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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Though Rodriguez was a reluctant star, singing his hits at the beginning of Hall’s show and then fading into the background when the boss took over, he soon went solo and grew accustomed to the spotlight. When he and Tanya Tucker toured together in 1973—the year they turned 21 and 15, respectively—they were hailed as the saviors of country music, rescuing it from its increasingly geriatric demographics by bringing kids back into the audience. As it happened, the real saviors turned out to be Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and the Outlaws, who began enjoying huge country-to-pop crossovers within the next couple of years; Rodriguez’s records were too solidly entrenched in the fading Nashville Sound to do the same, even though he represented that sound at its very best. But with his Texas roots, he eventually found acceptance within the Outlaw crowd. He even joined icons like Willie, Charley Pride, and Kris Kristofferson at former University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal’s house for intimate “guitar pulls,” in which a guitar was passed around the room as each man sang for no audience except his peers.
In 1973 Rodriguez married flight attendant Linda Patterson. The reception was held at Hall’s Nashville mansion; Mooney Lynn, Loretta’s husband, stepped from his black limo bearing a gift of a black goat wrapped in a bow. On trips home Rodriguez rented a white stretch limo at the San Antonio airport and arrived in Sabinal in style. “When I toured with him in 1976 and 1977,” says Dottsy Dwyer of Seguin, who enjoyed a string of hits in the late seventies, “the girls would swarm him until he had to have bodyguards, like Elvis.” He established the Johnny Rodriguez Life Enrichment Center in Corpus Christi for disabled and impoverished children and later became active in the End Hunger Network. Everything was going great.
BUT RODRIGUEZ’S VICES MUSHROOMED with his fame. In 1975 he told Shahan he had “no need” for a manager under the then-standard Nashville system, in which an artist’s booking agent also handled managerial duties. (“I just didn’t want to listen to anyone,” he now says. “I was getting too big for my britches.”) Freed from Shahan’s firm hand, however, Rodriguez grew reckless. His marriage deteriorated after three years because he was always on the road and because, he says, “I went out on her and told her about it.” Always a heavy drinker, he tried cocaine once and was unimpressed, but when he snorted it again a couple months later, he liked it so much that within a year and a half, friends were pushing him into a rehabilitation center in Denton. That was 1980. Since then, he has rehabbed five more times, the last time in 1993, but he has never remained straight for as long as a year. “The drugs were why I started slipping down the charts in the late seventies,” he told me with a rueful grin, “but my real problem is alcohol. I don’t know why. When I stay away from meetings and abstinent people . . .”
In 1981, after his first time in rehab, he left Mercury for a more lucrative deal with Epic. “Down on the Rio Grande” promptly hit the Top Ten, but subsequent releases didn’t fare so well. When he signed with Capitol in 1987, it wasn’t for better money; no other major label wanted to take a chance on him. After five modest chart singles for Capitol, he was released from his contract. But he remained a trouper. “If you told Johnny he had to get up at four a.m. and do a Ralph Emory radio interview before hitting the road, he’d be there without complaint, and he would charm the daylights out of everyone,” says Judy Newby, who booked and managed him from 1985 to 1990. “He always gave everybody what they wanted.”
Phillip Fajardo, currently the drummer for retro-country sensation Don Walser, played with Johnny for a year in the mid-eighties. “He had just come out of rehab and was real enthusiastic about building things back up,” Fajardo says. “He hired a full band, crew, bus and driver, the whole works. But he wasn’t having the hits like he used to, and he couldn’t afford it. He took me onto the bus once and opened a briefcase full of cash with an Uzi on top, then made a joke about having a little business on the side. But I would have stayed with him if he could have kept it together; he was great to his musicians. He’d never get mad; he’d just let the water roll off his back.”
In the nineties, though, Rodriguez has barely had a career. There have been several drinking-related misdemeanor arrests, most recently in Weslaco in 1994. He works only about fifty gigs a year, mostly in Texas or on overseas USO tours. And he has recorded only sporadically. The 1996 release You Can Say That Again, which mixed honky-tonk ballads with modern fare by songwriters like Lucinda Williams and Robert Earl Keen, was critically acclaimed but sold poorly. Last year he began recording new material with Nashville producer Nelson Larkin, who had handled his 1993 flop Run for the Border, as well as rerecordings of his old hits released a month after the shooting under the title Johnny Rodriguez. “We’ve cut both traditional and contemporary songs, and he’s singing great,” reports Larkin, who adds that a Sony/Epic executive was impressed with the tapes. Rodriguez believes this will be his ticket back to the top of the country charts, though it’s hard to see where he fits in among today’s young stars.
Offstage, Rodriguez’s life has been up in the air. In 1995 he married Willie Nelson’s daughter Lana, an old girlfriend from the mid-seventies. He occasionally played Willie’s show until the marriage ended, after about seven months. “One day Willie’s bus pulled up, and Johnny wasn’t on it,” says Hill Country dance hall king Johnny Bush. “Nobody said a word about him, and nobody asked. Willie has still never said a word about it, and still nobody has asked.” That marriage is the only subject, aside from his legal situation, that Rodriguez won’t discuss.
Early this year Rodriguez married for a third time, and his wife, the former Debbie McNeely, soon bore his first child, a daughter named Audry Rae. But by the spring that marriage was being torn apart by the old familiar demons. Around June Johnny started spending most of his time in Sabinal rather than at the couple’s San Marcos home. He told friends he wanted solitude to write more songs and delve deeper into Mexican music. “When Johnny is here in Sabinal, everybody wants to come and say hello,” his friend Carlos Tovar says, “but Johnny wants to be left alone to hear music and reminisce with his old friends. All he wants is two or three guys around him and to play music and talk about old songs.”
“He’s had a real good heart as long as I’ve known him—always gracious, considerate, very polite, and very responsible, with a strong work ethic,” said Randy Willis, who has known Rodriguez since they were twelve. “I guess time changes you.”
AFTER MAKING BAIL, RODRIGUEZ holed up in San Antonio, though he kept a date two days later at the Howard County Fair in Big Spring, where people had been calling all week to see if he was still coming. The fairgrounds music tent, which rarely fills completely, overflowed for both shows. Rodriguez sounded good. He mentioned his arrest only indirectly, when he apologized to the audience for the lack of a keyboard player “due to the confusion of the last week” and thanked them for coming out “after everything you’ve been hearing on the news.” Ever since, he has been splitting his time between San Antonio and Nashville, attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and pretty much keeping to himself. Although he had intended to cancel all of his upcoming bookings, he played dates near Midland in late September and in Helotes in mid-November.
But that was then. In December district attorney Tony Hackebeil will recall the Uvalde County grand jury; he’ll ask that Rodriguez be indicted on a charge of murder. Rodriguez’s trial will likely begin after the first of the year. It could be his final public appearance for quite some time—or it could be just a temporary setback for a man who’s had his share.
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