![]() ![]() Local producer Harry Balk caught one of his shows and recorded his Donovan-inspired track “I’ll Slip Away” for Impact Records. In 1967, Rodriguez was working in a car factory and playing in Detroit’s coffee houses and bars by night. He released a single in 1967 under the name Rod Riguez. Once you get down to that level, everything else is icing.” He once told me there’s three basic needs – food, clothing and shelter. “He lives a very Spartan life,” says Regan. His daughter Regan forced him to get a cellphone a few years ago because she grew weary of driving around the neighborhood trying to track him down. He has no car, computer or even a television. Rodriguez has lived in the same modest Detroit house for over 40 years. A recent string of shows in South Africa netted him over $700,000. The money, I must say, is obscene.” He’s not kidding. “I have a lot of commitments, and the list keeps growing. “I call those money dates,” says Rodriguez. He has over 30 shows across the world on the books right now, including Coachella and Glastonbury in England. They just booked him at Brooklyn’s 18,000-seat Barclays Center.Īnd that’s just in New York City. He soon graduated to the 700-seat Highline Ballroom, and his shows at Town Hall (1,500 seats), the Beacon Theater (2,900 seats) and Radio City Music Hall (6,000 seats) all sold out in minutes. He was playing the 190-seat capacity Joe’s Pub in New York under a year ago. Searching for Sugar Man, however, changed everything, bringing Rodriguez to a previously unfathomable level of success. Cold Fact was rereleased on CD and it slowly began finding an audience across the continent, though American success proved elusive. He returned to the country for shows every couple of years, and he also started gigging around Europe. Rodriguez’s rediscovery by South Africans in 1998 allowed him to retire from the construction business. When returning to the stage for an encore at his first Sydney show, he mumbled emotionally to his audience, ‘Eight years later. “He spoke no more than a dozen short lines throughout each show. “The man himself seemed almost embarrassed onstage,” noted Billboard. “He had never played a concert before, just bars and clubs.” He played to 15,000 people in Sydney, almost as many fans as Rod Stewart drew a few weeks earlier. “He was just stunned by what we put together for him,” promoter Michael Coppel told Billboard at the time. He arrived in Australia with his two teenage daughters for a 15-date tour in early 1979. “We’d play Bruce Springsteen’s The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Billy Joel’s first album and Cold Fact.”īy the late 1970s, Australian concert promoters tracked down Rodriguez in Detroit. “Every single one of my friends had Cold Fact,” says Midnight Oil drummer Rob Hirst. Record stores started selling Cold Fact for upwards of $300, and Blue Goose records eventually released it to huge sales all across the continent. One wound up in the hands of Australian radio DJ Holger Brockman, who began playing “Sugar Man” on 2SM radio in Sydney. ‘Searching for Sugar Man’ Documentary Uncovers Rodriguez’s Secret SuccessĪustralia discovered him before South Africa.Ī handful of copies of Rodriguez’s 1970 debut LP, Cold Fact, reached Australia months after the album bombed in America. “I was asleep when it won, but my daughter Sandra called to tell me. “We also just came back from South Africa and I was tired,” Rodriguez says. Searching for Sugar Man director Malik Bendjelloul begged Rodriguez to attend the Oscars, but he refused, feeling it would take the attention away from the filmmakers. Not only did he skip the Oscar ceremony – he was asleep when he won. Here are 10 things you may not know about Rodriguez: But while Searching for Sugar Man ( soundtrack and DVD now available) is a fantastic film, it only grazes the surface of Rodriguez’s life story. Sixto Rodriguez had no idea he was a legend there until a group of fans found him on the Internet and brought him to the country for a series of triumphant concerts. ![]() The Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man tells the almost unbelievable story of a Mexican-American songwriter whose two early Seventies albums bombed in America, but who wound up finding a huge audience in Apartheid-era South Africa.
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