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But it's quite far away from music.

Uh... Yeah, quite a bit,

quite a different contrast, yeah.

Did you continue

making music on your own?

I do, I play guitar.

I love playing guitar.

But I do love to listen.

I like to go see the shows and things.

But I do get about.

He never said anything

about being disappointed.

He would just move on,

continue to survive

because you can't just give up.

What did he do instead?

He read a lot.

He was involved in politics.

He was involved in the community.

He would attend protests and rallies,

if those were causes that

he believed in. He would take us along.

He was always a proponent

of working for the people

that maybe didn't always have a voice,

or didn't have a chance to speak up,

the working class, the working poor.

He had a lot of experience in that area.

He approached the work

from a different place than

most people do.

He took it very, very seriously.

Son' of like a sacrament, you know?

He was going to do this dirty,

dirty work for eight or ten hours, okay?

But he was dressed in a tuxedo.

He had this kind of magical quality

that all genuine poets and artists have

to elevate things.

To get above the mundane, the prosaic.

All the bullshit.

All the mediocrity that's everywhere.

The artist, the artist is the pioneer.

Even if his musical hopes were dashed,

the spirit remained.

And he just had to keep finding a place,

refining the process

of how to apply himself.

He knew that there was something more.

It was in the early '80s.

He wanted to do something,

do something righteous,

make a difference.

So, lo and behold...

...he told me that he

was gonna run for mayor,

and I thought,

"Well, God bless you, Rodriguez.

"You know, if you can become Mayor

of Detroit, then anything is possible."

Some old items from Rodriguez.

This is his bumper sticker, from

the first time he ran for city council.

And I think this is a copy

of the ballot.

He didn't win an election, ever.

Nine get elected.

They spelled his name wrong.

My relatives on my mother's side

of the family are European

and Native American.

And my father's family is Mexican.

My grandfather came from Mexico.

The Mexican came to Detroit

to work in the auto factories,

so we were working-class people,

blue-collar workers, hard labor.

Um, we lived in 26 different homes

and some houses didn't have bedrooms.

Some houses didn't have bathrooms.

And they weren't homes.

They were just places that we lived.

But just because people are poor

or have little

doesn't mean that, you know,

their dreams aren't big

and their soul isn't rich, you know,

and that's where the classes

and the prejudice come from

is that there is a difference

between you and me,

and there's a difference

between them and us.

He wasn't just doing

your average carpentry, you know,

he was really cleaning out the house.

I mean, doing work that no one else

wanted to do.

Really, no one else

wanted to do that work.

He would come home, he would be covered

in dust and din', paint chips,

from his day's work. Long days.

I saw him take refrigerators

down on his back, downstairs.

It was just a day at work for him,

but I knew he was a harder worker than

a lot of other fathers that I knew of.

It's a city that tells you

not to dream big,

not to expect anything more.

But he always took me to places

that only certain elite people

would be able to go.

So, he kind of instilled in me

that I can go anywhere I want,

regardless of what my bank statement

says, and I'm going, you know.

So, that's kinda how he was.

He showed me the top floors of places.

I said, "I'm just as good as they are,"

you know.

He majored in philosophy

in university.

My dad gave us a lot of exposure

to the arts.

He would let us go into the libraries

and the museums and the science centres,

and where that was our day care,

and we toured the halls of the museum

in San Diego Rivera

and, you know,

all Picasso and Delacroix and...

We began to learn of life

outside of the city,

and that's in books and paintings

and in music.

Well, I started playing

when I was 16,

and the thing is,

it was a family guitar,

and I played a lot of bars in the city

and clubs in the city, small rooms.

And I met Mike Theodore

and Dennis Coffey

and they came to the club

to see me play.

I had a gig at a place called The Sewer,

right out by the Detroit River,

and then we got a record deal

from Clarence Avant,

so that's how it started.

But all those early years were,

you know... lot of work.

I was at a Chrysler plant

called Dodge Maine,

and I also worked

at Eldon and Lynch Road in Detroit.

Worked in the heat treat department.

Stuff like that.

A lot of heavy labor.

But it was a good year for me.

This Cold Fact thing.

I had achieved what I was trying to do,

is to get a product, you know.

And it was going very well,

I thought, you know.

How did it feel? A great feeling

of accomplishment. Actualization.

Did you believe

that it was a good album?

I did my best with it.

The reviews were good on it, and...

Yeah, I thought it was good.

I'm not the one to ask that, though.

Ask that question to.

But you go ahead, yeah.

Were you surprised that it didn't sell?

Um...

Was I surprised? It's the music business

so there's no guarantees, you know?

So I told him,

"You're bigger than Elvis, "

and he said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "In South Africa you are

more popular than Elvis Presley. "

And there was this pause,

and I sensed he thought it was

a crank call and he was gonna hang up.

So I said, "Listen, wait.

Listen, listen to me, wait.

"I promise you, just come here.

You won't be disappointed."

He's working his ass off in Woodbridge.

One day, be brought this picture

of himself on a milk carton.

And he'd say, "Emmerson, look at this.

You know, they're looking for me."

I said,

"Really? Why is that, Rodriguez?"

Next day he says,

"Emmerson, I gotta go on tour."

I said, "Come on, Rodriguez,

are you serious?"

Because I'm a journalist,

I doubted it.

That son' of thing does not happen

in the rational universe.

It does not happen.

It's against the laws of God and nature.

This guy is coming to tour here,

he must be an imposter.

It's a clever public relations scam.

Actually, not even a clever

public relations scam. it's a stupid...

'Cause it so obviously can't be true.

Only idiots would believe it. They...

But I was wrong.

We were always anxious,

of course, to get off the plane.

That was a long flight.

But we got off the plane

and we put our bags on our backs

and, you know, they were heavy and

we just kept moving towards the airport.

And suddenly,

three, two limousines pulled up

and we were sure

that they weren't for us.

We were like kind of

walking around them.

Like, "Oh, we better get out

of these people's way

"'cause they're important people

in limos."

But they were for us.

And that's when it began.

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