CHARLOTTE -- The cab looks ordinary enough from the outside. The computer monitors duct-taped to the seat backs are the first clue this might not be a standard taxi experience.
The second is the driver. He's holding a microphone.
“Welcome,” Billy Rivera intones, “to Karaoke Cab!” He cues up a favorite, “Pour Some Sugar On Me,” say, or “Friends In Low Places.” Rivera starts singing. You're encouraged to sing, too.
“I can sing country. I can sing anything,” he said from behind the wheel on a recent weekday evening. “It makes the day go by. The customers are entertained. It's a lot of fun.”
Rivera, who's in his 40s, started doing this karaoke-in-the-cab thing a couple of years ago, after two decades alternately driving a taxi and working as a DJ in Charlotte clubs. Around the beginning of 2007, he figured: Why not combine them?
He installed — if that's the right word — the monitors, facing backward so fares could read the lyrics to any of the 39,000 songs he has installed in his laptop. He hooked up a couple of wireless mikes — one for him, one for the back — and was in business.
Like all karaoke, it's best enjoyed by the tipsy. Rivera does a smashing business on Friday and Saturday nights, when he cruises around uptown clubs, collecting fares looking for one last shot of good-time on their way home.
But he also has a list of about 70 regulars programmed into his cell phone, people who see the Karaoke Cabbie as an indispensable part of a night out. Rivera technically works for King Cab, but he rarely fields a call from dispatch. He mostly picks up fares off the street or gets calls from his regulars.
“Young urban professionals,” he said. “They're the ones spending the money.”
Rivera got his start, in cabs and life, in New York.
He grew up in Queens, the son of Puerto Rican parents. He said he began driving cabs in New York City at 19. In his 20s, he and his sister decided to move to North Carolina, which they knew from visiting a relative of theirs, a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune. He chose Charlotte simply because, as a city boy, he figured he'd be most comfortable in the biggest town.
Over the next 17 years, Rivera drove a cab, at times DJing and working as a grocery store clerk while raising a family. (He's divorced.) Then he hit on the Karaoke Cab idea. “I just started singing for myself, for enjoyment,” he said, “and people just went crazy.”
He knows of two other cabbies who have karaoke setups, one in Dallas, another in Kansas City. But Rivera said they can't hope to match his enthusiasm.
“It's the spirit I bring to people when I start singing,” he said. “Off-key, on-key — I may not know the song, but I'm on it.” He started belting out “Rhinestone Cowboy” in his clear tenor.
Business was slow that evening; Rivera usually just works weekends. But eventually, he got a call from some regulars who wanted him to take them to the Dilworth Neighborhood Grille to watch the North Carolina-Michigan State NCAA Championship game. In piled Julie Person, 26, and Megan Anderson, 25, a pair of Carolina grads.
Ten minutes later, the cab pulled up to the bar, Person and Anderson bobbing from side to side and proclaiming loudly that they were living in a material world, and that they were material girls. They're also ardent patrons of Rivera's.
They met him through a friend last year. The friend just called a cab to take her to a Matchbox 20 show at then-Cricket Arena, and she ended up with the Karaoke Cabbie. The friend passed the word, and Person and Anderson began using Rivera nearly every weekend. “We call him every time we go out,” Anderson said.
“It's the best thing to do before you go out for the night,” Person said. “It gets you ready.” Just then, Rivera cranked up the volume and bid his friends goodbye with another selection from his vast storehouse: “A little ditty 'bout Jack and Diannnnneeee …”