A Puerto Rican Pop Music Machine

By KURT ANDERSEN

For Menudo, perpetual youth and pots of gold

It has been nearly 20 years since the four Brits landed in the U.S. and tumbled helter-skelter into a Manhattan hotel suite, high above police barricades where hundreds of girls were squealing their way into Beatlemania. Pubescent girls, New York City saw last week, are still crazy after all these years: on streets around a midtown hotel, dozens of cops oversaw hundreds of squealing, hysterical teens who were simply dying for a glimpse of the dreamboat singers upstairs. The 80,000 tickets for the group's four concerts last weekend at Madison Square Garden were sold out three days after they went on sale.

Beatles redux? Hardly. Menudo, the objects of all that adolescent yearning, are well-behaved puertorriquenos who sing in their native Spanish and play no instruments. The hundreds of thousands of U.S. fans typically are Hispanic junior high schoolers, like the heartthrobs themselves: five Puerto Rican boys, ages 13 to 15. And menudo, which means "small change" in Spanish, is not really a band or even, to use the '60s phrase, a combo. It is a clever marketing idea: the boys are mere employees of a promoter who replaces each one before he turns 16. "Menudo is a formula, and we must take care not to break it," says Edgardo Diaz, 31, Menudo's inventor and honcho, who manages to seem both cynical and ingenuous. "If we play it cool, I know, I feel, that Menudo will be successful around the world."

Around this hemisphere, it already is. Diaz trotted out the original group in 1977. Their music is the blandest kind of pop, without even a dash of Latin bounce. Yet by 1980 Menudo was performing its custom-concocted songs ("Give me a kiss/ Now we are alone/ Nobody can see us") and primitive choreography throughout Central and South America.

The product flow is no less staggering than the live tours: two Menudo movies (which only a mother or a fan could love), ten record albums (total sales: 3 million) and four years of weekly half-hour TV programs. Remember Monkees lunch boxes? A Menudo school bag sells for $16. Menudo, in fact, may be the Strawberry Shortcake of Latin American product licensing. There are Menudo T shirts and sun visors, wristwatches and jeans.

Diaz is devising an ambitious American campaign. As many as 20 million Hispanics live in the U.S., and perhaps 1 million are females between ten and 15. The audience is concentrated in New York, South Florida, Texas and Southern California, which makes marketing Menudo easier.

The group has already sold 750,000 LPs in the U.S., although Diaz has yet to strike a deal with a domestic record company. The sound-track album of their second film, Una Aventura Llamada Menudo (An Adventure Called Menudo), was a bestseller all spring (No. 1 in New York and California) on Latin record charts. In the fall comes their first serious "crossover" attempt: Menudo on ABC, a series of four-minute spots in English as well as Spanish, will be aired by the network Saturday mornings.

Menudo's encampment in New York last week was well timed. They arrived within 24 hours of the huge Puerto Rican Day parade down Fifth Avenue and so rode the crest of local ethnic pride. Indeed, many Hispanic American parents encourage their daughters' enthusiasm for a pop group that sings in the mother tongue. And the lads are nice. Onstage, in tight pants and glitzy tunics, the five do attempt a few sexy gyrations, but their lyrics tend to be wholesome odes to wind surfing, pretty hair, love of country and respect for elders.

Liza Lopez, 16, is president of the 225-member City Girls Rockin' with Menudo fan club chapter in New York. Hers is one of several dozen groups in the city and 700 in the world. "They send you rules for a fan club," Lopez says. "You must visit hospitals and churches. There must be no gossip or fighting among the girls."

That is Diaz's message. He chaperones the boys everywhere. "From our example," he notes, "kids see that if you work hard you can get what you desire." Menudo's members, mostly sons of the middle class, do seem to work hard, and they get a lot. "I'll give you an idea of what they make," says Diaz. "One kid paid $60,000 in income taxes this year."

Ricky Melendez is the boss's cousin and the only original member of the group remaining. He is also just five months short of 16, and so by contract his Menudo days are numbered. "When their voices change, that changes the sound of the music and that changes everything," explains Diaz. Six earlier members have been sloughed off, and two of the current personnel, Johnny Lozada (a member since 1980) and Miguel Cancel (1981), won't be around much longer. The others are Charlie Rivera, who turned 14 last Monday, and Ray Reyes, 13, who just this year was transformed from a Menudo fan into the real thing.

Curiously, a lot of fans like all the coming and going. Tony Torres, at 19 pretty much over the hill himself, is president of a large fan club in New York. "Some groups get tired and burned out." But with Menudo, he says, "Each time a new guy comes in, it's like a new group." Menudo, the disposable pop group, stays forever young.

--By Kurt Andersen.

Reported by Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by JANICE C. SIMPSON This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.