"I got my nickname from this song." "When I was in the Army they used to mispronounce Segerman as Sugar Man." "And then they just started calling me Sugar and that became my nickname." "It's 40 years since this LP called Cold Fact by Rodriguez was released." "And in South Africa it was a very popular album." "It was one of the biggest albums of the day." "But the thing was, we didn't know who this guy was." "All our other rock stars, we had all the information we needed." "But this guy?" "There was nothing." "And then we found out that he had committed suicide." "He set himself alight on stage and burnt to death in front of the audience." "It was the most incredible thing." "It wasn't just a suicide." "It was probably the most grotesque suicide in rock history." "The first time that I remember actually recognizing him is" "Mike Theodore called me on the phone one day and said," ""I have this artist I want you to come see with me." ""This guy's name is Rodriguez," ""he's working down by the Detroit River." ""There's a bar down there," ""down by the wharf riverside district." ""Let's go see him tonight." ""I think you'll really like him."" "So that night, I remember, we pull up... away in this kinda isolated part of Detroit right on the side of the Detroit River, and you could see the mist in the air coming off the river." "We could feel it." "And we went inside there, and as we walked in the door, we could hear behind us the sound of the freighters as they're going down the river, and so it's like you're walking out of a Sherlock Holmes novel." "You walk out of the mist and you go into this place, and inside the place, it's all full of smoke, so there's a mist inside there." "Boom, hey, you know, it's a wall of smoke." "Beer all over the place." "Peanut shells." "It was just a mess." "And then you hear this strumming sound." "Strumming and batting the guitar." "And then you hear this voice." "Strange voice." "Finally, we walked through the smoke, and I looked, and there in the far corner I saw..." "I could see the shadow of a man and I couldn't see his face." "I said, "What's the deal?" So we got a little closer..." "And you see this guy with his back to you." "So all you see is his back and he's in a corner, singing." "It was an ethereal scene, if you will." "Foggy night, foghorns, smoke so thick you couldn't see through it." "And here's this voice." "Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics 'cause you couldn't see the guy's face." "That's when we talked to him and figured we needed to do an album on him." "The only writer that I had heard of, of that time period, was maybe Bob Dylan, that was writing that well." "He was this wandering spirit around the city." "And, uh, sometimes I might catch him in the corner." "You know, Detroit's got its share of, uh, burned-out, desolate areas and I would occasionally see him, um," "far away from The Brewery, and I wondered, and it just added to this mythology of him." "Like, what is he doing?" "What is he doing?" "What does he do?" "I heard he did a little roofing, some construction work." "Um, I think that's how he got his money at the time." "He just was, you know, and I say this with love," "I say this with respect, but," "I thought he was just a... just not much more than a kind of a homeless person, you know?" "He just was a drifter." "He was just..." "Um..." "I didn't know if he had a home, you know?" "He'd look like maybe he'd go from shelter to shelter or something." "Detroit in the '70s was a hard place." "Well, it's still a hard place." "Lot of decay, lots of ruined houses." "Real poverty exists in this city." "And those streets were Rodriguez's natural habitat." "Any time we met him to talk about what we were doing, he would always meet us on a corner somewhere in his neighbourhood." "Most of the time he wasn't coming to my house." "He'd say, "Meet me on the corner of this street and that street,"" "and we would be there." "Uh, Mike and I would get out of our cars and park our cars, so we'd be standing on the corner, and then we'd look round and he'd be there all of a sudden." "He'd just show up." "We thought he was like the inner city poet." "You know?" "Putting his poems to music of what he saw." "And it was definitely a very gritty look at what he saw on the streets of Detroit." "What he saw in his neighbourhood." "Who was walking around the streets." "And the way he presented it in a song, I thought was very, very interesting." "We were working at Tera-Shirma recording studio." "When he opened up and sang, you went, "Whoa, this guy's got it."" "Rodriguez, at that time, had all the machinery in place." "Big names, big money behind it." "Circumstances were right." "Why didn't it make it?" "That's the big question that today still haunts me." "Did he get enough promotion?" "Did he do enough performances?" "Was he too political?" "Was there this or was there that?" "Should it have been green instead of orange?" "Should it have been a violin instead of an oboe?" "On and on you can go." "But the end of the day is, if you listen to the stuff now, you'd say," ""I don't understand it, he's right-on."" "I only heard him play once, and one of the songs that he had on his album, it was called..." "The Sugar Man?" "Was it Sugar Man?" "Is that the name of the song?" "Um, I knew that guy, the Sugar Man." "And his name was Volkswagen Cha..." "Volkswagen Frank!" "And he lived right around the corner and you used to go over to Volkswagen Frank's." "You'd go in and get a little "sugar," if you know what I mean." "I got some photos here that I'd like to show you that I've kept since my days in England with Rodriguez." "Let me see." "Possibly it's in this book, I don't know where." "These are all my photos from when I was acting." "That's me, and that's Jimmy Dean." "That was in 1955." "Hang on, I think I've found them." "Think they're in here." "Yeah, here they are." "Wow." "Good Lord, here they are." "You know, I haven't seen these pictures in almost 35 years." "He's my most memorable artist." "You know, I've produced a lot of great ones, but... he's my most memorable." "It's not just a talent." "He's like..." "He's like a wise man, a prophet." "He's way beyond just being a musical artist." "And he probably could have done fantastically well if he had have continued." "When I met him, they said, "Rodriguez, this is Steve Rowland." ""He really likes your album." And Rodriguez said to me," ""Well, did you like Cold Facts?"" "I said, "Man, I thought it was absolutely brilliant." ""Absolutely brilliant." ""I can't believe that this album didn't do anything." ""It's just a fantastic album."" "So he played me..." "Well, his next album was on..." "In those days you had cassettes." "He had demos of this next album that he was gonna call Coming From Reality." "And I said, "Wow, man, this has got to be a smash." ""These are great songs." ""Little bit..." "Little bit different from the others," I said, "but great songs."" "I said, "And a couple of them were so sad." You know." "There's one in there that's absolutely a killer." "It's one of the saddest songs that..." "I'm laughing, but it's one of the saddest songs that I've ever heard." "And it's a very simple song." "Hang on, I wanna play this." "Hang on." "Okay, listen to these words." "Oh, man." "And it really makes me sad, because... that was the last song that we recorded." "And that was the last song that Rodriguez ever recorded." "And what makes it even sadder was the album was released in November of 1971," "and we expected big things." "And it did absolutely nothing." "And then, two weeks before Christmas," "Sussex dropped him off the label." "And the very first line in the song, as if premonition, was, "I lost my job two weeks before Christmas."" "Oh, man." "I just think about that." "This guy deserves recognition." "Nobody in America had even heard of him." "Nobody..." "Nobody even was interested in listening to him." "How can that be?" "How can that be?" "Guy that writes like this." "I mean..." "It's still a bit of a mystery how the first copy of Cold Fact actually came to South Africa." "But one of the stories I've heard is that there was an American girl and she came to South Africa to visit her boyfriend and brought a copy of the record with her." "And her and him and all their friends really liked it and went out to try and buy it but you couldn't buy it." "So they started taping copies and passing copies along." "However it got here, however it germinated here, once it got here, it spread very quickly." "I remember I was in high school and we heard this song, "I wonder how many times you've had sex?"" "And at that time South Africa was very conservative." "It was the height of apartheid, and there wasn't television here." "That's how conservative it was, 'cause television was communist." "It was really..." "You wouldn't believe." "Everything was restricted, everything was censored." "Everything was..." "And here's this guy singing this song." ""Who's that?" Said, "That's Rodriguez."" "And he became something of a rebel son' of icon." "But the strange thing was that we all bought his records." "Everybody I knew had his records." "I Wonder, that was the big song that everybody was singing and we all bought a record." "And there he was on the cover, sort of a hippy with shades." "But nobody knew anything about him." "He was a mystery." "Unlike other artists that you could read about from America, get to know something about them, there was zilch." "Nobody knew anything." "It was a mystery." "We only had his picture on the cover of the record." "The album was exceptionally popular." "To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives." "In the mid-'70s, if you walked into a random white, liberal, middle-class household that had a turntable and a pile of pop records and if you flipped through the records you would always see" "Abbey Road by The Beatles." "You would always see Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel." "And you would always see Cold Fact by Rodriguez." "To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time." "The message it had was:" ""Be anti-establishment. "" "One song's called Anti-Establishment Blues." "We didn't know what the word "anti-establishment" was until it cropped up on a Rodriguez song and then we found out, it's OK to protest against your society, to be angry with your society." "Because we lived in a society where every means was used to prevent apartheid from, you know, coming to an end," "this album somehow had in it... lyrics that almost set us free as oppressed peoples." "Any revolution needs an anthem and in South Africa Cold Fact was the album that gave people permission to free their minds and to start thinking differently." "It may seem strange that South African record companies didn't do more to try and track down Rodriguez, but, actually, if you look back at the time we were in the middle of apartheid, the height of apartheid." "South Africa was under sanctions from countries from all over the world." "South African musicians were not allowed to play overseas." "No foreign acts were allowed to visit South Africa." "It was a closed-door situation between South Africa and the rest of the world." "The countries around the world were saying horrible things about the apartheid government but we didn't know because they controlled the news." "The majority of the population had been marginalized and forced out of the commerce in areas." "It was what had happened in Nazi Germany." "It was a spin-off from Nazi Germany, but if a newspaper published it, they'd get prosecuted." "So, because of that, South Africa had achieved a pariah status in the world." "There were cultural boycotts." "There were sporting boycotts." "It was a very isolated society." "So we were cut off." "We all knew apartheid was wrong, but living in South Africa, there wasn't much, as a white person, you could do about it, 'cause the government was very strict." "It was a military state, to a large degree." "If you spoke out against apartheid, you could be thrown into prison for three years." "So although a lot of whites were part of the struggle, the majority of whites were not." "You were watched." "There were spies." "It was scary and people were scared." "But out of the Afrikaans community emerged a group of Afrikaans musicians, songwriters, and for them, when they heard Rodriguez, it was like a voice spoke to them and said, "Guys, there's a way out." "There's a way out." ""You can write music." "You can write imagery." ""You can sing, you can perform."" "And that was where, really, the first opposition to apartheid came from inside the Afrikaans community." "It was these young Afrikaans guys and, to a man, they'll tell you they were influenced by Rodriguez." "Koos Kombuis." "Willem Moller." "The late Johannes Kerkorrel." "The guys who were regarded as the icons of the Afrikaans music revolution will all tell you, "Rodriguez was our guy."" "We call it the Voelvry movement of Afrikaans artists singing against apartheid." "All of us listened to Rodriguez at some point." "All of us." "It had an enormous impact." "It made you just think that there's another way." "What's presented to you by the establishment isn't all theirs." "The biggest hit was a song called Set It Off which was when PW Botha was the president then." "The real bad guy." "When he came on TV, he used to talk like that." "And this song said, "switch it off, just switch off the TV."" "So what lines do you think were the lines they had problem with?" "Ah, gee whiz, it's all of them." ""Sugar Man, won't you hurry Cos I'm tired of these scenes" ""For a blue coin, won't you bring back all those colours to my dreams?"" "The most difficult ones is probably" ""Silver magic ships, you carry Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane."" "And what is that?" "I'm gonna leave that to you." " But it's drugs?" " It's certainly drugs." "During the apartheid years, it was just impossible to play it." "And what happened if you did play it?" "Well, you couldn't." "I'd like to show you why." "Right, here we have the album, the vinyl." "At the back of the sleeve you'll see a sticker that says "Avoid."" "But when you open the album and take it out from its sleeve, you would see that they have scratched that particular song with a sharp tool to make sure that it would not go out on air." "And that's the way that they banned the music which, in my mind, was quite a brutal way of ensuring the song would never be heard on the air." "Most of those tracks were on the banned list at SABC and they ran the broadcast industry completely." "There weren't any independent radio stations or TV stations." "Obviously, when that word got out, it just made the record more desirable." "You know, it's like having something banned." "You're 16, 17 years old and you've got something that's banned." "It was absolutely perfect." "Cold Fact was just one of the albums we had in our collections, and for 10, 20 years, it was just a record we listened to and enjoyed." "But then a pivotal event happened that changed everything for me." "We were down in Camps Bay beach." "We were sitting around on the beach and a friend of mine, a woman, who was from South Africa, but she had got married and emigrated to Los Angeles, she said to me, "Where can I buy Cold Fact in South Africa?"" "And I turned round and I pointed to a store across the road that sold CDs and I said, "You can buy it at that store."" "She said, "Really?" "Because, you know, you can't buy it anywhere in America." ""I've asked everywhere in America, no one's even heard of it."" "And that was a pivotal moment, 'cause I didn't know that." "I thought everybody knew Rodriguez, especially in America 'cause he was American." "So my next thought was, "Ah, Rodriguez, that's interesting. "" "I went back..." "I came back home and I took out my Rodriguez records and that's when I realised there was nothing on the record to tell us who he was or where he was from." "On Cold Fact there are four names." "On the front cover it just says "Rodriguez."" "But if we take the record out and examine the sleeve, the artist's name is Sixto Rodriguez." "But if you look at the tracks, six of these tracks are credited to Jesus Rodriguez, and four of these tracks are credited to Sixth Prince." "So who actually wrote these songs and who are all these people?" "We didn't have any more information than a record with him sitting on the cover with a hat and sunglasses on." "We didn't know how tall he was 'cause he was sitting cross-legged." "So how do you solve a mystery?" "You use whatever information's available." "What did we have?" "A record cover with lyrics." "So we started looking quite deeply at the lyrics and seeing what they said, and some of them, very few of them, had geographical references." "The one You Can't getaway starts off," ""Born in the troubled city" ""In Rock and Roll, USA."" "Born in which troubled city?" "Seems all the cities were troubled in the late '60s." ""In the shadow of the tallest building."" "The tallest building, as far as we knew, was in New York." "And at the bottom of the song this verse says," ""In a hotel room in Amsterdam."" "Then it says, "Going down a dusty Georgian side road I wander." Georgia?" "So we've had Amsterdam, we've had Georgia, we've had the world's tallest building." "Not much to go on." "Well, what I heard, and the story differs a lot, and a lot of people have different versions of the story, but what I heard, he hadn't played a concert in a very long time." "And a promoter got him to play a concert, and he was hoping it was gonna be a great show." "Of course, the show didn't work out that way." "It started out..." "The sound wasn't good." "The venue wasn't good." "A lot of the factors surrounding the show wasn't good." "And as the show went on and on, it started going downhill from there." "People started ridiculing him." "People started whistling or making mention of the fact that, you know, the show wasn't going as planned." "And it got to a point where, just very quietly, very gently, he just sang his last song." ""But thanks for your time Then you can thank me for mine" ""And after that's said forget it."" "And he reached down and pulled up a gun and pulled the trigger." "And that was the dramatic, very dramatic ending, to what was actually a non-career." "In 1996, the South African record label released Rodriguez's second album, Coming From Reality, on CD for the first time in South Africa." "And because they thought I knew a lot about him, they asked if I wanted to co-write the liner notes for the booklet, which I did." "And I'll read some of it to you." "They start off by saying," ""if ever there is an air of intrigue and mystery around a pop artist," ""it is around the artist known as Rodriguez." ""There's no air of intrigue and mystery around him anywhere else in the world" ""because his two albums, Coming From Reality and Cold Fact," ""were monumental flops everywhere else."" "And this is the important part." ""There were no concrete cold facts about the artist known as Rodriguez." ""Any musicologist detectives out there?"" "And that, that's the line that changed everything." "I started searching for Rodriguez when a few of us were sitting around in the Army and somebody said, "How did Rodriguez die?"" "And just coincidence, at the time I was looking for subject matter to write an article." "I remember having, like, five points on a piece of paper." "And number four, or something, was "Find out how Rodriguez died."" "I thought it would make a good story." "So that was in the back of my mind for many years and then, many years later, I came across this, um, re-release of Coming From Reality and inside, the liner notes said," ""There were no concrete cold facts about the artist known as Rodriguez." ""Any musicologist detectives out there?" Um, was the question, and I think that to me, was like an invitation." "I thought, "Well, maybe it's me"." "The first way I tried to find him was to just follow the money." "Normally, you follow the money." "That's how you get to the bottom of anything." "But where do dead men's money go?" "I was astounded that no one knew anything about him." "I guess it was reminiscent of how bad the music industry was." "They were renowned for ripping people off." "And it is one thing, if they had said to me, "Oh, yeah," ""we send the money to X place or Y," or whatever, but they just kept on being very vague." "And, in fact, when I put some pressure on somebody, I did get an address, and I called and, I can't remember if I spoke to someone or left a message, but when I called the next day, the number had been changed." "And that to me was..." "I mean, that's a gift for anyone who wants to be a detective, is an obstacle, because an obstacle is an inspiration." "If you just find things easily, they're not inspiring, and this was a great obstacle that somebody had changed their number." "I just smelt a dirty money story somewhere there." "So, if you compare to other artists, how big was it actually?" "Every month it just sold." "And every party you went to and every place you went to, you'd hear that album at least once." "I don't think I could even think of how many albums he's sold here 'cause it's a long period of time." "What could be probable?" "I'd have to guess." "Maybe half a million copies over that period of time." "It's a lot of records, especially for a small country." "Gold record, ten times over." "Rodriguez never got to know that he was big in South Africa." "How could that be?" "Don't know." "I mean, everything would have been..." "I find that strange." "I have no idea." "But you must have sent royalties somewhere?" "Of course we sent royalties." "We sent royalties to AM Records." "I remember the label." "It was AM Sussex." "Whether they had a partnership, whatever they had, I don't..." "You know." "So, my suggestion is, if you can find out whoever the person was who owned Sussex Records, then you will find out what happened to the money." "Because it's weird, isn't it?" "It's very strange." "Very strange." "How popular was the album?" "Was he as famous as, you know, the Rolling Stones and the Doors?" "Oh, it was much bigger than Rolling Stones." "Absolutely, at the time, yeah." "When you released the record, did you try to contact him?" "No, not at all." "You know?" "Because... because, at the time, the legend... the legend was..." "here was an artist." "This was like Jimi Hendrix." "With Jimi Hendrix catalogues, you've gotta understand, if you just got Jimi Hendrix and you'd got the license for this territory, you're obviously not gonna go try get hold of Jimi Hendrix, because he's dead." " But who did you pay royalties to?" " To Sussex Music." "To Clarence?" "Yes." "Well, to Sussex Music which is his company, yeah." "So, I decided to make a diagram." "Write down the whole path and trail that I was trying to work out." "All the various touch points, all the record companies, all the people that had dealings with Rodriguez and his album at some point." "I made this whole document." "So I found out there were three record companies in South Africa that had released Rodriguez's records." "Finally discovering that led to a record company in America." "It was a company that had been signing Rodriguez and creating his first album called Sussex." "I then did my research on Sussex." "That led me to discovering who the owner of Sussex Records was:" "Clarence Avant." "Clarence Avant, he'd been the head of Motown, one of the most prestigious jobs to have in the record company industry." "So I did my research." "I tried everything to get a hold of Clarence Avant, but I just got to a lot of closed doors." "I could not get a hold of him." "I don't know if you've ever seen this picture." "That's him." "That's Rodriguez." "I don't know when this was made." "I have absolutely no idea." " That's 1970, I think." " Yeah." "This is my man." "Man, don't get me emotional again." "Shit." "You made me emotional once." "I ain't getting emotional no more sitting here talking to you, man." "If I had to name ten artists that I have ever been involved with," "Rodriguez would be in the top five, simple as that." "There's nothing..." "You never heard anything like him." "People would say, "Well, Bob Dylan." I said, "No, no"." "Bob Dylan was mild to this guy." "Did it make any money?" "We judge singing here in America..." "If you say, "Is it..." "Was it the top hundred?" ""Was it... was it number..." "Did it get on the charts as number 12?" ""Was there a lot of radio play?" The answer's, "No, man."" "Nobody didn't..." "Rodriguez?" "You know, that name didn't register." "Although he looked like he was a white guy but, even still, Rodriguez, everybody knew Rodriguez, that's a Spanish name." "A Latin name." "Latin music was not happening then." "How many records do you think he sold in America?" "In America'?" "Six." "Maybe my wife bought it, maybe my daughter bought..." "She couldn't buy it, but maybe Neil Bogart, maybe Dennis and Mike." "Hey, look, man, you know, it didn't sell here." "There was some excitement about him." "Couple of agents heard him and wanted to bring him to California and, you know, when he came to California he was nervous, and he turned his back to the audience and everybody said, "Well, what the hell is this?"" "But the thing is that the guy sold hundreds of thousands of records in another country." "I'm going to South Africa to try to chase somebody who's selling records?" "Shit, no, man." "But did you know that he was big in South Africa?" "Rodriguez, young man, never happened insofar as I'm concerned." "Period." "But if I'm really gonna try to track down the money, how should I do it?" "Well, is that important, the money?" "Or is Rod..." "Which is important?" "Rodriguez's story or you worrying about the money?" "How many people in South Africa?" "40 million?" "40 thousand?" "40 million people?" "How many people?" "40 million people live in South Africa." "Well, so they've been freed for how long?" "Three hours?" "So what the fuck's that supposed to mean?" "You told me at lunch, they scratch records because they wouldn't let the lyrics..." "So the underground movement, how big was it'?" "How big was it?" "He sold half a million records in South Africa." "So he sold half a million records." "So what?" "I don't know who he sold them to." "How many distributors did he have?" "I have no idea." "There are only..." "There are three record labels." " I spoke to all the record label..." " Well, great." "...bosses in South Africa who has released his records." "It was..." "Go back to 'em and tell 'em to send me an account." "You think it's something I'm gonna worry about, a 1970 contract?" "If you do, you're outta your goddamn mind." "Buddha Records out of business." "I'm out of business." "So you think they give a shit about that?" "I know I wouldn't." "I've been looking for information about Rodriguez for a long time." "I've even setup a web page called The Great Rodriguez Hunt in the hope that someone out there in cyberspace would post a message on the forum giving us any information about Rodriguez." "But there was nothing." "At that stage I met Craig, who was the musicologist detective who had read my liner notes and who was also searching for Rodriguez." "And he flew down to Cape Town and we met in a coffee shop." "And we exchanged all the information we had." "But unfortunately we had very little." "And at that stage I remember we felt it was probably best if we just stopped." "So basically I was lost." "I'd come to a dead end." "I couldn't find him." "I didn't know where to look any more." "I'd even visited the places that he sang about." "I'd been to London." "Nothing." "I'd been to Amsterdam." "He sings about Amsterdam." "Nothing." "And one day I'd basically given up." "I thought, "Well, this is it. "" "And one day, just by accident, I was listening to the album in the car and I heard the song Inner City Blues." "Great song." "And the line came up." ""I met a girl in Dearborn, early six o'clock this morn." ""A cold fact."" "Then I thought, "Hang on a minute." I 'd never checked out Dearborn." "I didn't even know if it was a city but then I thought," ""Actually that sounds like a town or a city."" "And I thought, "Hang on, let me check it out in an atlas."" "So I went through to my old atlas and pulled it out." "I thought, "Let me see what I could find here." ""Let me see if I could find Dearborn."" "Urn..." "Dear..." "Then I found it." "Dearborn, Wayne, Michigan." "F7." "F...7." "Dearborn." "Part of Detroit." "That was a huge breakthrough in my mind." "Detroit, home of Motown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and, eventually, Mike Theodore, the producer of the album." "I was sifting in my condo, just having a cup of coffee." "I was looking out the window watching the ocean." "Phone rings." "It's a long-distance call from South Africa... from a writer whose name's Craig Bartholomew, and he starts telling me this amazing story." "So he said, "Do you know that Rodriguez" ""has been selling in South Africa for 25 years." ""His albums are selling millions."" "I said, "What?"" "Then he's sitting there and he wants..." "he starts telling me some stories." "He said, "How did Rodriguez die?"" "And he's telling me information that he had that Rodriguez had... blown his brains out on stage, or set himself on fire and killed himself." "I had 100 questions I wanted to ask." "I was just hoping I could get all my questions in, you know." ""Why did he write this lyric?" "Why did he write that lyric?" ""Where did he record this album?" "Where did he record that album?"" "And we got talking and I asked him a lot of questions and it was amazing." "It was a rollercoaster ride of questions and answers, and it was a euphoric moment of just having finally broken through and discovered something." "And finally I got to the one question I wanted to know the answer of, was," ""How did Rodriguez die?" "Did he blow himself up on stage?" "Or..." ""What is this dramatic story?" ""Let's open up the lid on this right away, and find out what happened."" "And Mike Theodore said, "What do you mean dead?" "He's not dead." ""Sixto is alive." "He's alive and kicking." ""The principal artist known as Sixto Rodriguez is alive and kicking" ""and living in Detroit."" "I..." "I can't remember who called me and said, "They've found him."" "I said, "No." "You're shitting me." "This isn't..." "No."" "At first I thought it was a hoax." "I thought somebody was faking it." "You know, it's like going into Tutankhamen's tomb and finding the mummy." "You know, it was like, "Wow, he lives."" "I remember dancing on the spot when I was staying on the phone." "And Craig and I were jumping up and down saying, "We found him, we found him."" "It was the most exciting thing." "We'd actually done it." "So that was it." "I'd come to the point, it was the end of the story." "I was searching for a dead man." "One morning I discovered a living man." "And to me that was the end of the story." "I wrote my article," "I called it "Looking for Jesus."" "I faxed it to many individuals, many people involved, but somehow this article made its way across the Atlantic and into the hands of someone in America." "And what I thought was the end of story was actually just the beginning of another story, and the best part was still to come." "'Cause I don't know where it is." "It might take a while." "They do have the dates." ""Three-year search for dead singer." Yes." "August '97." "I was in Kansas." "I got a copy of it to me at work." "I was on, like, a 24-hour shift." "And then, I went online and that's when I discovered the website." "When I went online there was this milk carton with a picture." "And it said, "Wanted" and "Have you seen this man?"" "I was like, "Matter of fact, I have seen him before."" "I replied, "Rodriguez is my father." "I'm serious." ""Do you really want to know about my father?" ""Sometimes the fantasy is better left alive."" "I don't know why I said that, but anyway I did." "And then I gave them e-mail address, phone numbers, anything that they wanted to contact me." "And he phoned me." "Well, we'd found out that Rodriguez was alive." "I'd spoken to Craig." "I came to work and Alex McCrindle, who was the guy I worked on the website with said," ""You're not going to believe what's on the website."" "And on the website was a forum where people could post messages, and there was a message that said," ""My name's Eva." "I'm Rodriguez's daughter."" "She'd left a phone number and she said," ""I'd like to speak to someone in connection with this."" "So that night I phoned her." "I said, "Hi, I'm Sugar," and she said, "I'm Eva,"" "and we had the most amazing conversation." "She explained to me who her father was, what he had done, where he had been." "She asked me who I was and I explained why my name was Sugar and how I was involved with the website." "And then at the end I said to her," ""This has been the most amazing thing for me," ""and what would be really great is if I could," ""at some point, speak to your dad." ""I'd love it if I could just say hello to him. "" "Because, for me, this was son' of the end of the search and I just wanted to speak to this man." "And then I went to bed." "And 1:00 in the morning that night, the phone rang." "And my wife answers it 'cause it was her side of the bed." "And I remember she picked up the phone and her face just changed." "She had this look of awe." "She said, "it's him."" "And I was in shock." "I'd been sleeping and I ran into the other room, into my study, and I picked up the phone and she put hers down." "And I said, "Hello?" and a voice said..." ""Hello, is that Sugar?"" "And I knew, I just knew, because I knew that voice." "I'd heard that voice so many times on the records, I knew it was him." "I was talking to Rodriguez." "That, for me, was one of the greatest moments of my life." "Whenever you're ready." " Okay." "Is this all right?" "Should I be doing something though?" "Should I have a glass of water or something?" "Is that right?" " Do you want?" " Yeah." "I like that." "Yeah, this is..." "I'm supposed to be comfortable." "So run the question to me again." "Just so I can hear it in my head." "In the '70s and '80s, did you ever get any contact from South Africa?" "Uh..." "No, I didn't." "Maybe they didn't have a contact number or something but, no, I didn't." "How does that feel?" "You weren't aware of something that would have changed your life completely." "I mean, probably to the better." "Well, I don't know if it would have been for the better, but it's certainly a thought, you know." "But wouldn't it have been nice to know that you were a superstar?" "Uh, well..." "I don't know how to respond to that." "After Coming From Reality, did you wanna continue making albums?" "I would have liked to have continued but nothing beats Reality." "So I pretty much went back to work." "What did you do?" "L..." "Well, I'd do hired labor." "Demolition, renovation of buildings, of homes, you know." "Restoration." "Did you enjoy that'?" "I do." "It keeps the blood circulating, keeps you fit, yeah." "But it's quite far away from music." "Uh..." "Yeah, quite a bit, quite a different contrast, yeah." "Did you continue making music on your own?" "I do, I play guitar." "I love playing guitar." "But I do love to listen." "I like to go see the shows and things." "But I do get about." "He never said anything about being disappointed." "He would just move on, continue to survive because you can't just give up." "What did he do instead?" "He read a lot." "He was involved in politics." "He was involved in the community." "He would attend protests and rallies, if those were causes that he believed in." "He would take us along." "He was always a proponent of working for the people that maybe didn't always have a voice, or didn't have a chance to speak up, the working class, the working poor." "He had a lot of experience in that area." "He approached the work from a different place than most people do." "He took it very, very seriously." "Son' of like a sacrament, you know?" "He was going to do this dirty, dirty work for eight or ten hours, okay?" "But he was dressed in a tuxedo." "He had this kind of magical quality that all genuine poets and artists have to elevate things." "To get above the mundane, the prosaic." "All the bullshit." "All the mediocrity that's everywhere." "The artist, the artist is the pioneer." "Even if his musical hopes were dashed, the spirit remained." "And he just had to keep finding a place, refining the process of how to apply himself." "He knew that there was something more." "It was in the early '80s." "He wanted to do something, do something righteous, make a difference." "So, lo and behold he told me that he was gonna run for mayor, and I thought, "Well, God bless you, Rodriguez." ""You know, if you can become Mayor of Detroit, then anything is possible."" "Some old items from Rodriguez." "This is his bumper sticker, from the first time he ran for city council." "And I think this is a copy of the ballot." "He didn't win an election, ever." "139." "There were 169 candidates." "Nine get elected." "They spelled his name wrong." "My relatives on my mother's side of the family are European and Native American." "And my father's family is Mexican." "My grandfather came from Mexico." "The Mexican came to Detroit to work in the auto factories, so we were working-class people, blue-collar workers, hard labor." "Um, we lived in 26 different homes and some houses didn't have bedrooms." "Some houses didn't have bathrooms." "And they weren't homes." "They were just places that we lived." "But just because people are poor or have little doesn't mean that, you know, their dreams aren't big and their soul isn't rich, you know, and that's where the classes and the prejudice come from" "is that there is a difference between you and me, and there's a difference between them and us." "He wasn't just doing your average carpentry, you know, he was really cleaning out the house." "I mean, doing work that no one else wanted to do." "Really, no one else wanted to do that work." "He would come home, he would be covered in dust and din', paint chips, from his day's work." "Long days." "I saw him take refrigerators down on his back, downstairs." "It was just a day at work for him, but I knew he was a harder worker than a lot of other fathers that I knew of." "It's a city that tells you not to dream big, not to expect anything more." "But he always took me to places that only certain elite people would be able to go." "So, he kind of instilled in me that I can go anywhere I want, regardless of what my bank statement says, and I'm going, you know." "So, that's kinda how he was." "He showed me the top floors of places." "I said, "I'm just as good as they are," you know." "He majored in philosophy in university." "My dad gave us a lot of exposure to the arts." "He would let us go into the libraries and the museums and the science centres, and where that was our day care," "and we toured the halls of the museum in San Diego Rivera and, you know, all Picasso and Delacroix and..." "We began to learn of life outside of the city, and that's in books and paintings and in music." "Well, I started playing when I was 16, and the thing is, it was a family guitar, and I played a lot of bars in the city and clubs in the city, small rooms." "And I met Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey and they came to the club to see me play." "I had a gig at a place called The Sewer, right out by the Detroit River, and then we got a record deal from Clarence Avant, so that's how it started." "But all those early years were, you know..." "lot of work." "I was at a Chrysler plant called Dodge Maine, and I also worked at Eldon and Lynch Road in Detroit." "Worked in the heat treat department." "Stuff like that." "A lot of heavy labor." "But it was a good year for me." "This Cold Fact thing." "I had achieved what I was trying to do, is to get a product, you know." "And it was going very well, I thought, you know." "How did it feel?" "A great feeling of accomplishment." "Actualization." "Did you believe that it was a good album?" "I did my best with it." "The reviews were good on it, and..." "Yeah, I thought it was good." "I'm not the one to ask that, though." "Ask that question to." "But you go ahead, yeah." "Were you surprised that it didn't sell?" "Um..." "Was I surprised?" "It's the music business so there's no guarantees, you know?" "So I told him, "You're bigger than Elvis, "" "and he said, "What do you mean?"" "I said, "In South Africa you are more popular than Elvis Presley. "" "And there was this pause, and I sensed he thought it was a crank call and he was gonna hang up." "So I said, "Listen, wait." "Listen, listen to me, wait." ""I promise you, just come here." "You won't be disappointed."" "He's working his ass off in Woodbridge." "One day, be brought this picture of himself on a milk carton." "And he'd say, "Emmerson, look at this." "You know, they're looking for me."" "I said, "Really?" "Why is that, Rodriguez?"" "Next day he says, "Emmerson, I gotta go on tour."" "I said, "Come on, Rodriguez, are you serious?"" "Because I'm a journalist, I doubted it." "That son' of thing does not happen in the rational universe." "It does not happen." "It's against the laws of God and nature." "This guy is coming to tour here, he must be an imposter." "It's a clever public relations scam." "Actually, not even a clever public relations scam. it's a stupid..." "'Cause it so obviously can't be true." "Only idiots would believe it." "They..." "But I was wrong." "We were always anxious, of course, to get off the plane." "That was a long flight." "But we got off the plane and we put our bags on our backs and, you know, they were heavy and we just kept moving towards the airport." "And suddenly, three, two limousines pulled up and we were sure that they weren't for us." "We were like kind of walking around them." "Like, "Oh, we better get out of these people's way" ""'cause they're important people in limos."" "But they were for us." "And that's when it began." "It was all another world." "It was another world." "Just like you would see people..." "over Madonna or..." "Like stepping out into the wind and the paparazzi and all the... you know, the production assistants and everybody are there to welcome him and take us into the VIP suite." "The white carpeting." "You know, that was something that never would we ever even dream of walking on white carpeting, especially in your shoes." "They put him in a limo and they drove him into the city." "And along the way, on all the lampposts, were placards advertising the concert." "And he saw his face on every lamppost as it sped by and he'd go, "There I am, there I am, there I am."" "So we came and we got to meet all the people." "We got to meet Craig Bartholomew and their family and their kids and Stephen Segerman." "And everybody was just so happy." "Everybody was thrilled." "We were even happier." "Stephen phoned me." "He said, "You will never believe this..." ""but Rodriguez is coming to South Africa" ""and we can be the opening band." ""Do you wanna do it?" I said, "Of course we wanna do it."" ""Why?" "Where is he?" "Now they found him." ""They found him, he's alive, he's gonna come and tour in South Africa."" ""Are we gonna be the opening band?" So I couldn't really believe this." "And then I got all the information:" "he's living in Detroit and everything." "And then a little while later he said," ""Look, it turns out he hasn't got a band." ""Could we be the support band?" I mean his band." "I remember, even then, we were sort of," ""Is this really gonna be Rodriguez?"" "We'll only know if he can actually sing these songs." "I mean, we don't know." "What if it's just some guy?" "It was just like one day we heard about it and the next day we were there," "trying to believe our eyes, thinking it was just all very shocking." "I don't know, he took to it really easy." "He just walked in and did his thing and I was amazed that he did so well." "But he's not all" ""head in the clouds" kinda guy." "He's a little bit too much grounded." "He didn't take advantage of all the amenities and stuff." "He didn't sleep in the big double king size bed." "He kinda curled up on the love seat and I found him there and..." "Yeah, he just didn't think somebody should have to make another bed because he messed it up or..." "There was a time where I stayed in the house we were at and everyone else had gone out." "The phone rang and it kept ringing, so I decided to answer it." "And it was a reporter looking to speak with Rodriguez and set up time for an interview." "And then, before she hung up, after I told her to call back later to talk to someone 'cause I couldn't help her, she told me that she wanted to know, between she and I," "if it was the real Rodriguez." "We were rehearsing with a CD of the songs that we've got in the studio here in Cape Town on the day that he came from the airport, when he arrived, and we were actually in the middle of a song when he walked in" "and just took over the microphone and finished the song." "We switched off the CD player and it was, like, completely seamless." "Completely seamless." "I mean, "OK, this is the guy."" "I think we all knew this is gonna be something really special." "Thank you, Cape Town." "Thank you." "When we, uh... initially got on a plane," "I thought maybe there 'd be, hopefully, 20 people in the audience." "Hopefully." "But it turned out really, really different than that." "And there's old people and young people and they're coming to see the show." "And there's my step-dad on the stage..." "Before he went on stage, 'cause I wanted to take a picture of the audience, since nobody's gonna believe this." "You must remember, this guy, it's like seeing someone like Elvis come back from the dead." "People in the audience still don't believe it." "They're standing there." "They're at the concert." "They've paid their money." "They still don't believe that Rodriguez is actually gonna walk on that stage." "Are you ready?" "Please welcome..." "Rodriguez!" "It was almost as if he didn't even have to play." "They were just happy to see him." "So, for a time," "I think they wanted to meet." "It was a reunion." "It was something completely different." "It was for everybody there, I'm sure, the most exciting concert they'd ever been to." "Because it was unique." "We'd never seen Rodriguez." "And all you heard was the bass player just playing..." "And Rodriguez wandered out to the front of the stage and the bass player actually just stopped playing." "And it took a while." "There was about five or ten minutes of just people screaming at him." "Thanks for keeping me alive." "I think to go from being the outcast to being, uh, who he really was." "Because it was as though it was him again... and that was who he was, a musician on stage, playing for his fans." "I thought I would see him being bewildered at all these people staring up at him." "I saw the opposite." "I saw this absolute tranquility." "There was absolute serenity on his face." "Total." "It's like he had arrived at that thing, at that place he'd tried to find his whole life." "Home is acceptance." "Here's a guy who'd lived somewhere else, on the other side of the earth, and it was almost as if he had found his home." "And I looked around at all these people and I thought, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime experience." ""This is never going to happen again."" "Well, isn't this all our great fate?" "Your dreams of yourself, the higher forms of yourself is that one day you will be recognised and that your talents and everything else, will suddenly become visible to the world." "I mean, most of us die without coming anywhere close to that sort of magic." "I tried to get him to talk about that when I interviewed him, about how strange it was, and I got absolutely nothing back." "Absolutely nothing back." "And I couldn't tell whether he was just like son' of cripplingly shy or whether I was asking the wrong questions or there was a language barrier or whatever." "He just..." "Maybe that was OK as well because he preserved his mystery." "I walked away from that interview saying," ""This is all too strange to be true."" "It remains too strange to be true." ""These are the days" ""of miracles and wonder."" "Oh, they were so sweet." "I didn't believe it." "And I still don't, but the thing is..." "So when I went on stage 5,000 seats all set up, white seats, and the thing is..." "And I said, "This is..."" "So when I played a show, they jumped out of their seats and rushed the stage." "South Africa made me feel like more than a prince." "And then signing the autographs for, like, a couple of hours." "I mean, just the line of people bringing their guitars to be signed, bringing their CDs and..." "The most amazing thing I'd seen was the man with his tattoo of the Cold Fact." "He was a Rodriguez impersonator." "That just stoked my fire." "I was like, "Man, that is just too crazy."" "I have with me here, presented to Rodriguez for sales of the album Cold Fact." "Now just tell the States that, OK, will you?" "American singer Rodriguez is certainly alive and well and with us in the Front Row tonight." "Welcome." "Very kind." "How are you?" "I've heard some really riveting tales about your "death."" "I mean, they range from you pouring petrol all over yourself on stage and committing suicide to taking a drug overdose and dying in prison." "Yeah, it was a beautiful, beautiful dream and then you gotta go back." "My dad said he's got two lives." "The carriage turns into the pumpkin bus or something." "It's like..." "Did people in Detroit believe you when you came back and told them what had happened?" "You know, people in Detroit need to hear something good." "I'm not sure how much of it they believed because it is a grandiose story." "It sounds like something you would make up if you were bragging on some dream or something." "He was really quite famous." "He'd be, you know, tearing down this old shack or he'd be sweeping up filth or dirt and he started to show me one day, and I didn't believe him, about the album and how it got to be so popular." "Somebody had a bootleg copy of this thing and it spread around and everyone..." "It got to be so popular that children could recite it and sing the song word for word..." "all of the songs word for word." "And I had never heard of the album and I said, "Can you get me an album?"" "And he couldn't even get me one." "I mean, that's how obscure of a thing it was." "But he had all these photos and stuff, with these giant crowds, 20,000 people, like Woodstock or something." "Like, "Are you kidding me?" "That's you?"" "I thought it was Photoshopped or something." "I didn't believe him." "But he had all these giant crowds and he was quite content to just go and sweep up people's lawns or clean up and do manual labor." "He stayed." "He lives a very, very, very modest life." "Definitely." "There's definitely no excess, and he definitely still works hard in order to make ends meet." "And there's no glamour to his life in that sense." "But he must be a rich man today?" "No." "Rich in a lot of things but perhaps not material things." "I guess it just never got to that." "But he's sold hundreds of thousands of records in South Africa." "Well, yes." "But I believe there's a great deal of perhaps bootlegging, piracy, such like that." "Perhaps..." "Perhaps other people are rich." "You know, when I think about that night when I spoke to Eva on the telephone, we could not have imagined how much our lives were gonna change after that phone call." "Eva came on tour with Rodriguez and the organizers arranged a chaperone bodyguard to drive them around and they fell in love." "And they have a child." "So Rodriguez has a South African grandson, a South African grandchild." "For me, I used to be a jeweler in Johannesburg." "I now live in Cape Town and have a music store." "Things changed so much for us." "But, except for one person, and that's Rodriguez." "For him, nothing has changed." "The life that he was living is still the life that he's living now." "What he's demonstrated very clearly is that you have a choice." "He took all that torment, all that agony, all that confusion and pain, and he transformed it into something beautiful." "He's like the silk worm, you know?" "You take this raw material and you transform it." "And you come out with something that wasn't there before." "Something beautiful." "Something perhaps transcendent." "Something perhaps eternal." "Insofar as he does that," "I think he's representative of the human spirit, of what's possible." "That you have a choice." ""And this has been my choice," ""to give you Sugar Man."" "Now, have you done that?" "Ask yourself."