True story - in the early 1970s, two record company executives received a tip to go to a dingy club in downtown Chicago to see a musician perform, a purportedly a creative genius and a promising new talent. Inside the small smoky club against the wall in the back of the room, they saw a guy singing and strumming an acoustic guitar with his back facing the audience, too shy to look at the audience directly. Believing they had discovered what could be the next big thing in popular music, or possibly "the next Dylan", they signed the artist, known only as Rodriguez, to a contract.
Rodriguez released a folk rock album, Cold Fact on a subsidiary label of a major recording company. It sold, as one company executive half-jokingly recalls "about six copies." After giving his budding musical career a fairly good shake (a second album, a tour of England, and a move to California) Rodriguez abandoned his career and faded into obscurity.
Meanwhile in South Africa, a bootleg copy of Cold Fact was smuggled into the apartheid country of the early '70s, becoming a major success. The bootleg and subsequent pressings of it were circulated and sold to an estimated half million copies. In the two decades since its unofficial release in South Africa, Cold Fact had reached platinum sales level.
With precious little information available on Rodriguez, South Africans living in the media-controlled apartheid country, believed Rodriguez to be akin to other western musical imports like The Rolling Stones or Dylan. One South African of the era recalls that Rodriguez' albums (a second album soon found its way to similar success) were as commonplace as The Beatles' Abbey Road in any given record collection. The music was "the soundtrack to our lives" and was embraced by an oppressed generation who heard it as their own voice speaking out against Apartheid.
The Swedish/British documentary film Searching For Sugar Man, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, currently playing the indie movie house circuit, follows two South African fans of Rodriguez - Stephen Segerman and Craig Bartholomew - as they attempt to uncover what had become of Rodriguez, known as Sugar Man, from the title of one of his songs. With the unexpected realization that Rodriguez was unknown outside of South Africa, and nothing but a few albums as clues, the two fans, discovering each other searching for Rodriguez independently on the Internet, embark on a quest to find him.
Article comments
1 - Grahame Palmer
The "pressings" in South Africa were NOT from a bootleg copy. I bought the album at a record shop in Johannesburg in 1973, and it as a legitimate release on the A&M label. Just about everyone I knew had a copy of Cold Fact - all being perfectly legitimate pressings. We all tended to make taped copies to play in our cars, but serious music lovers would never just have a taped copy - the sound quality would not be good enough... We would buy albums, then make a tape for the car. Very rarely would someone ask us to make a taped copy - firstly because the sound would be terrible, and secondly because it was a real hassle to tape a record back then. No hi-fi systems at the time had vinyl-to-tape-deck capacity, so you made your recording (usually on a portable cassette recorder using a mono microphone placed between the speakers of the hi-fi - and you hoped that no-one would walk into the room and fart or something...
The idea that all his music was bootlegged in South Africa is nonsense... Everyone I knew had legitimate, studio-pressed copies.