Searching for Sugar Man Page #2

that's absolutely a killer.

It's one of the saddest songs that...

I'm laughing, but it's one of

the saddest songs that I've ever heard.

And it's a very simple song.

Hang on, I wanna play this. Hang on.

Okay, listen to these words.

Oh, man.

And it really makes me sad, because...

that was the last song that we recorded.

And that was the last song

that Rodriguez ever recorded.

And what makes it even sadder

was the album was released

in November of 1971,

and we expected big things.

And it did absolutely nothing.

And then, two weeks before Christmas,

Sussex dropped him off the label.

And the very first line in the song,

as if premonition,

was, "I lost my job

two weeks before Christmas."

Oh, man. I just think about that.

This guy deserves recognition.

Nobody in America had even heard of him.

Nobody...

Nobody even was interested

in listening to him.

How can that be? How can that be?

Guy that writes like this.

I mean...

It's still a bit of a mystery

how the first copy of Cold Fact

actually came to South Africa.

But one of the stories I've heard

is that there was an American girl

and she came to South Africa

to visit her boyfriend and brought

a copy of the record with her.

And her and him and all their friends

really liked it

and went out to try and buy it

but you couldn't buy it.

So they started taping copies

and passing copies along.

However it got here,

however it germinated here,

once it got here,

it spread very quickly.

I remember I was in high school

and we heard this song, "I wonder

how many times you've had sex?"

And at that time South Africa

was very conservative.

It was the height of apartheid,

and there wasn't television here.

That's how conservative it was,

'cause television was communist.

It was really... You wouldn't believe.

Everything was restricted,

everything was censored.

Everything was...

And here's this guy singing this song.

"Who's that?" Said, "That's Rodriguez."

And he became something

of a rebel son' of icon.

But the strange thing was

that we all bought his records.

Everybody I knew had his records.

I Wonder,

that was the big song

that everybody was singing

and we all bought a record.

And there he was on the cover,

sort of a hippy with shades.

But nobody knew anything about him.

He was a mystery.

Unlike other artists

that you could read about from America,

get to know something about them,

there was zilch. Nobody knew anything.

It was a mystery. We only had

his picture on the cover of the record.

The album was exceptionally popular.

To many of us South Africans,

he was the soundtrack to our lives.

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 would 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. "

One song's called

Anti-Establishment Blues.

We didn't know what the word

"anti-establishment" was

until it cropped up on a Rodriguez song

and then we found out,

it's OK to protest against your society,

to be angry with your society.

Because we lived in a society

where every means was used

to prevent apartheid from,

you know, coming to an end,

this album somehow had in it...

lyrics that almost set us free

as oppressed peoples.

Any revolution needs an anthem

and in South Africa

Cold Fact was the album

that gave people permission

to free their minds

and to start thinking differently.

It may seem strange

that South African record companies

didn't do more

to try and track down Rodriguez,

but, actually,

if you look back at the time

we were in the middle of apartheid,

the height of apartheid.

South Africa was under sanctions

from countries from all over the world.

South African musicians

were not allowed to play overseas.

No foreign acts

were allowed to visit South Africa.

It was a closed-door situation

between South Africa

and the rest of the world.

The countries around

the world were saying horrible things

about the apartheid government

but we didn't know

because they controlled the news.

The majority of the population

had been marginalized

and forced out of the commerce in areas.

It was what had happened

in Nazi Germany.

It was a spin-off from Nazi Germany,

but if a newspaper published it,

they'd get prosecuted.

So, because of that, South Africa had

achieved a pariah status in the world.

There were cultural boycotts.

There were sporting boycotts.

It was a very isolated society.

So we were cut off.

We all knew apartheid was wrong,

but living in South Africa,

there wasn't much, as a white person,

you could do about it,

'cause the government was very strict.

It was a military state,

to a large degree.

If you spoke out against apartheid,

you could be thrown into prison

for three years.

So although a lot of whites

were part of the struggle,

the majority of whites were not.

You were watched. There were spies.

It was scary and people were scared.

But out of the Afrikaans

community emerged

a group of Afrikaans

musicians, songwriters,

and for them, when they heard Rodriguez,

it was like a voice spoke to them

and said, "Guys, there's a way out.

There's a way out.

"You can write music.

You can write imagery.

"You can sing, you can perform."

And that was where, really,

the first opposition to apartheid

came from inside

the Afrikaans community.

It was these young Afrikaans guys

and, to a man,

they'll tell you

they were influenced by Rodriguez.

Koos Kombuis. Willem Moller.

The late Johannes Kerkorrel.

The guys who were regarded as the icons

of the Afrikaans music revolution

will all tell you,

"Rodriguez was our guy."

We call it the Voelvry movement

of Afrikaans artists

singing against apartheid.

All of us listened to Rodriguez

at some point. All of us.

It had an enormous impact.

It made you just think

that there's another way.

What's presented to you

by the establishment isn't all theirs.

The biggest hit was a song

called Set It Off

which was when PW Botha

was the president then.

The real bad guy. When he came on TV,

he used to talk like that.

And this song said, "switch it off,

just switch off the TV."

So what lines do you think

were the lines they had problem with?

Ah, gee whiz, it's all of them.

"Sugar Man, won't you hurry

Cos I'm tired of these scenes

"For a blue coin, won't you bring back

all those colours to my dreams?"

The most difficult ones is probably

"Silver magic ships, you carry

Jumpers, coke, sweet Mary Jane."

And what is that?

I'm gonna leave that to you.

- But it's drugs?

- It's certainly drugs.

During the apartheid years,

it was just impossible to play it.

And what happened if you did play it?

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