Rodriguez - C/D

never thought I would see this reviewed anywhere

a college buddy of mine who had spent a bit of high school in South Africa had a cassette of this album and played it non-stop, eventually making a bit of a convert out of me. The tunes are catchy, arrangements engaging, etc. But for years I never saw ANY info about this guy, anywhere - no one in America knew this album, it was never reissued, no biographical info available, etc. Bit of a headscratcher. And now, 20 years later Pitchfork is on it... oh teh irony. Anyone else ever heard this?

I know the MP3 Pfork links to from a David Holmes mix- his essential mix maybe?- and really like that track.

I was more surprised to see Pitchfork validate everything I knew about this album in their review than anything else... I might pick this up for nostalgia's sake.

Cold Fact has been available on LP for a while now, via Scorpio. It's got some nice jams on it.

It became a bit of classic about 7-8 years ago during the psych rediscovery, I think FE carried a questionable reish for a few months earlier in the 00s.

The worst part is that my friends had a band also called Rodriguez. Both are thankfully on to bigger and better things at the moment.

boo to Steve Shasta for demonstrating penis size through username choice :(

And now, 20 years later Pitchfork is on it...

you're missing something here...

eh? I first heard this album 20 years ago. what am I missing

weird. i was at a friend's house last night and one of his songs came on random on her iPod. i think it mighta been from a Fader podcast.

we had a slight conversation about him here Can we talk about these obscure 70s singer-songwriters featured in the newest Record Collector Magazine (and others if you wish)

i've got both his cds and the second one on vinyl also. it's as good as the first one without the greatness of the fuzzed out 'Only Good for Conversation'

I first heard sugarman on that david holmes comp
found this album a few years ago and listened to it for a while, then forgot about it
I honestly don't remember it being that special

well yeah its not THAT special... thx for diggin up that thread jaxon I knew this had come up before somewhere but couldn't find it.

i think it mighta been from a Fader podcast.

Bingo.

holy shit. he performed live for them!

http://www.thefader.com/articles/2008/9/11/fader-tv-rodriguez-live-at-fader-56-party

wow. he forgot the whole song.

is this dude related to Gomez?

no

this record was huge in australia so i've been aware of it for a long time.. oddly enough i first came to know it well via a sample on a Huon record..

Rodriguez doc picked up by Sony Classics:

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2012/01/sundance-the-electrifying-search-for-sugar-man.html

Is the guy who did 'Crucify Your Mind'? Really great track if so. It showed up on a latenighttales comp lately which is why people might be picking up on it?

yeah that's the guy

both albums received major reissues within the last 5 years. I first came across him in college cuz a friend who had grown up in S. Africa had a cassette of his first album (apparently he was huge in S.A.)

yeah i only heard about him via the light in the attic reissue, and maybe something in one of those galactic zoo dossier zines? good record, curious about the doc!

I've never heard the second one, is it worth tracking down?

saw the new documentary on him tonight; which is great by the way - plus the man himself popped out at the end to play a set!

I purchased his record the other day on itunes. I really rrreally love it. Really lovely end of the 60s vibe. By the second listen we were singing along to his record in the car.

Also, I think Kris Kristofferson (?) covered the Sugarman song or am I wrong?

that can't be right

(second one turned out to be better than I expected btw)

i bought "cold fact" on vinyl yesterday! it's good!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oYwMBHI39g

aw check out that huge orchestra! nice. voice sounds well preserved. hope I can get to the documentary while it's still in town

I always loved that the arrangements are almost blaxploitation-esque. I blind-bought a sort of "best of" disc of Rodriguez' at Amoeba in 2003 called "At His Best" (which actually doesn't include many of his best songs). I finally bought both LPs from Light in he Attic this year.

I've got both of the LitA reissues, which I love, is there much material on the new soundtrack that isn't on either of those?

doc is fantastic everybody go see it

one thing I noticed in the film which is not discussed (and which I never noticed before, due to there being no footage of him duh) is that one of the fingers on his fretting hand (his left) appears to be severed at the knuckle...?

la ppl

https://d1wh43egtz3cgo.cloudfront.net/promotion_images/0339/7578/original/092812-LA-show-poster.jpg

ha wow, that looks like quite a show

woah goldenvoice still exists! i only know them from seeing old LA hardcore flyers

Don't know who you're thinking of, but I think this is the Goldenvoice that promotes Coachella and Bonnaroo.

When I saw Animal Collective here around the time of "MPP," Rodriguez opened up. There were slight murmurs that it was a big deal, but frankly it was like any dude with a run of the mill pick-up blues band. I want someone to talk Shuggie Otis out of retirement.

pretty sure you'd get the same kind of thing from Shuggie. his last live ventures here in SF were um not well received

to wit

Youch.

Finally get to see him at the LITA 10th anniversary show here October 12.

Amazing story, but the documentary is incoherent and opportunistic. The filmmaker would have you believe that every moment he wasn't busy as Elvis Dylan was spent eating dog food over a trash can fire. The limousine liberals sitting in front of me ate it up.

Had to go to Wikipedia (?!) to find out he put out an album titled ALIVE in order to disabuse fans OF THE IDEA THAT HE WASN'T DEAD. Ace detective work there, guys. Also, that was a smart idea after consulting your atlas to try calling the producer.

also, he toured Australia in the '80s? Kinda contradicts some of R's interview in the doc, and def a sin by omission on filmmakers' part.

Word has it he may be hooking up with Tony Visconti for a new album.

the arrangements are good, the songwriting is too plain and weak imo

I dug the documentary; the story, as presented, was pretty engaging. But the over-the-top descriptions of his work ("He was better than a thousand Dylans backed up by ten million Rolling Stones playing a billion Woodstocks on the surface of the sun!") set up the inevitable let-down that was his actual music. And his records are decent enough, just not this overwhelming revelation the interviewees were preparing us for.

I think Oscar made a big mistake here. Tarfumes, nostormo, Hadrian, and Morbius are OTM.

yeah the doc was ... sorta thin. i mean, i didn't hate it, but it just felt like the filmmakers did just enough to get by and call it done. and i thought it was weird that there was all this mystery and in the end they called the producer. like ... what number step in the investigation is "call the producer of the record"? (just looked back and saw Hadrian made this point.)

not to mention, they totally cracked open the door to the label guy ripping him off and then did *nothing* with it.

i did enjoy the footage of him and his daughters going to s.a. for the big show.

i dunno, my wife liked it more than i did. perhaps i would've liked it more if i'd not known he was alive going in.

and i thought it was weird that there was all this mystery and in the end they called the producer. like ... what number step in the investigation is "call the producer of the record"?

It seemed like the problem was that they didn't know where in USA to start looking for the producers, and once they figured the Detroit connection it was easier to find them. It's still weird, I would understand the problem if the producer was some little known guy called "John Smith", but Mike Theodore was a pretty profilic producer in 1970s, and Dennis Coffey even had a top 10 solo hit in the USA, it shouldn't have been that hard to locate them.

not to mention, they totally cracked open the door to the label guy ripping him off and then did *nothing* with it.

Yeah, that was the huge elefant in the room for the whole movie. The South African record company guys claim they paid the royalties to Sussex, the Sussex label head claims he doesn't know about the money (though he got so defensive about the issue it felt almost certain he wasn't telling the truth), Rodriguez' daughter says "I guess someone got rich", and yet the movie-makers don't bother to draw the conclusions they should have... Were they afraid the Sussex guy would sue them for libel?

I thought this was an enjoyable document, but in the end it felt like a wrong decision to sacrifice so much time for the "finding Rodriguez" suspense story at the expense of Rodriguez' own story. The most memorable parts of the doc were the one where he, his daughters and his co-workers were talking about his life and working-class life in Detroit in general. The "searching for Sugar Man" thing was a great hook for the movie, but it also made it more superficial that it could've been. There are so many documents about musicians who made it that it would've been cool simply to hear more about the guy who didn't quite make it. (I guess "The Story of Anvil" was similar in this regard, but Rodriguez' whole attitude – the way he seemed to be content with what he'd gotten out of life – was so different to the Anvil guys that I would've loved to hear him talk more.)

watched it last night: except for a few tunes of phrase, doesn't seem like this music is all that interesting to me:

but what I kept thinking was: this is the story of Afrikaners hearing something that gave them courage to distinguish themselves from the PW Botha-establishment. the South African musicians who were interviewed re: Rodriguez's influence were white. his music's omnipresence in SA was completely down to white afrikaners.

What did black people think of him? did they know his music? I would think a more meaningful musical symbol of throwing off the yoke of your brutal, repressive forebears would be…Hugh Masekela? Miriam Makeba? guys who did township jive? Why was it an (admittedly sweet and pleasingly unconcerned with accruing $$$) warmed over singer-songwriter that Afrikaners responded to?

this was the elephant in the room to me…

The way I understood it was, at first he simply became a cult icon among liberal white youngsters, because he was doing the sort of music white people listened to at the time, except that the lyrics had a bit more sting... The chronology was a bit unclear, but I took it that the Afrikaner political music movement gained prominence somewhat later, and he was idolized because all of those musicians had listened to him when they were younger, and took stylistic cues from his music and the way he wrote his lyrics, not because they felt he was symbol for their own struggle per se.

As for why not Makeba or Masekela, I don't know about the specific cultural barriers that existed in SA at the time, but I guess in the West too a lot of people supported anti-racist movements, even though they mostly listened to white rock and not black music. That's still the case today, I think.

great movie but yeah how comes the 2 South African geezers didn't know he wasn't dead if he was big in Austrailia and toured there?!
i know it was the pre-Google era but still.

had yer man sen Beverly Hills Cop he'd have clocked Dearborn was in Detroit lol.

^^^^^^^^^^^

Director of the documentary has passed on

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/13/malik-bendjelloul-dead_n_5319001.html

saw that.

have to admit the documentary (and rodriguez's music) left me almost completely cold. the worst kind of music doc IMO, just a bunch of talking heads saying "this guy is so great, he's like... bob dylan." also the narrative was obviously a bit too perfect, eliding and moving things around for the benefit of a really canned, can-see-it-an-hour-in-advance drama. and IIRC you don't actually get to hear more than 20 seconds of a rodriguez tune before someone starts talking over it. which is all for the good, i suppose, given that rodriguez was a pretty 2nd-rate singer-songwriter.

oh well, it's always sad when someone so young (my age, exactly, in fact) dies.

As for why not Makeba or Masekela

? b/c south african boomers listened largely to rock music just like their american and british counterparts ?

there is no lack of attention paid to makeba and masekela and their role as ambassadors for SA's anti-apartheid movement. they are surely household names in 10,000x as many homes as sixto rodriguez, which is the way it should be.

south african white boomers i should note

i always feel like an asshole when people are like, "omg, did you see that rodriquez doc, what an amazing story! and the music is incredible--he's better than bob dylan!" and i just kind of sit there squirming.

it reminds me of that moment in luis bunuel's "las hurdes" when there's a shot of a doctor inspecting a young girk's perfectly-fine set of teeth and the narrator says something like, "these people suffer from a total lack of dental care, as you can see from the atrociously deteriorated state of this young girl's teeth." and most people are like, "oh, yes, i see, very bad teeth." i guess if everyone interviewed is saying "oh my, he was so incredible--like a bob dylan who disappeared off the face of the earth" enough people in the audience will just buy that no matter what they are hearing.

I finally saw this, I thought it was pretty good but it def could have used more of him and his family.

RIP

I am listening to Cold Fact - "I wonder how many times you had sex" interesting line

always figured it was a "sexual liberation" thing, the joy of being blunt

but it's a dumb line and one that instantly made me suspicious of some of the hyperbolic claims abt his songwriting prowess

I am susceptible to believing music is better when it is hyped by critics - I guess depending on the critic

true, I was thinking about the blurbs/talking heads in the doc saying stuff like "he was better than dylan"