You just can’t write a story like this. It seems the charming unpredictability of real life is forced to make some of our greatest stories, and provide us with our greatest sources of inspiration. Take the true story of Sixto Rodriguez, a.k.a. Sugar Man, which was captured in the fantastic 2012 documentary Searching for Sugar Man. The documentary won an Oscar for Best Documentary at the 2013 Academy Awards. After watching and becoming mesmerized by the uncanniness of the story, it became obvious to me the accolades were well deserved.
A co-worker recommended this documentary and I must admit that I remember seeing the previews for this one a few years ago, yet it had fallen off my radar in the same manner that Rodriguez’s albums fell off the radar in the early 1970’s. Rodriguez lapsed into obscurity in America before he was even given the chance to emerge, which is part of the tragedy, because this man was a brilliant songwriter with an intriguing persona who should have attracted many fans. Somehow America disregarded him, yet a couple years after releasing his best music he gathered a cult following in South Africa, within the ranks of the anti-Apartheid movement, and then his fandom grew and he became a music icon in many countries in southern Africa where he was considered just as popular, if not more popular, as musicians like Bob Dylan and Elvis Presley. The remarkable part of the story is all this belated success, the thousands of records he sold in Africa, was unbeknownst to Rodriguez. He was living a quiet life in Detroit, working odd jobs in construction, far removed from the celebrity he had garnered in Africa.
The improbability of a man becoming a legend in one corner of the world while being something of a wandering street denizen in another, especially in the 20th Century, is inexplicable. The greatest part of the story is that the music still holds up today. In fact, after watching the documentary I bought his first two albums just minutes after watching, and haven’t stopped listening. The albums are fantastic, with superb lyrics and a poignancy I haven’t felt in very many albums. Both Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971) have been retroactively labeled “classics” when they should have been considered such decades before.
Now comes the possible explanations as to why Rodriguez and his amazing albums never rose to prominence in America. As the dubious Sussex record label owner Clarence Avant says in the interview within the documentary, there’s a good chance at the time of release Sussex only sold 6 copies of Cold Fact in America! Yet the quality is so plain to hear, Rodriguez’s figure so striking in the album artwork, that it is truly a mystery to many why he was overlooked. Some might shrug it off as the vagaries of popular culture at the time, or that his record label didn’t do enough to promote him, or a shift in popular tastes at the beginning of the 1970’s. Some of those explanations might be partly true, however, I believe the main reasons he never gained notoriety are because 1) he got lost in the vast numbers of prolific artists and music coming out of Detroit at the time (which I will get back to in just a bit) and 2) Most people immediately wrote him off as a Bob Dylan impersonator.
Both of those reasons also tie into the possible shift in popular taste in music at the time. Motown was changing (Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder were making “concept albums”), folk music was losing the sharp edge it had in the late 1960’s, during Woodstock and the apex of the anti-war movement, and even the main figure of folk, Bob Dylan, was venturing into different musical territory at the time. He released his polarizing album Self-Portrait (1970) around the same time of Rodriguez’s debut Cold Fact. Self-Portrait received a lot of mixed-reviews, though all could agree it was a departure from previous Dylan music. Although Simon & Garfunkel’s pop-folk album Bridge Over Troubled Water was one of the best-selling albums of 1970, you see that all the other big sellers that year were albums from artists like Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Black Sabbath, Santana, and CCR. American rock music was venturing into bigger sounds, Hard Rock, more electrified music, which would soon turn into the Stadium Rock of artists like The Who, Boston, and Deep Purple.
When you see tracks titled “This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues” and “Inner City Blues”, it doesn’t do much to convince you that the guy isn’t ripping off Bob Dylan. Those are classic names for folk songs, especially Bob Dylan-esque songs. I admit, those seem like uninspired track titles. Then there’s his song “Sugar Man” from Cold Fact, which sounds intriguing, if not a bit reminiscent of a track title from a band like Steppenwolf. It sounds fitting for a track on the Easy Rider soundtrack, which also means maybe Rodriguez’s timing was just a bit off.
But just listen to the song “Sugar Man” and you’ll hear the song transcends first impression. The lyrics and “feel” are simply one-of-a-kind.
https://soundcloud.com/insyncmusicservices/sugar-man-rodriguez
Then listen to a song like “Cause” from his album Coming From Reality (1971) and you realize Rodriguez was a songwriter superior to most of his contemporaries, and a man deserving recognition as one of the best songwriters ever. The emotion hits me in waves. Bob Dylan never had songs that hit an emotional chord in the same way. The big difference between the two is the lyrics are never as covert as Dylan’s. Rodriguez always came at things directly, and sharply. A couple of his songs are so poignant, the lyrics so simple yet delivered so purely and plaintively, that it strikes the core.
Even though Cold Fact is the album Afrikaners say is his seminal recording, and the album as ubiquitous as Abbey Road and Highway 61 Revisited in South Africa, I think Coming From Reality is his best album. From beginning to end it’s nearly perfect. Like the track “I Think Of You”.
He was a man shrouded in a thick layer of mystique even in his hometown of Detroit, which was probably the way Rodriguez truly wanted it. He was and still is a modest man living a remarkably unmaterialistic and simple life in the home he has owned for decades. I respect Rodriguez the man just as much as Rodriguez the musician, and I think anybody who watches the documentary will feel the same way. I am so glad that I found his music through this documentary.
In another uncanny real life twist, a stunning documentary about the band Death also came out in 2012, called A Band Called Death. They were one of the first all-black punk bands in America, and get this….they also hailed from Detroit! Two musical acts making a modern resurgence after years toiling in the limbo of forgotten music are both from Detroit, both had documentaries made about them in 2012, and both have albums retroactively regarded as classics! I will be creating a post regarding this band and the documentary right after this one.
