Randy Rodriguez, a local hip-hop artist, was invited by Illumina Records to partner with them in a campaign aimed at teenage drunk driving. Rodriguez’s new album is soon to be released.
Rodriguez pairs with record company for campaign
“Just saying no is not enough,” said Randy Rodriguez, also known as Zenopolis in the world of music.
Rodriguez, a resident of Alamosa, is one of 30 Colorado artists to be featured by Illumina Records for their drunk driving prevention campaign Ground Control/ LAUNCH Campaign.
His parents, Tony and Florence Rodriguez have run Toy N’ Flo’s, a second hand shop for more than 26 years. After moving to Denver, Rodriguez decided it was time to come home.
Rodriguez is an unsigned hip-hop artist who has been on the musical career track since 1997. “I really never had a purpose,” Rodriguez said, referring to his music. Illumina Records came across Rodriguez’s MySpace music profile at www.myspace.com/zenopoly. He recalled the turning point when he chose to follow the “law of attraction,” as coined by local musician Creed, formerly with Lucky la Rue, whom Rodriguez has been working with for some time. “I’ve been attracting all this good stuff into my life. I’m going to start feeling good about my music and get a purpose, the boom, they came along,” he said. “I totally wasn’t prepared for this to happen so fast, but I had no hesitation; I said yes.”
With the help of Illumina Records, he said his music now serves a purpose. “[Ground Control] is mostly for publication to promote unsigned artists and pair it with a cause,” he said. “It’s not just to get rich and buy cars.”
“Everyday our newspapers and televisions are filled with terrible images of crashed cars and demolished lives,” said Ronald Bellanti, president of Illumina Records and founder of the Ground Control campaign. “What can we all do to focus our young people on the right choices? This is where Ground Control comes in.”
Bellanti was witness to a horrific car accident 18 years ago that was a result of teens drinking and driving. On the record label’s website, Bellanti recalls “the darkest event of [his] life.”
Bellanti, a veteran of 20-plus years in the entertainment industry was working at a concert in New York. “It was early in the afternoon, well before show time, when I struck up a conversation with a group of high school kids from the area. They were skipping school, partying in the parking lot and hoping to get a glimpse of the band at sound check.” They also, according to Bellanti, were all high on marijuana and drinking wine.
They approached Bellanti and were trying to enlist his help getting backstage, a scenario familiar to anyone who has ever worn a backstage pass. “I had gone through this routine so many times before, in a hundred cities, with a thousand kids. But something would happen this time that would set this day apart from all the others. One of the kids was this 15-year-old girl. She was just beautiful, blonde hair, with big blue eyes. She and two of her friends jumped into the back of a pickup truck being driven by one of the other kids. One minute she was standing there talking and laughing with me, the next she was standing in the bed of the pick-up doing 60 mile an hour donuts in the parking lot.”
What happened next changed everything about not only the remainder of the day, but Bellanti’s life forever. “I looked up just a second before the crash. I remember how horrible the sound of that truck hitting the other car was. The second car seemed to just break apart while the 15-year-old girl and the rest of the pickup bed’s occupants were sent flying hundreds of feet through the air. I ran to the crash as fast as I could. When I got there I could see that it was bad, there was with screaming and blood everywhere. The girl that I was just speaking to was lying on her side. One of her arms was severed and blood was everywhere, it was just pumping out of her. The thing I remember the most was her eyes, and that only one of them was still in her head. I remember that I kept looking all over for her other eye.”
That was the day when Bellanti realized that more had to be done, and the day that he realized that “more had to be done by me.” Bellanti returned home to Massachusetts with a set of ideas, a mandate to try to show young people that drinking alcohol and driving can have horrific consequences. “It was easy to see that even with the plethora of programs available that lots of kids were being skipped over. I wanted to do something about that.” What he did was start what is now called Ground Control. “We have one mission, to educate teenagers and young adults about the dangers of driving drunk, to show them that they have choices. We show them that they can in fact choose life.”
“There’s a lot of campaigns preventing teen drinking and driving and I just want to be part of that. You can tell them just say no, but will they?” Rodriguez believes that through education to parents and young adults will raise awareness. “Are you aware that you can die from six drinks of vodka?” He wants to be a representative for the cause in Alamosa. “I’m ready for this point in my life. You gotta do more than just say no. I say no because it can kill you.”
Rodriguez and Creed are forming a counseling program for young adults. After running into some trouble with the law, Rodriguez decided he needed to make some changes in his life. “You’re always working on changing your ways. Since that time of incarceration and getting released, I’ve been thinking about how to save some child from going through what I went through...when that does happen, I’ll be sitting in that chair next to that kid helping him.”
Rodriguez submitted his recordings, made in his home studio, to Illumina Records where they will complete them by mixing down, mastering, pressing the disc, and making the inserts.
The album will be released within the next 90 days, probably sooner according to Rodriguez. Only 50 copies will be available upon first release. To reserve a copy, contact Rodriguez at 580-3806 or to_nulevels@yahoo.com.