Rodriguez - The Phantom Songwriter

One of the most important names in 2000s songwriting has the unsteady gait and the wrinkle-carved face of a seventy-year-old from Detroit, who to this day leads a hermit's life in the outskirts of the city that embodies economic and social crises of every era. His is an "evangelical" story: first disowned, then presumed dead, then resurrected, and finally raised to eternal glory in an unstoppable surge of popularity. And so the greatest concern of Jesus Sixto Rodriguez is that it's the music that keeps speaking for him...

by Lorenzo Righetto

It's a story that would perhaps be impossible today; as an aside, it's one you could tell all the detractors of that shapeless, horned monster known as “the Internet”. A story of how, back when the world was little more than a vast archipelago where it was easy to hide news - but just as easy to invent it - someone could be a suicidal legend in one place, and a half-blind labourer in another.

Jesus “Sixto” Rodriguez is a ghost in the decaying, depressed Detroit of then and now, as if the city had been built for that very purpose, born into an immigrant working-class family during the Second World War. His career begins in the smokiest, most derelict and rowdiest bars in the city: his music is little more than a faint backdrop to the noise of after-work drinks and clinking glasses. But it rises loud enough to convince Sussex Records, a fledgling and ambitious local label, to let him record Cold Fact, the first collection of songs he'd gathered over the years on the streets of Detroit (1970).

The mayor hides the crime rate

council woman hesitates

Public gets irate but forget the vote date

Weatherman complaining, predicted sun, it’s raining

Everyone’s protesting, boyfriend keeps suggesting

you’re not like all of the rest.

Garbage ain’t collected, women ain’t protected

Politicians using people, they’ve been abusing

The mafia’s getting bigger, like pollution in the river

And you tell me that this is where it’s at.

Woke up this moming with an ache in my head

Splashed on my clothes as I spilled out of bed

Opened the window to listen to the news

But all I heard was the Establishment’s Blues.

Gun sales are soaring, housewives find life boring

Divorce the only answer smoking causes cancer

This system’s gonna fall soon, to an angry young tune

And that’s a concrete cold fact.

The pope digs population, freedom from taxation

Teeny Bops are uptight, drinking at a stoplight

Miniskirt is flirting I can’t stop so I’m hurting

Spinster sells her hopeless chest.

Adultery plays the kitchen, bigot cops non-fiction

The little man gets shafted, sons and monies drafted

Living by a time piece, new war in the far east.

Can you pass the Rorschach test?

It’s a hassle is an educated guess.

Well, frankly I couldn’t care less.

“The Establishment Blues”

The voice of conscience has a sharp yet persuasive timbre, paired with an instinctive stop-time feel, the listless creak of Detroit's gears. Cold Fact is one of those rare albums you simply can't listen to with indifference - try, and it'll grab you by the collar. It opens with “Sugar Man”, a liberating and disquieting hymn dedicated to his own dealer, sole dispenser of hope, carried on the air by the magical rolling of an unforgettable acoustic pattern, broken by sinister dissonances, an initiation into the spirit world conjured by sugar-fuelled dreams.

It's also the arrangements by Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, among the deus ex machina figures of Motown, that give the album's songs their proper shine, keeping pace with the playful swing of “I Wonder” through bass and organ (“I wonder/how many times you’ve had sex/I wonder/Do you know who’ll be next”), managing to embellish without detracting - if anything sharpening - the record's groove with horns and strings (“Crucify Your Mind”), or beefing up the sound into a blues-rock that still doesn't feel an ounce of time's weight today (“Only Good For Conversation”).

rodriguez_reality But the most impressive instrument on Cold Fact is Rodriguez's voice, powerful, animated by a natural, vibrant exhalation, the vital and sensual expression of a restless soul. A Johnny Cash wrapped up against the freezing North, a nameless Bob Dylan, a Jim Sullivan without the UFO. “Thank you for your time, and you can thank me for mine, and after that’s said, forget it”: so closes a record full of the joy of unleashing one's own anger and turning it into something beautiful and moving, with the rare conviction of fighting for just causes.

Going down a dirty inner city side road

I plotted

Madness passed me by, she smiled hi

I nodded

Looked up as the sky began to cry

She shot it.

“Inner City Blues”

It's perhaps hard, today, to understand why Cold Fact was such a resounding flop: some point to Rodriguez's shy and controversial stage behavior (apparently he liked to play with his back to the audience, especially during promotional shows); others think an English-sounding stage name would have served him better.

Rather than go on tour and get himself known, Rodriguez wrote his second album, Coming From Reality, which he recorded with Steve Rowland, who would later also work with Cure and Jerry Lee Lewis. It's certainly a record lacking the vital drive, the need to scrape away the sediment of a life, that Cold Fact had. There's a lot of mannerism here: orchestral serenades like “I Think Of You”, weighed down further by a mannered acoustic solo; the invectives turn into lukewarm, functional slogans (“Well just climb up on my music/And my songs will set you free/Well just climb up on my music/And from there jump off with me”). Guided by a somewhat crude sensibility, too, are the string progressions of “Cause” and “Sandrevan Lullaby-Lifestyles”, like a Hollywood remake of “Five Leaves Left”. Elsewhere, it's Rodriguez's own songwriting that comes off bland (“Halfway Up The Stairs”), to the point that Coming From Reality at times feels closer to the sappiest singer-songwriter pop of the Seventies.

Where the Rodriguez of Cold Fact can still be recognized is in the poignant, confessional “It Started Out So Nice” and in the three bonus tracks, recorded later, with more grace, alongside Coffey and Theodore.

As if marked by an inexorable fate, this second album doesn't sell either; Sussex drops Rodriguez just two years after the start of his career as a musician. For twenty-five years, the American singer-songwriter will be nothing more than an ordinary citizen of Detroit, nine thousand one hundred and twenty-five days of hard labor, during which he'll even find time to run for mayor and earn a philosophy degree.

There is, in fact, a brief flare-up of interest when a few copies of Cold Fact make their way onto Australian radio, and soon the record is fetching 300 dollars a copy in stores. The album gets reissued, and before long Rodriguez is tracked down for an Australian tour that will see him play in front of 15,000 people in Sydney.

But the most incredible story is meanwhile unfolding in South Africa, where another phantom version of Sixto Rodriguez lends his voice to the anti-apartheid protest marches. Every word of Cold Fact resonates against the established order, the one that bans TV, that goes so far as to scratch an awl across every copy of the record so that “Sugar Man”, a brazen anthem to drugs, can't be played. Rodriguez becomes the inspiration for every anti-system, anti-apartheid band forming in those years; his music becomes popular largely through word of mouth among the white army's forced conscripts.

At the same time, his legend grows to such an extent that newspapers report he killed himself on stage, with a gun, setting himself on fire. All without his knowledge - and while Clarence Avant, Sussex's "impresario" and a Motown executive, quietly pockets the royalties - Cold Fact goes platinum in South Africa. The record is reissued on CD in '91, sparking a second generational wave of fans. Among them is a small group who, in 1998, start investigating the circumstances of his death, only to discover, without much effort, that Rodriguez was alive and well, living in his run-down house in Detroit.

The story, told in the documentary “Searching For Sugar Man” (Oscar winner in 2013), ends with a triumphant South African tour, with several dates in arenas and theaters. The poise and delicacy with which Rodriguez moves on those stages is striking, as if he'd always played in front of thousands of people, with a strength of spirit that cracks just slightly when he closes out a show in Cape Town, saying goodbye to the crowd: “Thanks for keeping me alive”. The earnings from this new musical career are staggering (reportedly around 700,000 dollars for the last South African tour alone), yet Rodriguez can still be found in his Detroit shack, without a TV, without heating: all the money has gone to his daughters and lifelong friends.

It will take ten years, several South African tours and a handful of European dates to spark the first stirrings of recognition in his home country. In 2008, Light In The Attic reissues Cold Fact and later Coming From Reality too. But it's “Searching For Sugar Man” that truly blows the case wide open: Rolling Stone reports that, in a single year (from 2012 to 2013), Rodriguez goes from playing venues of 200 people to completely sold-out auditoriums of 18,000. This year he'll play Coachella, Glastonbury and Primavera. This time, you can be sure he'll close out just like on Cold Fact: “Thank you for your time and you can thank me for mine”.