Record collectors and documentary filmmakers often look for the same thing: a moment when someone does something remarkable without being seen, a gap that turns the witness into a proprietary liaison between that moment and everyone else. Crate-diggers dream of finding that record, the one that sounds like music you know rendered in a version you don’t know. Maybe it’s a South African rock record with a clattering, popping drum intro or a forlorn acoustic song ready to drive home a Wes Anderson plot point. Documentary directors search for dogs in love with elephants and impossibly driven wire walkers, subjects that beggar belief but end up secured in the medium, confirmed and concrete. A new film by Malik Bendjelloul, “Searching For Sugar Man,” satisfies both the hunters and the general audience. How? To use technical language, the story is bonkers: Bendjelloul’s documentary is delicately balanced on an iceberg-sized peripeteia that is easily spoiled, so if you want to see this movie (currently in limited release, and opening nationwide throughout the summer) read no further. Or, go see it and come back.
The head-shaking bit is simple. In the early seventies, Sixto Rodriguez, a Detroit native born to Mexican immigrants (who goes by his surname both socially and professionally), recorded two albums for Sussex Records. They dropped into the void. Rodriguez returned to the demolition and renovation work he has done ever since. But, while he was living in a dilapidated house in Detroit, carrying refrigerators on his back and trundling chunks of plaster, his recordings became popular in Australia and South Africa. In Cape Town, he was “bigger than the Stones,” in the words of several South Africans who bought his first album, “Cold Fact.” (The lore is that the album reached South Africa when a woman brought home a copy for her boyfriend.) Three different labels ended up licensing the albums from Sussex and selling copies in South Africa. Rough estimates of sales in South Africa—hard enough to determine for a release in the seventies, much less a dodgy repress in a country under cultural boycott—are between five hundred thousand and a million copies. No royalties from these sales have ever reached Rodriguez.
In the seventies, Rodriguez knew nothing of this, and South Africans knew next to nothing about Rodriguez. The popular rumor was that he had killed himself onstage: maybe set himself on fire, maybe used a gun. Non-reports varied. Eventually, a journalist named Craig Bartholomew-Strydom attempted to figure out how Rodriguez had “died.” Along with a fan named Stephen “Sugar Man” Segerman, Bartholomew sent messages through a Web site, asking for people to volunteer information. Eventually, Rodriguez’s daughter Eva replied. Not so dead, this Rodriguez. He turned seventy a few weeks ago, on July 10th. You can watch him perform on August 14th, on the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
To the letter, it’s a boy’s childhood dream. (Nobody in school likes my songs, but in another universe, I’m a superstar!) As seen in Bendjelloul’s movie, Rodriguez seems appreciative of his remote stardom but unbothered. And though he’s gone on to play over thirty concerts in South Africa since 1998, to large audiences, he still lives in penury. The movie does not answer the obvious question of why Rodriguez never received royalties, and the artist’s three daughters convey a complicated blend of intense affection and frustration on screen, close to tears almost every time they appear.
There may or may not be an answer in Rodriguez’s best-known song, “Sugar Man,” which I first heard on David Holmes’s 2002 mix “Come Get It I Got It”: “Sugar man, won’t you hurry, ’cos I’m tired of these scenes. For a blue coin, won’t you bring back all those colors to my dreams? Silver magic ships you carry: jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane.” A few years ago, Light In The Attic Records’ Matt Sullivan stepped in and helped secure an official reissue for both “Cold Fact” and Rodriguez’s second album, “Coming from Reality.” Via e-mail, Sullivan said, “Our reissue of ‘Cold Fact’ came out in August 2008 and ‘Coming from Reality’ followed in May 2009. There had never been any legitimate reissues before ours or since. These reissues (along with our soundtrack release in partnership with Sony Legacy) represent the only time Rodriguez has ever been paid royalties from the sale of his albums.”
There’s no gainsaying the story here—it’s a juicy, freaky detective tale with a big payoff. The wobbly VHS footage of Rodriquez’s 1998 appearance in South Africa has a Shroud of Turin-meets-Zapruder quality: This happened? This actually happened? Bendjelloul deserves any and all attention he gets. But do the record collectors and music fans do as well? Improbably, they almost do. The “Yper-Yper” fans in the movie throw around Dylan’s name and rhapsodize about the depth of Rodriguez, the shadowy street poet. The music itself almost supports this, which is one way of saying that you should absolutely own “Cold Fact.” Detroit legends Dennis Coffey (guitar) and Mike Theodore (keyboards and arranging) produced the album, and it’s a hybrid not quite like anything else. Call it philosophical Motown folk-soul, or something hideous like that. The songs began on a nylon-string acoustic guitar that Rodriguez outfitted with a pickup and played through a bass amp. There are subtle rhythm-section additions, synth bleeps, vibraslap trails, and bits of string playing, none of which intrude. “Cold Fact” is a trim record that escapes the indulgences of the time (and the songwriter) by keeping everything brief and to the point. Rodriguez is an appealing, unpretentious singer who seems to want nothing more than to deliver the song and get out of his own way. The follow-up, “Coming From Reality,” goes slightly heavier on the love songs and strings and tips into anonymity. (The curious can start with the documentary’s soundtrack, which ably cherry-picks from both albums.)
Rodriguez worked in the wake of Dylan, but is a much more concrete, available character in his songs. His investment in politics was tangible, and was apparently audible. While he was running for Mayor of Detroit, Afrikaners in Cape Town were finding inspiration in “Cold Fact” as they established cells of resistance to apartheid. (The regime was so oppressive that a line like “I wonder how many times you had sex,” from “I Wonder,” read as an anti-authoritarian act.) Rodriguez’s take on his own influences is fairly accurate, at least in this recent interview, where he cites Paul Simon’s “I Am a Rock,” Dylan’s “Masters of War,” “Ohio,” by Neil Young, and “Eve of Destruction” by Barry McGuire.
The shadowy-poet profile is a bit of theatre, though. In a wonderfully edited and reconstructed sequence, Coffey and Theodore find Rodriguez in 1969, playing a club called The Sewer By The Sea, moving from the mist on the dock into the smoke of the club to find a man playing with his back to audience. All entirely true, except for a significant omission: Rodriguez had recorded a single two years earlier for Impact records, “I’ll Slip Away.” Mike Theodore had helped arrange the song, though he barely remembers the session. Reached by phone at his home in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, Theodore said that a friend of Rodriguez’s, Rainy M. Moore, invited them down to The Sewer.
“He didn’t really have a manager, just people who helped him out and introduced him to people, because he was pretty shy. I’m not sure we even knew it was the same guy when we saw him at The Sewer. It didn’t really matter because he sounded so different. The way it happened in the movie is really what it was like.”
Always go with the legend. I also spoke briefly with Bendjelloul by phone earlier this week:
You said you were taking tips, looking for stories, when you found out about Rodriguez.
I had been working for Swedish National TV, the SVT, on something called “Cobra,” an arts and cultural show that did stories like you’d find in The New Yorker. But in 2006, I quit and went backpacking, looking for stories with a camera. In six months, I went to sixteen countries: Ethiopia, all the countries in Central America, and a few countries in South America. I went to many places. I found quite a few pretty good stories, but this was the one I was like, “Wow, this is like a fairy tale, this is scripted, this sounds too good to be true.” I fell in love, very, very much. I’d never spent more than four weeks on story before, and I spent four years on this. Normally, I get a salary when I work. I didn’t get any salary for four years.
You sacrificed a lot for this movie.
It was very hard to finance, it really was. The music and the illustrations and the editing was done by myself, but it wasn’t on purpose. I don’t think you should do that. I think you should collaborate with professionals, but I couldn’t because I didn’t get any funding. I borrowed money from friends and family. I didn’t really buy clothes for the last two years.
Is anybody working on that trail of money that Rodriguez hasn’t seen?
Rodriguez today still sells gold in South Africa—only in the last five years he sold another gold disc, but that money does not go to Clarence Avant. It goes to another company in England, and someone should investigate what happens with that money. I spoke to a South African lawyer who solved the case of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and he said, “Sure, we can solve this, but it will take three years and we will need some money because these things are difficult.”
I didn’t get too deep into what happens with Rodriguez’s record checks today, because the story is not really about money. We had a country during apartheid that was isolated, so we didn’t have any cultural exchange. The South African record labels didn’t search for him because they couldn’t bring him to South Africa anyway, it was a boycott. We had a guy who was living in a house without a telephone, which is not very common, and we had a time before the Internet, the third factor. I mean, there are a few factors that made this story happen and the money is only one of those factors, I think.
Have you figured out how many other people knew about this phenomenon?
We haven’t screened the film in South Africa, but there are South Africans that came to screenings. A South African told me, “Of course I knew all this already. I actually had this conversation with an American a few years ago.” He also said, “We were talking about something completely different, and I said, ‘That would be like the seventies without the Beatles, the Stones, and Rodriguez,’ and the American was like, ‘What did you just say?’ ” They talk about him in the same breath as those rock gods in South Africa.
Have people reached out to you that were part of that moment after the release of the movie?
There’s one story that’s pretty cool. In 1970, track number six on “Cold Fact” is called “Inner City Blues.” Next year, 1971, there’s an album by Marvin Gaye, called “What’s Goin’ On?,” released in Detroit. Track number nine is called “Inner City Blues.” On both those albums, you find the same guy, Bob Babbitt, an amazing bass player who just passed away two weeks ago. I called a year ago and asked him, “Is this a coincidence? Or did you tell Marvin Gaye the title of this completely unknown song?” He told me, and I think he was truthful, “I don’t remember anything. I don’t even remember Rodriguez.”
Photograph courtesy Sony Pictures Classic.
