Searching for Sugar Man Page #3

Well, you couldn't.

I'd like to show you why.

Right, here we have the album,

the vinyl.

At the back of the sleeve

you'll see a sticker that says "Avoid."

But when you open the album

and take it out from its sleeve,

you would see that they have

scratched that particular song

with a sharp tool to make sure

that it would not go out on air.

And that's the way that they

banned the music which, in my mind,

was quite a brutal way of ensuring the

song would never be heard on the air.

Most of those tracks

were on the banned list at SABC

and they ran

the broadcast industry completely.

There weren't any independent

radio stations or TV stations.

Obviously, when that word got out,

it just made the record more desirable.

You know,

it's like having something banned.

You're 16, 17 years old

and you've got something that's banned.

It was absolutely perfect.

Cold Fact was just one

of the albums we had in our collections,

and for 10, 20 years, it was just

a record we listened to and enjoyed.

But then a pivotal event happened

that changed everything for me.

We were down in Camps Bay beach.

We were sitting around on the beach

and a friend of mine,

a woman, who was from South Africa,

but she had got married

and emigrated to Los Angeles,

she said to me, "Where can I

buy Cold Fact in South Africa?"

And I turned round and I pointed

to a store across the road

that sold CDs and I said,

"You can buy it at that store."

She said, "Really? Because, you know,

you can't buy it anywhere in America.

"I've asked everywhere in America,

no one's even heard of it."

And that was a pivotal moment,

'cause I didn't know that.

I thought everybody knew Rodriguez,

especially in America

'cause he was American.

So my next thought was,

"Ah, Rodriguez, that's interesting. "

I went back... I came back home

and I took out my Rodriguez records

and that's when I realised

there was nothing on the record

to tell us who he was

or where he was from.

On Cold Fact there are four names.

On the front cover

it just says "Rodriguez."

But if we take the record out

and examine the sleeve,

the artist's name is Sixto Rodriguez.

But if you look at the tracks,

six of these tracks

are credited to Jesus Rodriguez,

and four of these tracks

are credited to Sixth Prince.

So who actually wrote these songs

and who are all these people?

We didn't have any more information

than a record

with him sitting on the cover

with a hat and sunglasses on.

We didn't know how tall he was

'cause he was sitting cross-legged.

So how do you solve a mystery?

You use whatever

information's available.

What did we have?

A record cover with lyrics.

So we started looking

quite deeply at the lyrics

and seeing what they said,

and some of them, very few of them,

had geographical references.

The one You Can't getaway starts off,

"Born in the troubled city

"In Rock and Roll, USA."

Born in which troubled city?

Seems all the cities were troubled

in the late '60s.

"In the shadow of the tallest building."

The tallest building, as far as we knew,

was in New York.

And at the bottom of the song

this verse says,

"In a hotel room in Amsterdam."

Then it says, "Going down a dusty

Georgian side road I wander." Georgia?

So we've had Amsterdam,

we've had Georgia,

we've had the world's tallest building.

Not much to go on.

Well, what I heard,

and the story differs a lot,

and a lot of people have different

versions of the story, but what I heard,

he hadn't played a concert

in a very long time.

And a promoter got him

to play a concert,

and he was hoping

it was gonna be a great show.

Of course, the show didn't

work out that way. It started out...

The sound wasn't good.

The venue wasn't good.

A lot of the factors

surrounding the show wasn't good.

And as the show went on and on,

it started going downhill from there.

People started ridiculing him.

People started whistling

or making mention of the fact that,

you know,

the show wasn't going as planned.

And it got to a point where,

just very quietly, very gently,

he just sang his last song.

"But thanks for your time

Then you can thank me for mine

"And after that's said forget it."

And he reached down and pulled up a gun

and pulled the trigger.

And that was the dramatic,

very dramatic ending,

to what was actually a non-career.

In 1996, the South African record label

released Rodriguez's second album,

Coming From Reality,

on CD for the first time

in South Africa.

And because they thought

I knew a lot about him,

they asked if I wanted to co-write

the liner notes for the booklet,

which I did.

And I'll read some of it to you.

They start off by saying,

"if ever there is an air of intrigue

and mystery around a pop artist,

"it is around the artist

known as Rodriguez.

"There's no air of intrigue and mystery

around him anywhere else in the world

"because his two albums,

Coming From Reality and Cold Fact,

"were monumental flops everywhere else."

And this is the important part.

"There were no concrete cold facts

about the artist known as Rodriguez.

"Any musicologist detectives out there?"

And that,

that's the line that changed everything.

I started searching for Rodriguez

when a few of us

were sitting around in the Army

and somebody said,

"How did Rodriguez die?"

And just coincidence,

at the time I was looking

for subject matter to write an article.

I remember having, like, five points

on a piece of paper.

And number four, or something,

was "Find out how Rodriguez died."

I thought it would make a good story.

So that was in the back of my mind

for many years

and then, many years later,

I came across this, um,

re-release of Coming From Reality

and inside, the liner notes said,

"There were no concrete cold facts

about the artist known as Rodriguez.

"Any musicologist detectives out there?"

Um, was the question,

and I think that to me,

was like an invitation.

I thought, "Well, maybe it's me".

The first way I tried to find him

was to just follow the money.

Normally, you follow the money.

That's how you get

to the bottom of anything.

But where do dead men's money go?

I was astounded that

no one knew anything about him.

I guess it was reminiscent

of how bad the music industry was.

They were renowned

for ripping people off.

And it is one thing,

if they had said to me, "Oh, yeah,

"we send the money

to X place or Y," or whatever,

but they just kept on being very vague.

And, in fact, when l put some pressure

on somebody, I did get an address,

and I called

and, I can't remember

if I spoke to someone or left a message,

but when I called the next day,

the number had been changed.

And that to me was...

I mean, that's a gift

for anyone who wants to be a detective,

is an obstacle,

because an obstacle is an inspiration.

If you just find things easily,

they're not inspiring,

and this was a great obstacle

that somebody had changed their number.

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