I persisted watching the CTV live streaming of the 2013 Academy Awards despite interruptions for commercial messages every five minutes, regardless of what was happening on the screen. Let’s just say the CTV people are idiots and leave it that. The effort was worth it though, with the announcement of the winner in the best documentary feature category, proof that sometimes the stars really do align in just the right way.
A few days earlier, I had been bummed out, feeling too flu-ish to go to the recent Friends of the Cinema presentation, Searching for Sugar Man. Angela came home giving it a rave review (which prompted me to download some of Rodriguez’s music onto my iPod), so a few days later I dragged myself over to the video shop and rented the DVD.
Searching for Sugar Man is one of those true stories that would have made lousy fiction — too unbelievable for a decent novel plot. But as a documentary, it is a moving and very satisfying film experience.
For those who haven’t seen it, the documentary tells the story of Rodriguez, a musician in Detroit who had a brief flirtation with fame in the early 1970s. Call him inexplicably unsuccessful. The son of a Mexican labourer, Rodriguez was tabbed by some as being better than Bob Dylan, and the next sure thing in pop music. He was signed by none other than the head of Motown Records. Two long-play records later, he was dropped like a hot potato, no longer a shooting star, but a flameout in an industry that chews up talent and spits it out like so much tobacco juice.
Rodriguez disappeared from the music scene, but not from life, as his adoring South African fans came to believe. He raised a family, worked as a construction and demolition labourer and even had a go at civic politics.
Luckily for music fans, some persistent South African fans, having grown up with the bootlegged copies of Sixto Rodriguez’s music, took on a search for information about the man who became a bigger idol than Elvis among young fans in the apartheid nation. No one was more surprised to learn of his popularity in South Africa than Rodriguez. Many of his fans grew up under the belief that he had killed himself on stage.
Rodriguez hadn’t received royalties or any other indication that another country had embraced his music. He was in his mid-50s when he learned the truth, and accepted an invitation to fly across the Atlantic Ocean with his family. He performed to sellout crowds of adoring fans late in the second millennium but it took until last year before a four-years-in-the-making documentary pieced the whole story together.
I have no doubt that part of the film’s appeal is the Shaman-like presence of Rodriguez himself, who didn’t participate in many interviews but allowed himself to be filmed walking in the wintery Detroit streets. He shows no inclination toward bitterness, accepts his life for what he made of it and now seems content to return to performing. He chose to visit South Africa and not attend the Oscar ceremonies, saying that he didn’t want to take attention away from the filmmakers.
I found myself wondering, as I so often do, about how the public ends up embracing some performers or music or books or art or movies, and rejecting others. Rodriguez’s music was catchy, the lyrics powerful and he had the support of the some of the right people. His clear, appealing voice and shy manner should only have helped him succeed. One man in the film suggested that Latino musicians “weren’t hot” in the 1970s, trying to explain his lack of success, but he was in error. At the very time that Rodriguez’s albums were being released, Jose Feliciano was one of the most popular performers on the planet.
My generation lost part of our voice when the music of Rodriguez didn’t reach most of us. We, like young South Africans, should have grown up singing:
I wonder about the love you can’t find
And I wonder about the loneliness that’s mine
I wonder about how much going have you got
And I wonder about your friends that are not
I wonder I wonder wonder I do.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.