Sugar Man ’ s lost white tribe: some cold facts

US singer was a SA struggle hero is a story many want to believe

WAS 12 when I first heard Rodriguez’s Cold Fact. Because he apparently knew of such things, the schoolmate who played me the album revealed, in a whisper, that it was banned and we risked a prison sentence merely by listening to it.

The record was “too heavy”, he said, not only for prime minister John Vorster’s government, but for the artist as well; in the throes of despair he had committed suicide on stage. So the rumour went.

This was in 1972, about a year after Sixto Diaz Rodriguez’s debut album found its way into the SABC’s music library. There, apartheid ’ s cultural custodians took the customary steps to ensure listeners would not fall under its sway, scratching away at the record’s offensive tracks with a sharp tool to make them unplayable.

This was the fate of the album’s powerful, mesmeric opener, Sugar Man, a junkie’s plaintive plea driven by acoustic guitar, light drums and bass, with trippy, psychedelic effects for measure. The concerns of the songs that follow in this

Idystopian vision are typical of ’ 60s folk-rock, revealing both a fascination with and a fear of the era they reflect, with unsparing observations about sex, religion, political corruption, social decay and an immoral involvement in a futile war in Southeast Asia.

The album, released in the US in March 1970, was a commercial failure, as was its follow-up, November 1971’s Coming From Reality, and in 1974 the singer simply disappeared from the scene.

By then, and unbeknown to him, he was an unlikely superstar in white South Africa, one of the most privileged and isolated communities on the planet. As a friend remarked of Cold Fact : “We worshipped this cultural artefact as remote South Sea islanders might a piece of Tupperware washed up on a beach.”

How the album prospered here in the pre-television and pre-internet era is now the stuff of legend. It’s not clear how it first got into South Africa, but a savvy local record label, aware that it was being widely bootlegged and that its reputation was growing by word of mouth alone, began pressing its own copies in 1971.

In 1991, Cold Fact and Coming From Reality were re-released in South Africa on compact disc, and Rodriguez began finding a new generation of fans, again purely by word of mouth. Cold Fact , it’s estimated, has sold more than 500 000 copies.

Rodriguez never saw a cent in royalties from sales, and had been eking out a living as a manual labourer in Detroit and raising three daughters. Then, in 1997, two local fans — record collector Stephen Segerman and journalist Craig Bartholomew Strydom — discovered that, far from having killed himself, Rodriguez was very much alive, and convinced him to tour South Africa a year later, duly resuscitating his career.

“This was the greatest, the most amazing true story I’d ever heard, an almost archetypal fairytale,” the Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul told the New York Times last month. “It’s a perfect story. It has the human element, the music aspect, a resurrection and a detective story. ”

Bendjelloul’s moving and powerful documentary on that quest, Searching for Sugar Man, released in South Africa this week, has been a hit at film festivals the world over. Its success has finally given Rodriguez, who turned 70 last month, the audience many feel he deserves.

But the critical acclaim has, unfortunately, thrown up a spurious narrative in the US and Europe concerning the supposed role that Cold Fact played in the struggle for democracy. Briefly it is this: upon hearing Rodriguez, white South Africans rose up in great numbers against apartheid.

The Guardian claimed the album was a hit among “the white liberal classes, and [Rodriguez’s] powerful, plangent voice became a soundtrack for the whites’ anti-apartheid movement”. The New Statesman said the singer was “revered by tens of thousands of liberal, antiapartheid Afrikaners, who found in his lyrics the inspiration to think freely”.

“You never know where social resistance will find its prophets and poets,” the Los Angeles Times said. “For young liberal Afrikaners opposing apartheid in the ’ 70s, it was [Rodriguez].”

US film critic Roger Ebert said his songs “became anthems of the anti-apartheid movement ”.

It’s a curious distortion, for the film makes no such claims — although it does suggest the album’s take on social mores would have been attractive to anyone opposed to apartheid, and some fans interviewed by Bendjelloul do in fact credit the album for raising their consciousness.

There ’ s no doubt that Cold Fact struck a responsive chord with many who heard it. Good pop music can do that. In this case, they included those who were opposed to apartheid as well as those who weren’t.

But ultimately the record played no greater role in the struggle for democracy than albums by Bob Dylan or The Beatles.

Remember — even racists like a good tune.

Searching for Sugar Man is now at Ster-Kinekor cinemas