Border Bandstand

The Johnny Canales Show, taped at television station KVEO in Brownsville, is the most successful syndicated TV show produced outside Hollywood or New York. Each week more than 100,000 fans in seven states and Mexico tune in to watch host Johnny Canales, the Dick Clark of border music, bounce onto the television stage, pick up the microphone, his diamond rings glinting in the studio lights, and shout, “All right, all right! Let’s go! Let’s get it on!”

Decked out in a tuxedo, Canales flashes a smile at the camera. “Aquí, amigos—bienvenidos al programa con su amigo, Johnny Canales. Tenemos otro show tremendo para todos ustedes.” (“Hello, friends—welcome to the program with your friend, Johnny Canales. We have another tremendous show for all of you today.”) “Pero, como todo el tiempo,” (“But, as usual,”) he says, switching fluently between Spanish and English in perfect Tex-Mex. “Let’s stop and let’s get it on.” Back in Spanish again, he introduces the featured group’s first song and sends them out to perform with, “You got it. Take it away. Vámonos.”

Billboard magazine recently ranked the hour-long show as one of the most popular non-network variety shows in America—the only Spanish-language show to make the list—along with shows like Hee Haw, Solid Gold, and MTV’s Top 20 Video Countdown. The program is also the only U.S.-produced Hispanic show aired in Mexico, where it is sponsored by the 25-store chain La Soriana. The Johnny Canales Show runs each week in cities scattered across Mexico, flashing the announcement “MADE IN THE U.S.A.” at the end of the credits.

A one-man video whirlwind who does the work of four or five people in a normal television production company, Canales is the show’s producer, talent coordinator, distributor, ad salesman, and star. “Everything that I have gotten I had to go and get it,” says Canales. “Now it’s beginning to pay off, pero it’s been hectic.”

Off-camera, Canales wears dark blue Sansabelt slacks and a dark blue sports shirt, which highlights the huge gold anchor pendant that dangles from one of many chains around his neck. On his wrists are thick gold-and-turquoise bracelets. Although Canales is in his mid-forties, he appears much younger, and he talks with the electric excitement of a teenage musician playing his first high-school dance. His hair carefully coiffed, his eyes dancing behind gold-rimmed glasses, Canales launches into his life story in the high-speed, joke-sprinkled Spanglish rap that has been the key to his popularity.

“My name is Juan José Canales, hijo de Esteban Canales, padre de más de cuatro, porque somos diez. That means I am the son of a guy who had more than four kids, a real cabrón,” he says. Johnny is the sixth of ten children born to his parents, Esteban and Maria. “For forty-two days I was a wetback. You see, my father was born in Rio Grande City and was traveling with my mother. I was born in Mexico, right across the border in a little town called General Treviño, Nuevo León. We spent forty-two days there after I was born, and then we went and lived in Robstown, Texas. So I’m not too much a wetback—just a little bit, just my elbows.”

When Canales was six years old he started playing music with his father. “I used to sing, and my father taught me how to play the guitar,” he recalls. “We played in all the bars in Robstown and the surrounding area. We used to charge quarters because we were real poor, because we were migrants. We used to pick cotton. In fact, that’s what they call the team at Robstown High, the Cottonpickers.”

After Canales got out of the Army in 1969, he spent eight years as the leader of his own band. Then he took a job as a deejay at radio station KCCT in Corpus Christi. “We called it ‘Radio Jalapeño, Red Hot,’ and it was. We were the first Hispanic station in Corpus to be rated number one. That’s where I started to work on my phrases, you know, like ‘let’s get it on,’ ‘let’s do it,’ ‘es-s-s-o,’ and ‘you got it.’ ”

Canales’ big break came when the local Coors beer distributor asked him to host a half-hour border music show on Corpus Christi’s NBC television affiliate. “The ratings were real good,” Johnny says. “So they went up to an hour on it. Laredo says well, we want to run that show here, then the Valley, then San Antonio, and then all of a sudden we started talking to TV stations all over the place.”

Coors has sponsored the program in the U.S. for more than eight years, running two commercials during each show. Canales himself has starred in six Coors commercials, portraying in one of them a bragging baseball star who can’t catch a can of Coors Light. “Golden hands and the silver bullet,” Canales says in Spanish at the end of the TV spot, “a tremendous combination.” The show’s other main sponsor is the U.S. Army, which informs Hispanic viewers that they can afford a college education, “gracias al GI bill,” ending with the “Be all that you can be” jingle, “Sea todo lo que puede ser . . . en el Army.”

In addition to selling the program to advertisers, Canales has had to persuade local stations to run his show. He remembers how tough it was to break into certain markets. “Some people looked at the program and said, ‘What is this? You speak English and Spanish. How can we play this?’ But the thing that always helped us was the ratings. One week on Channel Eight in Laredo we had better ratings than the Super Bowl.” In some largely Hispanic markets The Johnny Canales Show has gone head to head with 60 Minutes and has consistently garnered higher ratings. “My show gets played at different times on different stations,” Canales says. “But I think Sunday morning is the best. The show is good for the crudos—the guys just getting over their hangovers from Saturday night.”

Although Canales has a national audience, he prefers to produce his show in Brownsville. “What makes it so good recording here in the Valley,” he says, “is that we get all the bands from Texas here, and we get the norteño groups from Monterrey. After we record, the Mexicans go back to Mexico, and the Texicans go back to Texas. The Valley is like the Nashville of tejano music, and the crew here knows me so well they make the show look real good.”

Hispanic entertainers like Paul Rodriguez, Cheech Marin, and Charo have found their way onto The Johnny Canales Show. “I’ve even interviewed Mario Moreno Cantinflas,” Canales says. “We keep those tapes in a vault, man. He’s like the Mexican Bob Hope, and he doesn’t give an interview to nobody.”

Each of Canales’ shows features three bands who lip-synch songs from a red-blue-and-gold set backed by glittering gold curtains. “We feature Tex-Mex, norteño, and tropical music,” Canales says. “And we have had all the best acts—Little Joe, Freddy Fender, Roberto Pulido, Pegaso, Bronco. I was in a band for so long myself, I really know what these guys have to go through to get the music out.”

But it’s more than the music and the interviews, it’s Canales’ style that attracts both Hispanic and non-Hispanic viewers. “Our program is different from any other program—the ones that air from Mexico or the ones that air here—because we do it a little bit bilingual, and we put a lot of spice in it.” His style is more informal than that of other personalities on Spanish television, like Don Francisco of Sábado Gigante, who leads the audience in chanting a Coca-Cola jingle, or Raul Velasco, the traditional Ed Sullivan–type host of the variety program Siempre en Domingo. Canales’ warm and joking manner creates a relaxed atmosphere in the studio, which translates well to video and gives his program a down-home feel. “I just get it on, man, get the music going, get that accordion, get the beer,” says Canales.

During an interview once in Monterrey, Canales was asked why he mixed English with his Spanish, and he answered, “Well, Mexican people, first thing they want to do is learn a little English, and I help them a lot because I use the term ‘you got it.’ When they go down there to cross the border and the immigration says, ‘Are you an American citizen?’ they say, ‘You got it,’ and the immigration says, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ ”

Canales joes cornily with the bands and the audience, in English and Spanish. “Gorbachev invited me over to do a show in Moscow,” he told the nervous young leader of Grupo Cariño. “I said sure, you keep the moss, we’ll take the cow.” Cecilio L. Ruiz, Jr., an assistant director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, came to a recent taping to watch his son play drums with the group Nozotroz. Taking the INS badge from his guest’s pocket, Canales turned to the camera and said in Spanish, “I want you to know he’s good people. So when the INS picks you up, just give him a call.”

Canales maintains a furious schedule of public appearances. In 1986 he emceed the Fiesta del Sol in Chicago, which drew 450,000 people. He hosted a telethon in Modesto, California, and raised $50,000 for poor families. In April 1987 he taped a show from the main plaza in Matamoros, the first Mexican American entertainer to do so. A newspaper in Matamoros reported on the show with the headline JOHNNY CANALES CAUTIVÓ AL PUEBLO DE MATAMOROS—”Canales Captivated the People of Matamoros.”

He also uses his show to promote more than music. Prominent Hispanics—San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, Tony Bonilla, chairman of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, Hector P. Garcia, founder of the American GI Forum of Texas, and Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez—have appeared on the show to urge young Hispanics to stay in school and get an education. “We got a letter once from Modesto saying that I said on TV that I never went to school, and I was proud of it,” Canales recalls. “But, man, I was a graduate of Robstown High, and I graduated in the top ten. Of course, there were only eight in the class.”

Canales is fully aware that his jokes and his Tex-Mex puns are what endear him to his audience. “My goal is to entertain the people in such a way that they forget about their water bill, the light bill, and all that. I get a big kick when I go downtown and little kids—I mean little, three or four or five—come up and say, ‘Johnny Canales, Johnny Canales, Johnny Canales.’ And then old ladies seventy, eighty years old come up and say, ‘Oh, mi hijito.’ When you get an audience like that, man, it’s beautiful.”