Rodriguez, a Detroit musician whose songs, stuffed with protest and stark imagery from the city streets, failed to seek out an American viewers within the early Seventies however resonated in Australia and particularly South Africa, resulting in a late-career resurgence captured within the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in 2012, died on Tuesday. He was 81.
A posting on his official web site introduced his demise however didn’t say the place he died or present a trigger.
Rodriguez’s story was, as The New York Times put it in 2012, “a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion.”
Rodriguez — who carried out below simply his surname however whose full identify was Sixto Diaz Rodriguez — was taking part in bars in Detroit within the late Nineteen Sixties, his folk-rock reminding those that heard it of Bob Dylan, when the producer Harry Balk signed him. In the documentary, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who would go on to provide his first album, “Cold Fact” (1970), advised of listening to Rodriguez at a very smoky institution known as the Sewer on the Detroit River, the place he was taking part in, as he usually did, along with his again to the viewers.
“Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics, because you couldn’t see the guy’s face,” Mr. Coffey mentioned.
A single launched below the identify “Rod Riguez” went nowhere. “Cold Fact,” launched on the Sussex label, drew a smattering of favorable notices; its first observe, “Sugar Man,” gave the documentary its title.
“Rodriguez is a singing poet/journalist, telling stories of today,” Jim Knippenberg wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He does it with a voice much like Dylan’s, very Dylanesque imagery and a musical backing dominated almost entirely by a guitar. But he’s not a Dylan carbon. Rodriguez is much more explicit.”
Mostly, although, the album went unnoticed in America, as did its follow-up a yr later, “Coming From Reality.”
“Getting the records cut was easy,” Rodriguez advised The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1979. “Getting them played was a lot harder.”
He was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper that yr as a result of, whereas he had settled right into a life as a laborer and workplace employee in Detroit (although nonetheless taking part in bars and even working unsuccessfully for varied political places of work), he had — unknown to him — been growing followers abroad. Australia was one place the place his music had discovered an viewers, and in 1979 he was invited to tour there. He returned in 1981 for a couple of exhibits with the band Midnight Oil and launched a dwell album in Australia.
Rodriguez’s music had discovered a fair larger following in South Africa, which was nonetheless below apartheid and lower off from the remainder of the world in lots of respects. He appeared to don’t know how in style he was there, particularly amongst white South Africans uncomfortable with apartheid and the nation’s rigidly conservative tradition.
“To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,” Stephen Segerman, proprietor of a Cape Town document retailer, mentioned within the documentary. “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’d 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.’”
In the mid-Nineties Mr. Segerman started looking for out extra concerning the mysterious artist referred to as Rodriguez and the way he had died; rumors had been rampant that he had killed himself onstage, died of an overdose, and so forth. He joined forces with Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist who was additionally looking for Rodriguez, and finally they discovered the singer, nonetheless residing in Detroit. A 1998 tour of South Africa adopted, with Rodriguez taking part in six sold-out exhibits at 5,000-seat arenas.
“It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he advised The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 2009.
After the South Africa tour he performed exhibits in England, Sweden and different international locations. In the United States, the label Light within the Attic rereleased “Cold Fact” in 2008 and “Coming From Reality” in 2009.
And there was one other spherical of rediscovery forward. In 2012 Malik Bendjelloul launched “Searching for Sugar Man,” his first and solely documentary (he died in 2014), to rave opinions. The movie, which gained the Oscar for greatest documentary characteristic, targeting the search by Mr. Segerman and Mr. Bartholomew-Strydom and included an interview with Rodriguez, who within the aftermath discovered himself on the Hamptons International Film Festival and embarking on a recent spherical of touring.
Matt Sullivan based Light within the Attic Records, which reissued Rodriguez’s albums.
“His words and music were brutally honest and raw to the core,” he mentioned by electronic mail. “It instantly struck a chord the second we heard it, and still does, nearly 20 years later.”
Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942, in Detroit. His mom, Maria, died when he was a boy. His father, Ramon, was a laborer who turned a foreman at a metal plant.
He mentioned that he began taking part in the guitar at 16.
“Of course I’ve been into Dylan forever,” he advised The Times in 2012, “and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”
During his interval of relative anonymity after the discharge of his albums, he earned a bachelor’s diploma in philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Information about his survivors was not instantly obtainable.
The “Coming From Reality” album features a tune known as “Cause,” a lament about exhausting instances and life’s disappointments.
“They told me everybody’s got to pay their dues,” Rodriguez sings. “And I explained that I had overpaid them.”
But within the 2009 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he was extra serene about his uncommon profession path.
“My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he mentioned. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.”
Source: www.nytimes.com