Johnny on the Spot
A country music superstar in the seventies, a journeyman in the eighties—and a murderer in the nineties? Early next year, a jury will decide the fate of Johnny Rodriguez, who could soon be singing the saddest song of all.
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NOT MUCH IS KNOWN ABOUT ISRAEL BORREGO; THOUGH his family has talked to the press some, they haven’t said a whole lot. He was nicknamed Basco as a child because of the way he shoved burgers into his mouth when the family visited McDonald’s. He and Anita were only “real good friends,” she says, until they started dating, when she was a sophomore and he was in the eighth grade. October 14, little more than six weeks after the shooting, would have been their ninth wedding anniversary.
Except for a brief period doing carpentry with one of his brothers in Chicago, Borrego had lived in Sabinal all his life. He was a pretty fair pool player, but his two passions were softball—he was supposed to play second base for the Sabinal Tigers in a tournament the day after he died—and drinking beer. He had a reputation for wandering around town “until he found a party he could crash,” as one local puts it. Even his widow doesn’t disagree. “I wouldn’t let him drink beer in the house,” she says, “because he was the kind of guy that once he started, he wouldn’t stop, and I didn’t want that around my kids. But I didn’t mind that he went out to drink because I knew how much he liked it and because he almost always came home.”
On the night of the shooting, Anita drove him to his grandfather’s house around eleven. “Whenever I dropped him off anywhere, I would always say, ‘Be careful,’” she recalls. “And he would always say, ‘I love you.’” Her sister Alicia came to tell her what happened at around seven the next morning. Meliton Borrego had been called by the hospital chaplain just after six, but the family couldn’t make it to Israel’s bedside in time to see him before he died. “I go to the cemetery every day to talk to him,” Anita says. “I cry, but I know I have to be strong for my kids.”
BY CONTRAST, THOUGH MEMBERS OF JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ’S family wouldn’t be interviewed, his life story has been told many times. Born in 1952, Juan Raoul Davis Rodriguez was the eighth of nine children born to Andres Rodriguez, a welder at Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, and his wife, Isabel. He grew up in a four-room shack in Sabinal. After his singing career took off and the money started rolling in, Rodriguez tore down that shack and in its place built his mother the house where Israel Borrego was shot.
His boyhood idol was his older brother Andres Junior, a two-fisted drinker and barroom brawler who gave him his first guitar. By his early teens, Rodriguez was sitting in with bands in the local bars, playing country as well as Mexican music. In high school in the mid-sixties he and his friends formed a band called the Spocks; they performed in Beatles wigs and Star Trek ears and played mostly rock and roll, but Johnny worked in a little country. “Even then,” he told me, “I knew I wanted to get into music.”
He got there in a roundabout way. The goat-rustling incident that indirectly launched his career is one of country music’s most potent rags-to-riches stories and has seen several permutations over the years. According to retired Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson, sixteen-year-old Rodriguez and eight friends were hanging out at Garner State Park, thirty miles northwest of Sabinal, when they stole and barbecued a goat from an adjacent ranch. The goat turned out to be a registered Angora, worth about $150 instead of the $15 common for unregistered animals. When Utopia constable J. R. Jackson (no relation to Joaquin) caught up with the group, Rodriguez took the rap for everyone. He was arrested and released on bond, but he was quickly picked back up by Uvalde County sheriff Kenneth Kelley because he owed $250 on a previous public-drinking charge. He had no more money for bail, so he served several days’ time. While at the Uvalde County jail on unrelated Ranger business, Joaquin Jackson recognized him as a great singer he’d met at Garner State Park. Jackson went home and fetched his guitar, and after Rodriguez serenaded the sheriff for about three hours, Rodriguez was released and allowed to pay off his fine gradually.
Jackson then took Rodriguez to meet J. T. “Happy” Shahan at Alamo Village, a western movie set and tourist attraction outside Brackettville. Shahan gave Rodriguez work while coaching the shy youth on stage presence and the like. He became Rodriguez’s manager on a handshake—and his father figure as well. Country stars Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare, both of whom had played Alamo Village one Labor Day weekend, liked what they heard of Rodriguez and invited him to Nashville. At first he wasn’t sure he was interested, but he changed his mind after his father died of cancer in January 1972 and his brother Andres was killed in a car wreck the following May.
As the story goes, Rodriguez arrived in Nashville with $14, three pairs of pants, three shirts, a toilet kit, and a guitar wrapped in cellophane—and within days he was playing lead guitar in Hall’s band. Known both for liberal politics that went against the Nashville grain and for wry, insightful story-songs (he wrote “Harper Valley PTA”), Hall persuaded Rodriguez to start singing a few warm-up songs at the beginning of his show. He was so amazed at how well Rodriguez could sing in smooth Spanish and unaccented English that he suggested a bilingual version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” (Years later, when Rodriguez started hanging with tejano musicians, they were surprised that he not only spoke fluent Spanish but also knew the same traditional Mexican ballads they did and sang them in the proper accent.)
Hall helped secure Rodriguez’s deal with Mercury Records—his first contract—and the rookie responded by reaching number nine on the country charts with his debut single, “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through).” His next three singles all hit number one, as did three of his next six, and each of his first fifteen efforts cracked the Top Ten. Many were bilingual, which is how Rodriguez came to be country music’s first Chicano star. He sang in the tradition of Lefty Frizzell and Merle Haggard, with phrasing that suggested both yearning and disappointment around every corner; his voice was sweet and young yet rugged and sexy.
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