AMPING IT UP:
THE woman on the phone with Los Angeles’ top-rated morning DJ confides that she used to work as a prostitute. On the air, she sounds young and conflicted. She has tried to get out of the life, she tells the radio host in Spanish. But her current job in retail just doesn’t pay, and she’s tempted to sell herself again.
The woman’s call comes in just before 10 a.m. on a recent day at the Glendale studios of La Nueva, KSCA-FM (101.9). Piolin, the former undocumented alien who helped rally last spring’s massive immigration marches, is almost six hours into his marathon daily shift. He has an hour left to go but shows no sign of waning.
Though his program is often frantic and noisy, he takes on the soothing voice of father/confessor to delicately reassure the caller, using Spanish terms of endearment that melt with avuncular compassion.
“You can improve yourself, mamita,” coos Piolin, the Spanish name for Tweety Bird. “You must find a new path because your body is worth its weight in gold. Remember, hija, you have a mission here on Earth.”
Abruptly, the voice of one of his zany cohorts rudely interrupts: “Your mission is to please men.”
“Shut that pig up!” somebody else shouts.
Then, the wisecracker insults the host: “She reminds me of your ex-wife, only this one charges.”
“Saquenlo! (Get him out of here!),” commands Piolin. “He has no shame!”
The dramatized ejection -- with the DJ literally chasing the offender around the studio -- is accompanied by a cacophony of catcalls, hoots, jeers and whistles. Such antics surrounding real-life dramas are a staple of “Piolin por la Manana,” the hugely popular morning show hosted by Eddie Sotelo, who got his nickname because childhood friends thought he looked like the bug-eyed cartoon character.
The former class clown from a working-class town near Guadalajara, Mexico, has grown up to become the most popular Spanish-language DJ in the United States -- syndicated by Univision in 16 major markets, including San Francisco, Houston and Phoenix, with plans to move into 10 more this year, including New York, Miami and Chicago. Most Americans had never heard of him until he helped mobilize half a million people to demonstrate for immigration reform on the streets of L.A. last spring. The dramatic marches helped stall a strict immigration bill in Congress and push legislation to a back burner.
Within the Latino community, the DJ’s popularity just keeps growing. In the last year, Piolin’s ratings have jumped dramatically from a 5.1% audience share in summer 2005 to 7.2% this summer, the reporting period immediately following the marches. He not only far surpassed his closest Spanish-language competitor, No. 2-ranked “El Cucuy” on La Raza (KLAX-FM) with a 4.9 share, but he also eclipsed all his English-language rivals: KROQ’s Kevin and Bean, KFI’s Bill Handel and Rush Limbaugh, KIIS-FM’s Ryan Seacrest and Power 106’s “Big Boy.”
On one level, “Piolin por la Manana” is pure madcap entertainment. The program is boisterous, irreverent and chaotic, more squawk show than talk show. The host is a mash-up of Oprah, Jerry Springer and Cantinflas.
At the controls, Piolin goes loco, dancing in place to music and hopping in glee at a prank. He is in constant motion, taking calls and orchestrating the vocal participation of a whole village of odd characters -- Casimiro Buenavista Miralejos, the town drunk; Chela Prieto, the single mom; and Don Poncho, the wealthy macho who considers all women inferior.
Meanwhile, his handful of in-studio assistants are stationed at microphones around a crescent-shaped console, facing him like a peanut gallery spouting cracks. A producer stands at his side, whispering in his ear. When the rabble says something offensive, which is often, Piolin shouts his famous “Saquenlo” (Get him out of here!), and the noisy chase around the studio is on again.
Outreach pays off
DURING an interview following his show recently, the normally loquacious DJ was at a loss to explain the ratings. He bowed his head in silent prayer before lunching on a chicken sandwich at the building’s cafeteria, then simply called his success a “blessing.”
The key, he finally offers, is audience participation. Piolin compares his show to a soap opera. There are people in distress. There are good guys and bad guys, winners and losers. And the audience is either cheering or booing. The difference from the tube is that radio listeners can be interactive.
“That’s the nice thing about the show: The listener becomes a part of it,” says Piolin, whose lunch was interrupted by a fan who had driven four hours from Santa Maria to meet him. “It’s the stuff of daily life. You have the drama and you get angry or you get happy when the guy gets the girl, so to speak. The listeners are driving along and they want to jump in and participate. They say, ‘Hey, I didn’t like that joke and I’m going to call and give him a piece of my mind.’ ”
When Piolin took over the drive-time slot at La Nueva in February 2003, he was replacing the most popular Spanish-language DJ at the time, Renan Almendarez Coello, “El Cucuy,” who moved to an afternoon slot at the station. In an interview at the time, Piolin spoke of the burden of sustaining the ratings of his superstar predecessor.
“To inherit the most popular morning show in Los Angeles is like having a sack of rocks thrown at you,” Piolin told the Spanish-language daily La Opinion. “But I’m ready to do it and I have faith that we can make it.”
His faith proved well-founded. The following year, Piolin found himself competing head to head against the man he had replaced when El Cucuy left La Nueva over a dispute with management and jumped back into the drive-time race at rival La Raza, owned by the Spanish Broadcasting System. The move sparked a ratings war between the two former co-workers, stand-ins for the clash of corporate radio that dominates the Spanish-language market.
In the end, Piolin prevailed. In January 2005, the Univision network trumpeted the news that its new star had surpassed his rival, helping to catapult La Nueva to second place in the overall ratings, a hair behind K-LOVE (KLVE-FM, 107.5), a soft-pop station also owned by Univision.
But Piolin downplays the rivalry. “For me, El Cucuy is a master of the microphone,” he says. “He’s a pioneer of Spanish-language radio here in Los Angeles, along with another master, Humberto Luna, and Mr. Martin Becerra and Jaime Pina. They all deserve my respect because I learned a lot from each of them.”
Piolin and Cucuy have similar styles, light on music and heavy on corny jokes, laugh tracks and community service. They both have high public visibility and crazy crews contributing to the in-studio mayhem. But there are also significant differences, starting with their nationalities. Piolin, who comes from the state of Jalisco, brings with him the ability to personally identify with the Mexican immigrant masses, Southern California’s Latino majority. This may give him an edge over El Cucuy, who is Honduran.
“El Piolin is a great communicator who speaks perfectly the language of the Mexican people,” says veteran record executive Guillermo Santiso. “He speaks to people as if he were seeing their faces.” Piolin is also less crude and overtly sexual than Cucuy, relying more on a typically Mexican form of double entendre known as albur. (“I don’t think you need to say bad words to make people laugh,” Piolin says.) Some of the humor is so colloquial it may sound foreign, even to other Spanish speakers.
And unlike El Cucuy, Piolin doesn’t have a charitable foundation through which to funnel his community fundraising. Piolin is more like a parish priest. He ministers one on one.
In one case, he helped a disabled woman acquire a motorized wheelchair. In another, he organized a soccer game where listeners sold tamales to raise money for a destitute Salvadoran woman who had lost her son in Iraq before the soldier could finish building her a home.
“We should finish her dream,” Piolin urged his listeners after seeing the story on the news. And they did.
Sometimes, listeners keep one another honest. When one elderly woman called from a pay phone to say she was homeless and needed help, some listeners recognized her voice and her false story. So the listeners picked her up and took her to the studio, where Piolin extracted her confession as a fake. Live, on the air.
“I think the show creates a sense of community,” says UCLA film and television professor Chon Noriega. “It’s an audience that really is not addressed in any other medium. The dialogue and interaction with the host is something you just don’t get on TV and you get in a clumsy way on the Internet. Newspapers are not going to play that function of creating a common space, though they used to 100 years ago. On the radio, people are listening to others like themselves talk to Piolin, and that amplifies his ability to connect as a social force.”
Piolin preaches in slogans that would make a grandma proud: Be positive. Save for a rainy day. Everything is possible. No excuses! Once, when work duties made him late for his regular afternoon soccer match, his teammates, all listeners, threw his slogan back at him: “No excuses.”
A rising profile
IN L.A., Piolin’s face is everywhere, plastered all over town on billboards and the sides of buses. The ads are only one sign of the corporate muscle behind him. His show is chock-full of A-list advertisers, including Pepsi, Sony, Albertsons and Best Buy.
“We are generally very envious in this business and never say anything nice about anybody,” says Pepe Garza, program director at rival station La Que Buena (KBUE-FM 105.5). “But Piolin has really known how to take advantage of all his strengths. He works very, very hard, and he has the best marketing plan anybody could ever have.”
That plan features a level of cross-media synergy possible only at a conglomerate the size of Univision, the colossus of Spanish-language broadcasting in the U.S. with some 130 radio and TV stations nationwide. Piolin is an increasingly frequent guest on some of Univision’s most popular TV programs, such as the Miami-based talk show “El Gordo y la Flaca.”
“You see him all over TV,” says Jackie Madrigal, Latin formats editor at Radio & Records, an industry trade journal. “He’s a very hot property for them.”
How hot? Univision won’t say. Executives of the notoriously tight-lipped network assiduously avoid media interviews under strict orders from Chairman A. Jerrold Perenchio.
Piolin also has his secrets. The host is evasive about his private life. He jokes when asked his age (36). He’s vague when asked where he lives. And he sidesteps when asked if he’s married.
“This is my family,” he says, pointing to the crew that has followed him down for lunch. “Can’t you see they’re my children?”
Yes, and Papa Piolin picked up the tab for the whole lot, almost $100 in sandwiches, sodas and chips. After lunch, Piolin and the crew meet to assess the show and return some of the 2,000 phone calls they get every day.
“This job for me is round-the-clock,” says Piolin, who runs and plays soccer to decompress. “You can’t disconnect because you always have to be thinking and be creative. What else can I do? What else? What else?”
Though the immigration issue has faded, Piolin continues his activism. In September, he was one of 2,500 people attending a mass workshop for new citizens and voters sponsored by the National Assn. of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials at the L.A. Convention Center.
“I don’t feel powerful,” says Piolin, “and I don’t know anything about politics. I see this whole thing as a chain. We on the radio form a chain with listeners that keeps growing so more and more people can get the help they need.... That’s what we accomplished with the marches, because people are no longer afraid to become informed.”
Piolin’s presence at the workshop was as much a distraction as an attraction. The DJ was so swamped by admirers seeking autographs that organizers worried participants wouldn’t have time to fill out their immigration forms.
At one point, organizers used Piolin to demonstrate how easy it is to take the picture required for the application process. For the star, the photo was the real deal. He used it for his citizenship application, which is now pending.
Piolin is the son of a factory worker raised in Octolan, Jalisco, the furniture-making capital of Mexico. As a small boy, he developed a faulty heart valve and nearly died. His family considered his recovery a miracle. His grandfather, however, didn’t want to leave his health entirely in God’s hands. Abuelito made sure to take the boy for regular jogs to strengthen his ticker.
When it came time for Piolin to make a run across the border, he was ready. In 1986, at age 16, he says he crossed illegally at Tijuana, wearing borrowed sneakers, and joined his father in Santa Ana. Eventually, both parents and two brothers would be living together in a rented garage.
The teenager worked various part-time jobs, recycling metal cans, washing cars at a used car dealer, doing maintenance at apartments in Irvine. He got a taste of theater at Saddleback High School and liked to emcee at parties and quinceaneras. All the while, he dreamed of being a big-time DJ, practicing his act in the dark room of a one-hour photo processing store where he worked.
In 1991, he got his first break in radio, landing a job at a station in Corona. But he was quickly fired for not having a green card. His illegal status hounded him at jobs in Oxnard, San Jose and Sacramento, where immigration agents arrested him outside the studio. The final time, he beat deportation by the skin of his teeth. His work permit came through just moments before being sent back to Mexico.
He considered the 11th hour reprieve another miracle, and now uses it to illustrate one of his trademark, grandmotherapproved aphorisms. “Each one of us needs to make a difference wherever we may stand. Let your presence be felt. Let it be known that you arrived.”
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Cornering the morning market
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“Morning drive,” it’s called in the industry -- radio’s prime time: the weekday hours between 6 and 10 a.m., when the audience is at its largest as people flip on the radio at home and in their cars to help get the day started. Here are the Top 10 morning shows in the Los Angeles-Orange County market as measured by Arbitron from June 29 to Sept. 20, its most recent quarterly survey of listening habits. A new report covering the fall is due out Wednesday.
*--* Host Station Share 1. Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo KSCA-FM 7.2 2. Omar Velasco & Argelia Atilano KLVE-FM 4.9 2. Renan Almendarez Coello (“El Cucuy”) KLAX-FM 4.9 4. Kevin Ryder & Gene “Bean” Baxter KROQ-FM 4.6 5. Bill Handel / Rush Limbaugh* KFI-AM 4.5 6. Ryan Seacrest KIIS-FM 4.3 7. Juan Leal (“El Cascabel”) and Los Guapos KBUE-FM 3.6 7. Kurt “Big Boy” Alexander KPWR-FM 3.6 9. none KCBS-FM 2.9 9. Mark Thompson & Brian Phelps KLOS-FM 2.9
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*Bill Handel is on 5 to 9 a.m.; Rush Limbaugh is on 9 a.m. to noon.