★★★
- Sugar Man: 🤷♂️
- Only Good for Conversation: 👍🏻
- Crucify Your Mind: 🤷♂️
- This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst: Or, the Establishment Blues: 👍🏻
- Hate Street Dialogue: 👍🏻
- Forget It: 🤷♂️
- Inner City Blues: 👍🏻
- I Wonder: 👎🏻
- Like Janis: 🤷♂️
- Gommorah (A Nursery Rhyme): 👎🏻
- Rich Folks Hoax: 🤷♂️
- Jane S. Piddy: 🤷♂️
I heard about Rodriguez a long time ago in a 60 Minutes segment about him I watched with my dad. Then I promptly forgot about him until last night when I read about him in, of all things, a book called “The World According to Star Wars.” I won’t get into why he’s mentioned in the book, but the story of Sixto Rodriguez is pretty fascinating.
Cold Fact is the first of only 2 studio albums he put out in the early 70s before basically fading into obscurity and retiring from music to work demolition in his home town of Detroit. Except South Africa loves him. He was as big there as the Rolling Stones. But he didn’t know it until decades later. There were all kinds of rumours about him there, because he put out these two amazing albums and then disappeared (kind of like William Onyeabor). This eventually lead to a resurgence, after a documentary was made about him called “Searching for Sugar Man.”
The story, unfortunately, I think is better than the music. At least on Cold Fact (maybe Coming from Reality is better). It definitely wasn’t bad, although some of the engineering really was. In fact, I had a lot of fun with it. This Is Not a Song, It’s an Outburst is one of the best titles I’ve ever heard and the song is pretty great too. But this is not the best album I’ve ever heard. Or even the best of its era. How it took off so much in South Africa, I couldn’t say, but maybe that’s because I haven’t seen the documentary yet.
cha.rlesthom.as 