At 81, the American musician with a clear voice died on Tuesday August 8, at the end of a life of salutary tranquility and blinding lights. His two albums remain the best testimony to his story, one that successive documentaries have never really succeeded in revealing. Tribute to the Sugar Man.
We knew so little about him that everything we knew about him was false. In this, Sixto Rodriguez was a musical legend in the literal sense of the word. A very real guy with a story, his own, and a second, ours, which was attached to him and with which he lived the last ten years of his life. At the age of 81, the American singer died on Tuesday August 8, ending his strange fate made up of strokes of fate or bad luck, it depends, and which is unlike any other. There remains a discography as short as it is exemplary: two albums, Cold Fact et Coming From Reality, released in 1970 and 1971, then two live records released in 1978 and 1998. Curious chronology, isn’t it? Yes, just like his career and his life.
If his death is so moving today, it is because Sixto Diaz Rodriguez and his music moved a good part of the world in 2012 during the release of Searching for Sugar Man, a documentary not about the artist, but about two South African fellows who went in search of the singer in the 1990s. This is the great contradiction that drives this artist: his life is now inseparable from a visual object that cannot does not entirely concern him. Born on July 10, 1942 in Detroit into a family of Mexican origin, he believed, for a time, to be able to make a career in music, releasing two albums armed with a few nuggets, which, undeniably, are part of his myth. In the 2012 documentary, signed by the Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul, it is the first thing that strikes: his songs Crucify Your Mind, Sugar Man or I Wonder pierce everything, they are of a beauty that contrasts with the anonymity that envelops them. A question then arises: how could such music go unnoticed in the United States, in the country that gave birth to it?
First, Australia
Sixto Rodriguez, although produced by the pundits Dennis Coffey, Steve Rowland or Clarence Avant on the Sussex Records label, put an end to his career for the first time in 1972, after the release of the album Coming From Reality, after having toured a little in Europe without convincing. The commercial failures and the timidity of the artist got the better of his contract with the record company.
Then follows a period of anonymity where he does manual jobs in Detroit, in particular in the building industry. Some, it seems, take him for a homeless person. However, Sixto Rodriguez does not let himself live, far from it. He pursued studies in philosophy, launched a candidacy for the city council of the city in 1973, and raised his three daughters Eva, Sandra and Regan, who all three inherited the traits of Native American of Sixto’s mother, who died when he was three years old. His music is firmly rooted in Australia. But all this, Malik Bendjelloul’s documentary does not say. Not to artificially construct the legend, as he has sometimes been accused of, but for an in fact obvious reason.
In South Africa, the 1970s were among the hardest of apartheid, the most virulent. From 1971, the album Cold Fact arrives somewhat by magic in this country isolated on the international scene, with carefully selected cultural imports. The control of the music is strict, and it is through pirated recordings that the album manages to emerge in the first place among the white middle class. The disc, reissued in particular by the A&M Records label, became a huge success with unclear origins, was censored on the radio (the vinyls were scratched by the authorities), invited itself into homes without inviting its author, who did not no idea of the repercussions of his music in these regions. He will become aware, somewhat by chance, of his unexpected success in Australia, then leaving his odd jobs for a tour of the antipodes in 1978, from which an unconvincing live album is taken, then a second in 1981, before returning to his relative anonymity. But of South Africa he knows nothing.
The price of freedom
The legend is born then. The South Africans pass the rumors as one passes his records. One claims he shot himself in the head after a failed concert in Cape Town earlier this decade. But because the country is closed in on itself and biographical elements are lacking, the mystery takes over and everyone believes him to be dead. Sixto Rodriguez does not receive royalties from Africa. In the documentary Searching For Sugar Manthe former boss of Teal Trutone, the label that released the albums in South Africa, certifies having sent the money to Sussex Records in the United States, and therefore to Clarence Avant, who kicked in touch and immediately went for the western villain, for the miser.
Too simple to be exact: Teal Trutone only published the CD from 1991. For twenty years, during the peak of sales, it was A&M Records which had the rights in South Africa, rights as it seemed. donate to an English company. But as director Malik Bendjelloul told the magazine Independent in 2012 : “Sixto is really, really different from us on this subject. He literally doesn’t want that money. You may think it’s crazy at first, but when you think about it, it makes sense. He never bought anything. And when you don’t buy anything, you make a lot of sacrifices: you can’t afford anything, you can’t go on a trip to Mexico or on vacation, but you also earn something. You gain freedom.” The controversy is therefore not quite the right one, but the story of Sixto Rodriguez, the one that the public builds through the documentary, comes out of it increased.
ultimate disappearance
What this embellished version also doesn’t say is that Rodriguez’s two albums were known in Detroit in the early 1990s, that local musicians identified the guy well. However, it was not until the middle of the decade and the abolition of apartheid that a curious South African record store, darn endearing and logically ignorant, Stephen Segerman, originally from Cape Town, embarked on the collection of information on the author of Cold Fact. One of the musician’s daughters comes across his blog and contacts him, telling him at the same time that his father is alive and well. So, once again, Sixto Rodriguez lives again, is reborn, resuscitates, reincarnates, reappears… All the terms are good to describe an event which is in fact only the umpteenth stage in the calmly led life of the discreet singer who, at 55 years old, went to play six concerts in March 1998 in a South Africa delighted to see him up. A documentary is then produced. It is mischievously titled Dead Men Don’t Tour.
His music took off twenty-seven years late, spreading in Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavian countries… In the 2000s, Sixto Rodriguez alternated between Detroit and a few concerts abroad, in Africa or in Europe, to Australia. The public of the Trans Musicales de Rennes can even applaud him in 2009, three years before the worldwide release of Searching For Sugar Manbringing an ultimate dimension to the music of an aging artist, tired, damaged by excess.
Sixto Rodriguez spent the last years of his life mainly in Detroit, quiet, protected by his daughters from the light that burned his eyes that had become so sensitive and from intrusive journalists wanting to enter his house, the one he had lived in for forty years, renovated thanks to recent income from his music, such as told it The world in one of his very last interviews in the summer of 2022. A year later, here he is disappearing. For real this time, sadly.
2023-08-10 09:17:06
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