Not all the excitement at Ricky Martin's sensational show Monday night at the Gund Arena came from those in their teens and 20s. Sweet-faced grandma Audrey Hunter of Westlake sat in an aisle seat and couldn't help smiling.
"My granddaughter in Kansas is going to be envious of me! She's 19," she said. "He [Martin] has such beautiful eyes."
Hunter doesn't shake it up like Martin, but she still goes out and dances with a special friend.
Barbara and Tom Markham, 64, of Bay Village, were as stirred up as best friends Georgeann Bates, 16, and Megan Aufdenkampe, 15, of Westlake, down the aisle.
The Markhams have a travel agency, E.T.S. Travel in Westlake, with a lot clients who travel to Puerto Rico.
"He's fantastic, and his songs are so easy to follow, even the ones in Spanish," said Barbara Markham, 60.
Georgeann and Megan had black stickers on their cheeks. "I Love" on one and "Ricky" on the other. "But it's not just his singing and dancing, it's his personality. When that little girl rushed up on stage during a song and the guards had to take her off, he wasn't angry and didn't want them to be rough with her," Georgeann said.
Young men were affirmative, too. "He's all right," said Tyler Grano, who was marking his 12th birthday with his father, Jeff Grano of Lakewood. "Ricky's so athletic. I want to be a baseball player some day," Tyler added.
"He's uniting South and North America, his show is very cultural," said Craig Hatfield, 28, of Pittsburgh.
Some fans were very direct. "I like the way he moves his seat," giggled a fourth-grader from Akron.
Others took another approach. Annie Thompson, 26, of Copley, and her sister, Amanda Ragsdale, 15, of Bath Township, waited four hours - part of that in their car - in the bitter cold outside of the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Monday morning just to get a glimpse and maybe an autograph from Ricky Martin. "Finally about 4:30 a.m., five buses came and the luggage was taken out and then in the last black bus was Ricky. He wore a black velvet shirt and black trousers. And we not only got an autograph, but I got to take a picture of him!" Thompson said. "He was undoubtedly tired, but he signed as many autographs as he could - there were about 15 of us out there - before he was ushered into the hotel. He was especially nice to a little boy about 7, holding up a poster to sign," she said.
The hottest pelvis in contemporary popular music gyrated into Cleveland last night. Handsome, hip-shaking Ricky Martin ended the first leg of his first American tour as a full-fledged superstar with a sold-out performance at Gund Arena.
The crowd was predictably female oriented, but it wasn't the strictly teeny-bopper crowd that turns out for 'Nsync. Although there were plenty of kids with parents, Martin's core audience is women in their upper teens and 20s.
Typical was 18-year-old Kelly Smith of Kent, who attended with her sister Jill and two friends, Genne Laasko and Melissa Wallach, both Kent State freshmen. Smith, clad in leather jeans and silver sequined tube top, said she hadn't even liked Martin's big hit "Livin' La Vida Loca" when she first heard it, but she quickly changed her mind. "I'm going to marry him," she asserted.
Judging by the roar of the crowd when the lights went down, she's going to have some competition. After a series of commercials for the tour sponsors projected on a screen, the show was introduced with a mini-documentary that showed Martin getting up, getting dressed and taking off in a car, pursued by fans.
Suddenly Martin was rising up on a revolving platform, standing on the hood of a car. He opened with "Vida Loca," as four pairs of dancers strutted around him and a blonde in a fringed bikini, whose skin was definitely NOT "the color of mocha," moved suggestively around him.
Throughout the 90-minute, 13-song show, Martin proved he could do plenty of suggesting himself. The only thing that evoked more screams than his famous pelvis was his wiggling rear end, encased for most of the show in tight leather pants.
Martin's small, scratchy voice is nothing to get excited about, but his charisma, ebullience and sensual, athletic dance moves are. Although it was a relatively short show, it was jam-packed and fully fleshed out. Besides the dancers, Martin's music was enhanced by a 12-piece band and a multileveled set that included moving pieces. Between songs, the pianist vamped.
Once a member of Menudo, the Puerto Rican teen group famous for dropping members when they came of age, Martin released his Spanish-language debut in 1992. Three more albums followed, making him a superstar every place but the United States.
That changed this past spring with his fifth album, the self-titled "Ricky Martin." It's gone quintuple platinum on the heels of the inescapable "Vida Loca." It's likely to sell more with his new single, a similarly flavored number titled "Shake Your Bon Bon," which points out what Martin does best.
Though a few of Martin's ballads are standard adult contemporary pop fodder, his distinctiveness is that he retains the musical flavoring of his background, and he sings almost equally in English and Spanish. "Love You For a Day" had that Latin feel, as did the more pensive "Spanish Eyes." The ballad "Private Emotion" featured vocalist Medeline Rosado ably handling the part sung by Madonna on the record. The theatrical staging opened with Martin on a ceiling-high platform and Rosado below him, before they switched places, riding past each other on moving poles.
Martin introduced the melodramatic "I Am Made of You" by saying that it was his favorite song. The audience seemed to prefer the sinuous dance rhythms of "Por Arriba, Por Abajo," on which Martin played congas, and the flashy set-closer "Cup of Life." The stage was a swirl of lights and dancing, culminating in an explosion of confetti and streamers over the arena and the gradual disappearance of the musicians.
The only way Martin could top that was by going in the opposite direction. He rose on a platform, seated on a white sofa and offered the audience the romantic "She's All I Ever Had." Then he stood, bowed, smiled and walked off. He definitely left them swooning in the aisles
Within minutes of the Ricky Martin crew hitting the studio where the singing star is to do a photo shoot, something akin to a full-scale Latin fiesta is in full swing. The CD has been changed and turned way up, an impromptu salsa lesson is being given to stylists and picture editors. All that's missing are cocktails, nibbles and maracas.
The whole crew is particularly buzzy today. Not only has 27-year-old Martin got a US number one with his rockabilly-salsa song Livin' La Vida Loca - living the crazy life - a record so infectious it should be sold with its own antibiotics, but his first album in English has become one of the fastest-selling records of the year.
Okay, so he was already the biggest-selling male artist in the world with number ones in 40 countries, but it's nice anyway. As well as taking the US charts by storm, Martin's made the cover of Time, something pop stars rarely do. But then this is the year he graduated from being just a Puerto Rican pop star to becoming a full-scale phenomenon, the figurehead of a whole Latin explosion that the music industry reckons will be the next big thing.
Black music may have dominated the scene for the past 30 years but the smart money says that, with Hispanics about to become the biggest minority in the US, Latin is the new black.
Martin's place at the head of this dates back to his history-making performance at the Grammy Awards in March, where he received the only standing ovation of the evening and was literally jumped on by Madonna after the show. Madonna, famous for always having her eye on the next trend, has already recorded an English/Spanish duet with Martin and there's been "have they or haven't they" speculation ever since. Martin himself says on the subject: "Even if I have, I'm not going to say."
Someone suggests that this response means they have. "I have not done it with Madonna," he replies, "but if I had, I would not say. But if there's one thing that would make me fall in love with a woman ... you have no idea how she treats her daughter. Doesn't matter where she is, at 8pm she has to be home because the baby's going to sleep. She can be in a meeting with the president and she'll be like, 'I have to go for my baby'. And that's something I melt for in a woman."
Very Latin, the mother thing. Martin agrees. While his stated mission is to destroy stereotypes about Latin culture, some of them are too true, or too marketable to be ditched.
The man himself - tall with almost cartoon good looks - is soon ensconced in the make-up room, smoking and having his foundation sprayed on with an airbrush. The make-up looks heavy enough to leave footprints on. But as soon as he gets under the lights you realise that, as usual, Martin's got it right. The look works perfectly. Well he has been doing this thing since he was six years old. It was then that Martin told his father he wanted to be a star. A couple of years - and 37 television commercials later - he told his by-then separated parents that in future if he wanted a bike he would buy his own.
"All I care about is being able to do it on my own," Martin says now. "I'm a bit of a control freak." The singer is an expert at tailoring his soundbites to suit his audience. At Lake Como, Italy, recently, journalists from all over the world were flown in for a lavish concert/party/press conference combo which cost millions of rands (Martin apparently challenged his record company to make it happen big time and they're certainly putting their money where their mouth is).
At the junket Martin fielded globally stupid questions such as "What's your second favourite city in China?" with a seamless stream of words. Apart from being a way to handle journalists who don't speak much English, it's a distancing technique. And Martin can reel it off till the cows come home, have dinner, get changed, and go out again.
It's a trick he learnt during his time on America's most-watched soap, General Hospital, and while he was in the Broadway run of Les Miserables. Martin also honed these tricks as a member of Menudo, Latin America's highly successful and totally manufactured boy band which recruits new members at the age of 12, works them like mules, and then unceremoniously dumps them when they reach their sell-by date.
Martin, who joined the band in 1984 and left in 1989 when he moved to New York, is supposed to have earned his first million with Menudo. But it's not so much what he earned as what he learnt.
He admits that sometimes in interviews he just "runs the tape" and if he's interrupted, he goes back to the beginning. "It's like if you're repetitive, I'm going to be more repetitive than you," he says.
Martin also admits that he's enjoying his elevation to superstardom. "Yeah," he says. "Who doesn't love the attention? Who doesn't love to walk into a place and have everyone look?" So, is this whole thing about needing to be loved by as many people as possible? "If I was a lawyer I would still want to be loved," he responds. "So what if you just see music as a good way to express yourself?" But he could have done that in small clubs in Puerto Rico. "That's the mediocre way," Martin counters. Oh, so he needs global recognition? "There you go," he says, grinning.
If Martin's not dating Madonna, who is he seeing? Is it still Rebecca de Alba, the glamorous television presenter, currently working in Spain?
"We just broke up," Martin replies, not seeming too upset. "I met her when I was 18 years old and we were together for a while then we broke up, then we were together again, then we broke up. I'm not blaming my career, I'm just saying, if it's my time to be alone, it's time for me to be alone."
What about rumours that he is gay? "I don't have a problem with homosexuality," he says. "I'm gay friendly - I'm not gay."
There are obviously privacy issues to consider, too. As Martin says: "I sell records, I sell concert tickets but I don't sell the key to my room. I have to think of the other person, and that person's family." Asked whether there is anything in his life that he dreads becoming public Martin, surprisingly, admits that there is. "Yes, there is something," he says, rather recklessly. "Oh, I'm not a criminal or anything like that. It's not like I've raped someone, but they are not happy with what I have done."
He doesn't say who "they" are or what he's done. "But you know what I'm saying? When I'm in love, I yell it out loud, I tell everyone, 'this is my girlfriend'." After the interview there is an opportunity to watch Martin perform Livin' La Vida Loca live for the BBC's Top of the Pops.
The minute he gets on the podium it starts. The hips move like he doesn't know what they'll do next. But of course he does know. Like the early Madonna, whose crazy dancing distracted us from a very calculating ambition, Martin knows exactly what he's doing.
He grins and pouts and bumps and grinds and the studio audience, which admittedly always goes mad, hardly realising that wherever they go on their holidays this year, they are going to be hearing this song. And Martin's hip thing - like the Lambada and the Macarena before it - will be imitated from low-cost British holiday resorts to Bali, until kiddies sick up their milkshakes and oldsters throw their backs out. After the show, just before making his way to the private jet waiting to whisk him back to his Miami home, Martin is asked whether he wants to be a male Madonna. He thinks about this one for a moment. "I want to be Ricky Martin," he replies. It's just what Madonna would have said in his place.
- �� Pan-African Literary Agency
Photo Caption : Born To Be Hip: Ricky Martin's unabashedly sexy bump-and-grind stage routine has millions of fans at opposite sides of the globe going mad.
