“Sugar Man”
from the album Cold Fact
1970 (2008)
iTunes
The hardest thing about telling the story of Sixto Rodriguez is deciding whether to start in Mexico, South Africa, Australia, or Detroit. He was born in Detroit to Mexican immigrant parents and spent his entire musical career there in the 1960s and early ’70s. Rodriguez made two albums of socially conscious rock, which flopped, in part because his label, Sussex, was distributed by Buddah Records, an AM-radio powerhouse that had little access to the adventurous FM spectrum for which Rodriguez’s music was better suited.
Though he was shut out from his audience at home, a curious thing happened in the Southern Hemisphere. The blunt urban commentary and the unique sound of his debut, Cold Fact, struck a chord in Australia and New Zealand, to the degree that in 1979 and 1980, Rodriguez, who had built himself as a musician playing dives, gay bars, strip clubs, and other out-of-the-way corners of Detroit, was able to mount a theater tour in Australia. The real surprise, though, was lying thousands of miles across the Indian Ocean, in South Africa, where Cold Fact became a counterculture hit and was accepted as a rock classic. It sold about 60,000 copies during the Apartheid era (very good numbers for South Africa) and was bootlegged many more times than that.
So how did that happen? Well, the reasons are all audible on the record — for one, there’s the aforementioned uniqueness of its sound. The album is a patchwork of folk, psychedelic rock, and pop production, built around a workman-like voice and simple melodies. Co-producers Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey were Detroit veterans who worked with Harry Balk’s Impact label, and later Motown after it gobbled up Impact (Coffey played the iconic wah guitar part on the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine”). They’d chosen to work with Rodriguez for the simple reason that they liked his music, and they brought their considerable arranging and playing skills to bear on Rodriguez’s ultra-basic guitar/voice compositions.
The more direct reason his music spread so widely in South Africa, though, was the lyrics, which played as unbelievably subversive to young (predominantly white) South Africans living under a cultural system that was so repressed it considered the entire medium of television too corrupting to be allowed into the country. In a police state like that, songs with lines like, “I wonder how many times you’ve had sex / And I wonder do you know who’ll be next” — never mind the drug-dealing references and anti-establishment messages — had automatic currency, the kind that caused listeners to circulate it amongst their friends. Ironically, the military was the most fertile ground through which music like this spread, as compulsory service for whites spread records throughout the male population by easy word of mouth.
Listening to this excellently remastered reissue of Cold Fact (a reissue of the follow-up, Coming From Reality, is apparently in the works), it’s not difficult to hear why so many South Africans placed it on the shelf next to Black Sabbath and the Beatles and figured that’s what the rest of the world was doing, too. It is one of those rare lost albums that turns out to be a genuine classic. “Only Good for Conversation” is a startling rocker with heinously distorted guitar, “I Wonder” sets the gravest of concerns to a carefree beat with a swinging bass line, “Rich Folks Hoax” is wonderfully dark psych-folk, and the subtle, varied orchestration on “Crucify Your Mind” and “Inner City Blues” helps highlight the message. Opener “Sugar Man,“ a plea to a drug dealer to “bring back all those colors to my dreams,” surrounds a hypnotic vocal with a complex psychedelic arrangement complete with horns, oscillators, strings, and xylophone.
Though its concerns were timely for its day, Cold Fact wears very well, and never sounds particularly dated at any point. Since being contacted by persistent South African fans (one of whom tells his story in the generous liner notes), Rodriguez has toured there, selling out 5,000-seat venues, a feat he’ll probably never repeat at home. This reissue, the first time any of his work has appeared on CD in the U.S., takes a step toward gaining him some of the deserved recognition that’s eluded him.