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Now just tell the States that,

OK, will you?

American singer Rodriguez

is certainly alive and well

and with us in the Front Row tonight.

Welcome.

Very kind. How are you?

I've heard some really riveting tales

about your "death."

I mean, they range from you pouring

petrol all over yourself on stage

and committing suicide to taking

a drug overdose and dying in prison.

Yeah, it was a beautiful,

beautiful dream

and then you gotta go back.

My dad said he's got two lives.

The carriage turns into the pumpkin bus

or something. It's like...

Did people in Detroit believe you

when you came back

and told them what had happened?

You know, people in Detroit

need to hear something good.

I'm not sure how much of it

they believed

because it is a grandiose story.

It sounds like something

you would make up

if you were bragging on some dream

or something.

He was really quite famous.

He'd be, you know,

tearing down this old shack

or he'd be sweeping up filth or dirt

and he started to show me one day,

and I didn't believe him,

about the album

and how it got to be so popular.

Somebody had a bootleg copy

of this thing

and it spread around and everyone...

It got to be so popular

that children could recite it

and sing the song word for word...

all of the songs word for word.

And I had never heard of the album

and I said, "Can you get me an album?"

And he couldn't even get me one.

I mean, that's how

obscure of a thing it was.

But he had all these photos and stuff,

with these giant crowds,

like Woodstock or something.

Like, "Are you kidding me? That's you?"

I thought it was Photoshopped

or something. I didn't believe him.

But he had all these giant crowds

and he was quite content

to just go and sweep up people's lawns

or clean up and do manual labor.

He stayed.

He lives a very, very, very modest life.

Definitely.

There's definitely no excess,

and he definitely still works hard

in order to make ends meet.

And there's no glamour to his life

in that sense.

But he must be a rich man today?

No.

Rich in a lot of things

but perhaps not material things.

I guess it just never got to that.

But he's sold

hundreds of thousands of records

in South Africa.

Well, yes.

But I believe there's a great deal

of perhaps bootlegging,

piracy, such like that. Perhaps...

Perhaps other people are rich.

You know,

when I think about that night

when I spoke to Eva on the telephone,

we could not have imagined

how much our lives were gonna change

after that phone call.

Eva came on tour with Rodriguez

and the organizers arranged

a chaperone bodyguard

to drive them around

and they fell in love.

And they have a child.

So Rodriguez has a South African

grandson, a South African grandchild.

For me, I used to be a jeweler

in Johannesburg.

I now live in Cape Town

and have a music store.

Things changed so much for us.

But, except for one person,

and that's Rodriguez.

For him, nothing has changed.

The life that he was living

is still the life that he's living now.

What he's demonstrated

very clearly is that you have a choice.

He took all that torment,

all that agony,

all that confusion and pain,

and he transformed it

into something beautiful.

He's like the silk worm, you know?

You take this raw material

and you transform it.

And you come out with something

that wasn't there before.

Something beautiful.

Something perhaps transcendent.

Something perhaps eternal.

Insofar as he does that,

I think he's representative

of the human spirit, of what's possible.

That you have a choice.

"And this has been my choice,

"to give you Sugar Man."

Now, have you done that? Ask yourself.

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