PG-13, 86 min.
Director/Writer: Malik
Bendjelloul
Featuring: Sixto Rodriguez,
Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, Dennis Coffey, Mike Theodore, Dan Dimaggio, Jerome
Ferretti, Steve Rowland, Willem Möller, Craig Bartholomew-Strydrom, Clarence
Avant, Eva Rodriguez, Regan Rodriguez, Sandra Rodriguez-Kennedy
A friend who shared a number
of new music albums with me in 2009 introduced me to Rodriguez’s debut album
“Cold Fact” at that time. I was unaware at first that this was not a new album.
It certainly had an older Dylan-esque sound to it. It was my favorite album of
all the ones to which he’d introduced me.
It didn’t take me too long
to figure out that it was an album from the early 70s. But I still knew next to
nothing about the artist. I read about rumors of how he’d killed himself on
stage. I’d read about how popular he was in South Africa, and that that country
was about the only one on the planet that had ever bought up any of his
records. Even in 2009, however, Rodriguez’s presence in the United States was
such that nobody seemed to know much about him. I didn’t know whether he was
alive or dead or even if he’d done anything other than that one album. It was
such a good album that surely the only reason it was virtually unheard of was
because it was the only thing he’d ever done and afterward he just dropped off
the map.
These are the same issues
that the new documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” deal with. The men who
initially searched Rodriguez out were immense fans who had no information on
the man and assumed many of the same things I did. Surely something had
happened for such a good musician to disappear without getting his due notice.
Well, I guess the music industry is a stranger entity than most people imagine.
Rodriguez’s story must be one of the most unique in the business.
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