American singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez dies at 82

American singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez, an initially unrecognized talent, has died at the age of 82. His triumph came forty years after his songs were written, deserving comparisons with Bob Dylan and Cat Stevens.

In 1970, Dennis Coffey, a member of the Detroit session group Funk Brothers, and his partner, producer Mike Theodore, met in a bar in their native Detroit a musician and songwriter named Sixto Rodriguez, who had one failed single on a small label and three years of obscurity. . Musicians who had experience working at the legendary Motown studio decided to give him a second chance, and under their leadership, Rodriguez recorded the Cold Fact album. In narrow circles, they started talking about the “new Dylan”, but only a few copies of the album were sold. No one in the industry believed that a man from a Mexican immigrant family with the last name Rodriguez could succeed in the US in any other music than “tex-mex”.

Nevertheless, the Californian label Sussex decided on a second attempt. After all, there was an absolute hit on Cold Fact – the song “Sugar Man”, which only for some inexplicable coincidence did not have much resonance. The man who composed such a masterpiece could not be hopeless. A year later, Rodriguez recorded a second disc in London – “Coming From Reality”. The quality of the compositions was still high, but they failed commercially. Shortly after the release of Coming From Reality, the author’s life echoed the line from one of his songs: “I lost my job two weeks before Christmas.” Rodriguez did not release more albums.

He left the stage, so plainly and without gaining a foothold on it, he disappeared from everywhere. Except South Africa. In South Africa, the figure of the mysterious Rodriguez stood on the same board with world stars. The three most popular albums in the country in the 1970s were Abbey Road, Bridge Over Troubled Water and Cold Fact. Only, unlike The Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel, white South Africans who fell in love with his music knew nothing about Rodriguez, they only had a photo of a man in a hat on the cover of Cold Fact, and this mystery only added points to the character.

His songs literally became the anthems of the anti-apartheid movement. Among his fans was, for example, the legendary anti-apartheid fighter Steve Biko, sung by Peter Gabriel in the song “Biko”. Stores in South Africa sold half a million records of Rodriguez (Sussex head Clarence Avant claimed that he did not receive a single cent of deductions from Africa), a collection of his songs received platinum, and there is little reliable information that Rodriguez died, either by shooting himself or committing self-immolation right on stage, only fueled interest in the singer in the country.

In 1976, it turned out that Rodriguez was also popular in Australia. Several thousand copies of “Cold Fact”, gathering dust in a warehouse in New York, were sold on the Green Continent in a matter of weeks. Obviously, Rodriguez’s popularity came there from Africa, where his songs were actively played on the radio.

And at home, in America, Rodriguez laid bricks and cleaned up debris after the demolition of old buildings. He did not even think about continuing his musical career. In his native Detroit, Rodriguez raised three daughters in an abandoned house bought for a penny, but at the same time he was politically active and at some point even ran for mayor. He lived the life of an ordinary person, and his virtual counterpart in South Africa at that time owned the minds of young rebels on a par with John Lennon. There was no Internet, and there was no one to inform them about how things were in reality.

Only in 1997 did the wave of his own popularity in South Africa reach the musician. Rodriguez’s daughter discovered a site dedicated to him on the growing Web. In 1998, he went on tour for the first time in South Africa, where he performed six concerts in front of enthusiastic crowds of thousands. He toured there again in 2001 and 2005, but there was no talk of new songs, Rodriguez reaped the benefits of an amazing belated fame. In total, he gave 30 concerts in South Africa, gave away all the money to family and friends, and continued to live in his renovated Detroit “abandoned”.

In 2012, Swedish director Malik Benjellul’s film In Search of Sugar Man premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It was about how two South African fans of Rodriguez are trying to find out if he really died. The most touching thing in the film is the triumphant appearance of Rodriguez in front of the eyes of the most dedicated, that is, South African fans who literally grew up on his music. This is an episode comparable only to the arrival of Bob Marley in Zimbabwe in 1980, described in the documentary Marley by Kevin McDonald. The film “In Search of Sugar Man” instantly became a cult in the truest sense of the word. Despite the many remixes and wide popularity in music circles, the song “Sugar Man” remained a hit for a narrow circle, a marker by which the whole world began to define “their own”, those who have access to unobvious musical treasures. And the name of the film “In Search of Sugar Man” is still something of a password for music lovers.

And this despite the fact that in 2013 Malik Benjellul received an Oscar for it. Rodriguez did not attend the ceremony. According to him, he did not want to divert attention from the achievements of the cinematographer, who gave him a new life.

Rodriguez outlived Malik Benjellul by nine years. Perhaps this is the saddest part of the Sugar Man story: if he himself, albeit belatedly, received well-deserved honors, then Benjellul remained in history as the author of one film. In 2014, he threw himself under a train at the Solna Centrum station in Stockholm. The cause of suicide, according to his brother, was prolonged depression.

Starting in 2013, having crossed the threshold of his 70th birthday, Rodriguez began to actively tour in the United States and Europe. He opened for Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys and played at Glastonbury and Montreux. Books were written about Rodriguez and TV shows were filmed, the story of his miraculous return eventually became a hit in itself, more than “Sugar Man”. And he lived in the historic Woodbridge district of Detroit, they say he did not use a cell phone, and he could only be found through local pubs, where he sometimes gave chamber concerts. Back in 2013, he said in an interview that he had about 30 songs in his arsenal that no one had heard. He died on August 8, 2023, and his daughters chose not to release the cause of death. There is no talk about the release of unknown songs yet, and no one knows if the second “Sugar Man” was among them.

Igor Gavrilov