Issue 10
El Vez
By Heather MurphyPhotos By Jeremy and Claire Weiss
Illustration By Zootszoff
Elvis impersonators come a dime a dozen, but Robert Lopez, aka El Vez, the “Mexican Elvis,” is no imitator. He infiltrates Elvis songs with a blend of kitschy Las Vegas-style glitz and Chicano-power performance art. “I don’t think I have an original bone in my body,” he claims. “It’s all about collaging in an interesting way.”
El Vez is the King of rip-away politics. With the aid of vinyl strip-off suits and silly lyrics, he makes the most somber issues sexy. One of Lopez’s greatest talents lies in his segues—he can connect anything. A ditty on illegal immigration gives way to a slideshow on Iraq, which leads to El Vez in a Santa suit standing next to a giant blow-up snowman. The crowd goes wild; a woman who has lost her pants thrusts her way to the front. El Vez embraces her—bare ass and all. The crowd goes wilder.
Some people know Lopez not as El Vez, but as the guitarist in Chula Vista punk band The Zeroes. In 1976, he and three friends—Javier Escovedo, Hector Penalosa and Baba Chenell—started playing music after school. What began as low-key experimentation quickly turned into playing packed shows with The Germs, The Weirdos and The Damned.
They were often called the “Mexican Ramones,” but being Mexican was not yet part of Lopez’s act. “We were all banded together because we were all misfits. Gay, straight, girls, boys, black, white, Mexican,” Lopez recalls. “It wasn’t a consideration what you were, just that you were one of us.”
At 18, after having played in half a dozen bands—the Boneheads, Catholic Discipline and The Johnnys, among others—he left the stage to curate an art gallery. Lopez might never have become El Vez had it not been for the impersonator he hired for an Elvis-themed art show. He was so bad that Lopez thought, “I could do better than this guy.” Within a week of his revelation Lopez had faked his way into the lineup at the annual Weep-Week Elvis tribute in Memphis. “When I called, they said, ‘I’ve heard of you’—which of course they hadn’t.”
Lopez wrote his songs and practiced his Mexican accent on the plane. (Although his grandparents are from Mexico, he had only learned Spanish in high school.) With his signature ‘stache in place, he charmed the crowd with songs like “You Ain’t Nothing but a Chihuahua.”
The act generated such a buzz that he was written up in L.A. Weekly and was asked to perform on the national TV show “2Hip4TV”. Before he’d even done three shows, he had a book full of press clippings and an enthusiastic following. “It was like a con job,” he recalls.
Nearly two decades later, El Vez is still selling out shows across the world, and his CD Graciasland is studied in Chicano Studies classes across the nation.
You’d think his act might have gotten stale by now, but it helps that Lopez is a perfectionist with the attention span of a hyperactive child. His shows may change from one city to the next; Lopez’s inspiration can emerge from news headlines or a sudden desire to wear, say, a ripaway blue suede suit.
Lopez couldn’t be happier with his career, but complains that he is getting older. Wrinkle-free at 46, he laments that one day he won’t be able to tour as much, and that “eventually I’ll have to cut back on the stripping.”