho tradition? A shared identity that overpowers ethnic lines?

“If your dad is shoving rugged, tequila-drinking mariachi music in your face, there’s a good chance you’re probably going to look for something else to identify with,” says Ruben Mart’nez, who taught at an East L.A. junior high school and is the author of “The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond.” “Morrissey could definitely be that way out.”

“Mando,” a 26-year-old from San Gabriel who once collected the band members’ autographs on a drumstick, attends Hooligans performances with a cadre of male friends. “It just makes us feel how good friends we are,” he says, explaining the frequent embraces during concerts. “Morrissey has a lot of feelings. And they come out very strong when we hear the songs live.” But Mando knows when to tuck his feelings back inside, such as during a short jail stint due to missed court dates for multiple driving violations. “I didn’t tell anyone there,” he says. “They would have called me gay. People think if you’re Mexican and listen to Morrissey, you’re gay. It’s just not true. They don’t understand what Morrissey means. Jail was bad, but it would’ve been worse if they all knew.”

Much like the Mexican youths he attracts, Morrissey’s parents came from somewhere else. His family emigrated from Ireland to the harsh environs of the blue-collar English city of Manchester for better jobs, a better life. “Many of us [Morrissey fans] came from working-class backgrounds,” says Maldonado. “Manchester is not much different. Maybe, subconsciously, that is what attracts people to the music and we just relate to it. The similarity of background. Much the same way as L.A. is home to a lot of Mexicans, Manchester is home to a lot of Irish people.”

In the past few years, Morrissey has been more inclined to acknowledge his Spanish-speaking fans. He frequently throws in a simple “gracias” at the end of a song. At a show in Irvine in 1997, he said: “I have always wished I was born Mexican. But it’s too late for that now.” During a tour stop in Santa Barbara, he wore a T-shirt that read “Mexico” and substituted the lines “To be finished/Would be a relief” from “The Teachers Are Afraid of the Pupils” with “To be Mexican/Would be a relief.” His last tour was called “Oye Esteban!”--his full name is Steven Patrick Morrissey--and a concert ad in L.A. Weekly trumpeted: “El cantante! El concierto!” (The singer! The concert!)

“If you ever felt that you were a minority in any sort of way, felt you were held down, he appeals to that feeling,” says Elias Kotsios, a 20-year-old Moz fan from Bell whose father is Greek and mother Mexican. “Moz has always felt like an outsider. Now he’s really big in the Hispanic community, and he’s very loving to our race.”

There also may be musical echoes the young fans are responding to, as Morrissey’s lyrics and vocal style are infused with the same passion and high drama that have distinguished Mexican regional and Spanish pop music. He recalls bolero kings Los Panchos, Latin American icon Rocio Durcal and contemporary Mexican singer Juan Gabriel--music to which thousands of teens and twentysomethings raised in bilingual households have been exposed. “Many Latinos grew up with Spanish music, in which lyrics romantically roll off the tongue,” says Shirley Hernandez, 28, a Moz fan from South L.A. “Morrissey has done the same for the English language. Strong, heartfelt lyrics, clever wordplay and his perfect crooning voice have made him my teen idol.”

What’s also filtered down to Morrissey’s young fans is the swing and rock music their parents and grandparents listened to in East L.A. and Mexico, dancing in cabarets to everything from cha-cha-cha and mambo to Western imports Glenn Miller and Elvis Presley to Mexico rock bands Los Teen Tops and Los Locos del Ritmo. “One could argue very easily that rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly rhythms are an essential part of Mexican culture,” says Eric Zolov, assistant professor of history at Franklin & Marshall College and author of “Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture.”

By the time Elvis Presley had cemented a following among young Mexican Americans in the late ‘50s, a duality had set in. “Most Mexican American kids were at home listening to traditional ranchera and Los Panchos music,” says author Mart’nez. “But at American public high schools, they were faced with more modern music. There was this schizophrenic nature of Hispanic culture where home was the ‘Old World’ and anywhere outside of it was the ‘New World.’ ”

Even today, the quinceaneras, the traditional coming-out celebrations for 15-year-old girls, reflect this combination of old and new, with the music a mix of big band, waltzes, Nueva Cancion music and even punk. “At every family function people are swing dancing and dancing to rockabilly and rock bands singing in Spanish,” Kotsios says. “My grandfather had a lot of records. It’s always been in our family. This music definitely influences what I listen to today.”

Musical dualities aside, there’s a nagging sense that this Morrissey craze wouldn’t have the life it does without the stylings of native son Jose Maldonado. “The [Hooligans] singer is performing Anglo music, but he is one of their own so he becomes a spokesperson they can identify with and not feel excluded,” suggests Zolov.

“To me, Jose is one of the closest living things to Morrissey in the way he acts and moves,” Kotsios says. “In our scene, Jose’s huge. It’s like Moz is really performing there.”

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THE MORRISSEY THAT MALDONADO RE-CREATES EXISTS NOW ONLY in old concert videos: the days when the young and energetic frontman would fall to the floor during The Smiths’ song “Ask” and roll around to the delighted squeals of the crowd. It’s a stunt that Maldonado often reprises and that the crowd has come to expect.

Born in Burbank to working-class parents from Chihuahua, Mexico, Maldonado, the oldest of six children, grew up listening to the music his father, an aerospace industry machinist, and his mother, a housewife, played at home: Julio Iglesias, Spanish-language and ranchera music. But when he heard The Smiths’ definitive 1986 album “The Queen Is Dead,” “I was an instant fan,” he says. “That album touched me in such a way that, really, nothing else had affected me quite like that. Here was a guy who had a very sensitive voice, clever lyrics and you just never heard that. He didn’t fit the profile of the lead-singer stereotype.”

Maldonado founded the Sweet and Tender Hooligans, making use of The Smiths’ song of the same name, with bassist Lee Burkhart in 1992. He and Burkhart, a sound engineer at The Gig in West L.A. and Hollywood, intended to play only original music. Then Maldonado met Ray Devries, a Moz enthusiast and manager of Hot Rocks Records, who had decided to put on a convention honoring Morrissey at a now-defunct venue in Monrovia called Le Papillion.

“I have this band. I thought, we’re fans, so why don’t we see if we can learn a few songs and get out there and play for fun,” Maldonado says. He teased his hair into Morrissey’s signature pompadour, and the band hastily practiced 12 cover songs. “It was easier than I thought to impersonate Morrissey’s voice, and we were surprisingly well received,” says Maldonado of the performance before 800 convention-goers. “I knew we were all there for one common thing: They wanted to hear the songs and we wanted to play them.”

The band was such a hit that at the second Morrissey convention in 1993, at the Hollywood Florentine Gardens, Maldonado had to be escorted out by a security guard after the show. “There were so many fanatical fans who wanted my autograph,” Maldonado says. “I realized then either I’m really good at this or they’re doing a great job impersonating fans. That’s when I became a pseudo-celebrity.”

Drawing from the convention successes, the band began playing regular party gigs. By the next Morrissey Convention in 1997, Maldonado had met lead guitarist David Collett, operations manager for a classical guitar distributor, and rhythm guitarist Jeff Stodel Jr., an L.A. County deputy district attorney. They were performing as an instrumental duo under the name The Westlake Village People. Drummer Danny Garcia, a graphics designer for a Time Warner company, was brought aboard a little more than a year later.

Moz has never attended a Hooligans show, which is probably a good thing, as Maldonado would likely be too nervous to perform. He has met his idol on a few occasions but never had Moz acknowledged his impersonator--until an appearance at the Sunset Virgin Megastore for a DVD signing for the “Oye Esteban!” tour video. Maldonado waited in line with hundreds of fans, some of whom recognized him. Normally confident and professional, he seemed star-struck as he finally approached the signing table. “Hi, I’m your impersonator, Jose,” he started off awkwardly. Morrissey interrupted him: “It’s as if I’m looking in a mirror.” Maldonado was shocked when Moz said that he had seen a video of the Hooligans’ shows for last year’s Morrissey Convention. “I thought you did a fantastic job,” said Moz as he signed Maldonado’s DVD: “To Jose, Sweet and Tender Person. Morrissey.”

Afterward, Maldonado watched as young fans repeatedly grabbed Morrissey’s hand to kiss it. If the fans receive Morrissey with the adoration that Catholics show the pope, then Maldonado may be playing the role of a priestly confessor.

“When I’m covering Morrissey, all eyes really are on me,” says Maldonado. “If we had to replace anybody in the band other than myself, I don’t know if they would be missed.”

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THE YEAR 1999 FINDS THE Morrissey convention ensconced at The Palace in Hollywood. Maldonado and the Hooligans are on a velvet-curtained stage in front of a crowd of 1,300 Moz fans. Those in the audience paid $30 for the two-day get-together to trade obscure album covers, pictures, bootlegs and gossip about Moz’s sex life (they don’t buy into his claim of celibacy) and the location of his house (designed by Clark Gable for Carole Lombard and once owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald), among other things. They stand packed together, Morrissey T-shirt to Morrissey T-shirt, waiting for the Hooligans, the convention’s headliners, to play their first song.

Smoke floats under sets of computer-controlled lights and spotlights, creating “Star Trek”-like transporter beams across the stage. Fans chant “Morr--iss--sey! Morr--iss--sey! Morr--iss--sey!” When Garcia pounds out the rhythmic ‘50s rockabilly beat of “Sing Your Life,” the crowd begins cheering. Collett strums a chord and then brings down the pitch with the guitar whammy-bar. The chorus soon sends the song into double time with Burkhart slapping the strings of an upright bass in a four-bar blues scale.

“Oh, make no mistake my friend/All of this will end/So sing it now (sing your life)/All the things you love (sing your life)/All the things you loathe/Oh, sing your life--”

Half the audience breaks into an impromptu swing dance. Males with dark-gelled pomps, cuffed blue-black jeans, vintage button-ups and shiny black shoes swing around females with schoolgirl ponytails, tight skirts, ‘60s off-the-shoulder country-style shirts and high heels. Maldonado pulls at his shirt until the top two buttons pop open, a gesture that is met with sexually charged shrieks from both genders.

On the hard-driving “The Boy Racer,” from “Southpaw Grammar,” an album that glamorizes working-class toughs, Maldonado pumps his hand over his head. As the song builds, the crowd rushes forward as if propelled by a wave generator at a water park.

As Maldonado gently slaps the extended hands of the crowd below, a cuff of his white button-up shirt is snagged by fans. They have seen this on Morrissey concert videos. The pressure on his shirt tears the remaining buttons, ripping the fabric apart. Maldonado falls slightly forward but keeps singing, not missing a word.

Just when he begins to right himself again, he is sucked into the crowd and swarmed by a mass of groping hands. He drops the microphone. The band keeps playing. Three security guards rush over to pull him back onto the stage. Ten seconds later, he is singing again, bouncing around the stage. He swings his shredded shirt over his head, lasso-style. A female fan wearing a spaghetti-strap black top jumps onstage and runs toward him. She hugs him and kisses him on the cheek before security drags her to stage right. Suddenly, as the front turns into a slam pit area, people scramble to the sides of the room like rats avoiding a flood.

Maldonado twists the top half of his body and whips his arms around. Then the barrage begins. Multiple teens climb on top of the shoulders of people in the pit and jump onstage. Ripping off their shirts, they dance in circles to show off their tattoos to the audience, bumping into Maldonado as they do their victory dances. Then they dive into the pit. As Maldonado holds his right hand up, indicating the end of the song, he watches the stage dancers with a pained expression. It’s unclear whether he’s chagrined at their antics or just moved by the music. After all, it was Maldonado who opined about his alter ego: “He continues to reach a place in me that no other songwriter ever could.

“What I liken the feeling to is being a child and wrapping a towel around your neck and pretending you’re Superman. You really believe you are Superman at that moment, like you can fly and it really feels like you could bend steel. Every single show we do, I go back to being 6 years old and I feel like I am Superman. It’s quite a feeling.”