THE LOW ROAD TO SUCCESS

You Won't Hear His Ballads Of Drug Dealing On The Radio, But They've Made
Lupillo Rivera A Top Seller.

Something's up with the young Mexican singer, the one with the
fashionably shaved head and the $1,800 ostrich-skin shoes. He's trying
to act natural, but he can't completely contain his excitement.

He's sitting in a low-budget, second-story recording studio in Long
Beach, where he grew up a short immigrant kid with outsized dreams of
playing pro baseball. He's barely 29 now, the father of four girls,
having married straight out of high school while working swing shift
at a Taco Bell in Seal Beach.

Somebody pinch him. He thinks he's still dreaming.

Finally, he blurts out the news he's been holding back. The recording
artist has just signed a new three-year deal with his manager, earning
him a $500,000 signing bonus, he says. At this very moment, he
announces, his representative is at the Bentley dealer in Beverly
Hills closing a deal for a late model of the British luxury car.

"It's black, dude. A convertible," the singer says to the studio
engineer.

The singer then pops out of his chair, flips open his cell phone and
dials his manager like a boy who can't wait for his latest toy--one
costing more than $300,000.

"He's gotta have two Bentleys," somebody jokes. "One's not
enough."

That's right. The singer's other elite vehicle is pictured on the
cover of his latest CD, "Despreciado" (Disdained), which has sold more
than 500,000 copies since its February release on Sony Discos. The
artist is shown standing in front of his trophy-on-wheels, western hat
in one hand, big fat stogie in the other.

Above is his name in gold: Lupillo Rivera.

Rivera is the first Mexican American recording star to rise so high
from the backwater of the Latin record business of corridos pesados,
heavy tales of drug smuggling, violence and quick riches. It's an
underground market catering mostly to blue-collar immigrants via
word-of-mouth, disseminated on cheap cassettes and promoted in live
performances in barrio bars from Huntington Park to Lynwood.

Rivera was bred in that gritty subculture, where life tragically
imitated art nine years ago. That's when somebody put two bullets in
the back of the head of Chalino Sanchez, a fellow corrido singer
signed to Cintas Acuario, the small Long Beach label owned by Rivera's
father, Pedro. The unsolved murder in Sinaloa, Mexico, was a personal
blow to the Rivera family but a boon for sales of corridos by Sanchez,
a notoriously bad singer whose death added to his notoriety as a
valiente, or brave one.

Undaunted, the young Rivera has carried the mantle of corrido
recordings, which became increasingly popular in the '90s. His own
career started by accident when a singer for another band on his
father's label failed to show up for a recording session. Since the
studio tab was running anyway, Rivera decided to sing, and another
Acuario star was born.

"I just started yelling," remembers Rivera, whose only previous
experience was singing for his glee club at Stephens Middle School.

Musical quality is far from essential in this street-grown genre,
which sells immigrant stories spiced with colorful--and
unprintable--Mexican slang. The style is considered too vulgar for
commercial airplay and too marginal for mainstream record deals. Now,
to the astonishment of industry observers, Rivera is among Sony's
top-selling acts, propelled more by his charisma than his modest talent.

At a private party thrown by the label earlier this month, Rivera was
honored for cumulative sales of 1 million records. The label's top
executives were on hand to honor the performer, who as a kid sold
counterfeit Michael Jackson and Culture Club cassettes at the
Paramount Swap Meet.

The party was held at the Palace nightclub. The Hollywood setting
seemed far removed from Rivera's roots but fitting for his new
rock-star success, complete with adoring female fans from Mexican
American neighborhoods such as El Sereno and Montebello.

"I didn't listen to this type of music until he came in," said Sheila
Bueno, 17, a junior at Schurr High School in Montebello and president
of his fan club. "I would always listen to English music like R&B and
rap."

Bicultural fans like Bueno--who sports a punk-like tongue
piercing--are the key to Rivera's unusual success in a business in
which stars are usually made in Mexico, not on this side of the
border. The bilingual youngsters feel that El Toro (the Bull) is one
of them--and he is.

"For the first time in the history of the Mexican music industry,
we've paid attention to the youth market in the United States," says
Abel De Luna, Sony's regional Mexican market manager. "We're giving
new heroes to those people who were ignored in the past ....This is
the artist we've been looking for."

Rivera was born in La Barca, Jalisco, and christened Guadalupe, a
Mexican name used for both boys and girls. His odd stage name,
Lupillo, was suggested by his father, who wanted audiences to know for
sure that his son was a man. (Unlike "Lupe," the normal nickname,
"Lupillo" ends in the masculine "o.") A smart move in the
rough-and-tumble world of narco-corridos , where manliness is a
marketing asset. It's no accident that Sanchez, the murdered singer,
always appeared on his CD covers with a pistol tucked in his waistband.

Pedro Rivera, the patriarch and now head of a small family
conglomerate of musical enterprises still in Long Beach, is an
unlikely leader in this tough business. He is small with a friendly
smile, a neat mustache and a bookish look.

Back in Mexico, the elder Rivera eked out a living selling lottery
tickets on the streets of Hermosillo, Sonora, wife Rosa's hometown. He
had little to his name when he decided to bring his growing family to
California. Lupillo was just a boy then; all he remembers of the
border crossing is "the big hills."

Lupillo was the fourth of what would eventually be six children, all
grown now. The family settled on the west side of Long Beach, living
in the shadow of the Long Beach Freeway. He attended public schools,
graduating from Polytechnic High School in 1990, and remembers a "nice
childhood," collecting Hot Wheels and playing Little League
baseball--when he wasn't working.

Like many immigrant kids, Lupillo had to work hard for his family. On
weekends, he was up at 5 a.m. to help his parents set up their spot at
the swap meet, where they peddled cookies, cassettes and medicines
from Mexico.

One day, the elder Rivera came home to find that his wife had spent
their week's wages on family portraits taken by a door-to-door
salesman. Rosa had ordered a whole set of her and her kids for $129.
She just couldn't resist, they were all so cute.

Pedro Rivera was furious. But he also saw a sales opportunity. In his
outrage, he went out and bought a 35-millimeter Minolta and started
taking pictures at baptisms to sell to proud parents. When the priests
shooed him away, he started working the Mexican bars where he also
sang as an amateur. He soon switched to a Polaroid, providing instant
gratification for the drunks pictured with their mistresses or
dollar-a-dance dates.

"My dad's always thinking how to make a buck," said Lupillo during an
interview at his spacious suburban home near the country club in
Lakewood, where his father and brother also bought homes.

Both father and son laugh when they recall the family's free-market
escapades.

There was the time the elder Rivera bought that carload of defective
buttons for the 1984 Olympics. When he got home, he spread the Olympic
pins on the floor and set Lupillo and his siblings to painstakingly
trim excess edges with razor blades, one by one. They then sold the
buttons for $1 apiece outside the Coliseum, where good ones were going
for a lot more.

The Riveras made $14,000 in three days. "And that's where I got the
money to make my first record," said a smiling Pedro Rivera during an
interview at the Main Street offices of Cintas Acuario, (Aquarius
Tapes), the label he founded in 1988 with the discarded tape of a
group that had flopped on a Mexican label.

The label's first hit came the following year on a CD by Los Rayantes
del Valle. It was titled "Misa de Cuerpo Presente," a bizarre story
about the open-coffin funeral of a drug dealer whose bereaved mother
beats the corpse, which mysteriously sheds tears for ignoring the
woman's warnings while alive.

Major record labels wouldn't touch the stuff. Radio programmers told
the Riveras they'd be fired if they played it.

Of course, there was always the swap meet as an outlet.

One day, a man stopped at the Riveras' spot, where Lupillo had been
playing underground corridos for customers all day. The stranger
wanted to know who was singing.

That's Chalino Sanchez, Lupillo answered before recognizing the man
from the cheap, two-color cassette covers. It was Sanchez, en persona.

The encounter marked the beginning of a fruitful association between
the Riveras and the troubled singer, who had been financing his own
recordings. He became the star of Cintas Acuario, composing corridos
on demand for drug dealers who wanted to brag about their exploits.

Sanchez was recording in Los Angeles the week before he was killed.
His beeper and cell phone were constantly ringing, the Riveras
remember. Constant death threats. Don't go to Sinaloa, anonymous
voices warned. You won't come back alive.

The singer went anyway, lured by the promise of big money. According
to the Riveras and published reports, after a show, Sanchez was
kidnapped by men in police uniforms. His body was found the next day
along the highway outside Culiacan, the state capital.

Lupillo Rivera says he's not afraid of following in his fellow
singer's footsteps. Sanchez, he explains, made the mistake of naming
names and places in his corridos , annoying rival camps of dealers.
Besides, Sanchez had led a shadowy life and made enemies.

Still, Rivera has avoided performing in Sinaloa, where he's in great
demand. He's just got a funny feeling about it, said his father.
Perhaps he's traumatized, said his mother.

On his compositions, Rivera makes the narco-stories more generic. As
in "Perros Bajadores," about a dealer who endures torture rather than
turn over his shipment to rivals. Or "El Pelotero," about a dealer
nicknamed "the ballplayer" because he pitches balls of crack and coke,
calling a kilo a home run.

In the middle of the song, Rivera calls out to the "pura raza pelotera
de Playa Larga, si senor." Going out, in other words, to all the
"ball-playing raza "--a slang term for fellow Mexicans--of Long Beach.

Rivera cleaned up his act, in some respects, on his latest Sony
release. The drug ballads are gone, replaced by Mexican standards
accompanied by banda sinaloense, the traditional town band with tuba
and clarinets. But he kept his happy drunk shtick, singing many songs
as if he were plastered.

"It only perpetuates the negative images of the Mexican population and
the Mexican culture," said Leticia Quezada, a former Los Angeles
Unified School District board member who now heads the nonprofit
Instituto Cultural Mexicano in Los Angeles. "It can do nothing good
for our youth."

Rivera is more pragmatic. The debate over narco-corridos was good for
his career, he said. All publicity is good if it's free. And though he
and his family say they have always been law-abiding, he considers
drug smuggling just a job. "A person who dares to do those things,
well, he should be respected," said the singer, sitting on his sunny
backyard patio near his swimming pool and rose garden.

But does he worry about the influence on his own children.

"If my children started doing drugs," he said, "that's because I
didn't watch my own kids. Then that would be my own fault."

Rivera's father also justifies the reliance on the drug culture to
sell records. He even smiles when he points out the marijuana leaves
that adorn the logo of Pelotero Records, another family label
belonging to his son Juan.

"Since we didn't have the opportunity to get ahead on the high road,
we had to stay on the low road with this type of corrido ," said the
senior Rivera, who still controls the recordings of his children,
including those by Lupillo that are licensed to Sony.

Pedro Rivera once tried to challenge a man who was selling pirated
cassettes of his company's music in front of a Long Beach market. The
next day, he woke to find all the windows of his car broken. So it's
better to let the counterfeiters be, he concluded. Nobody can stop
them.

"We're now suffering what before we did to others," he
said.

The counterfeiters don't bother Lupillo Rivera. He even sticks up for
those ripping off his recordings: "These guys are only trying to
survive. Know what I mean. Why should I hold 'em back."