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Thursday, October 25, 2012

Searching for Sugarman



There’s a mystery to every human life.  How its trajectory seems headed in one direction when it mysteriously turns into another.  How none of us knows the impact of our activities until they’ve been completed.  And then often not even then.

 
The film, “Searching for Sugarman,” is a documentary about just such a life.  In the 1970s, a Detroit folk musician named Sixto Rodriguez, came to the notice of some record producers, two well reviewed records were produced but nothing much happened after that.  Everyone who heard the work figured they’d have the next Bob Dylan on their hands.  But, no.  Rodriguez’ career came to zero, record sales, zero, future, zero.

Which happens to many, many, many in the Record Biz. So Rodriguez returned to his work as a laborer, and disappeared from view.  Except for some American kids who knew of his work and loved it.  And what young person wouldn’t; the lyrics spoke of love and loss and the struggle for identity, the need to refuse all attempts to let other people define your life, to refuse to let governments dictate what our life should be.

And so one of them took the LP to South Africa at the height of the brutal apartheid years and since it was impossible to order any more LPs, soon people were making bootlegged tapes and the songs spread like wildfire to become the coded language of protest and rebellion against the regime.  And so it came to pass that Sixto Rodriguez became a legend more famous than Elvis Presley.  In South Africa, that is.

Back home in Detroit, Rodriguez knew nothing of this.  He returned to a normal life, raised a family, worked hard, got involved in his community but never returned to his musical career which had ended in such silence.

Until the 1990s when a South African reporter started snooping around and in an amazing case of serendipity chased the mysterious Rodriguez to ground.  And found out that he was not dead, despite the bizarre and dramatic rumors about him, but was alive and well and living in Detroit utterly unaware of what happened to his name and his music in South Africa.

And so an extraordinary documentary film was born (now playing at the Downtown Center, SLO) – the search for this musician and eventually his return to a South Africa that was in no small way, changed by his music, so he could repeatedly play to sold out stadiums full of generations of his adoring fans. As one of the film’s talking heads said, Rodriguez’ return was a once in a lifetime event, as if Elvis Presley had returned from the dead to play a concert.  

And what the film also revealed is the eternal vagaries (and the, uh, "creative bookkeeping") of the Music Biz’s financial accounting system, the impossible odds of ever “making it” in the Biz, the total unpredictability of “fame,” why one talented singer rises to the top while another one disappears from view.  And the mystery of creativity itself;  How clear it becomes in retrospect that most artists only have just so much good work in them and when that’s completed, they’re finished.  And how too few artists recognize that iron rule and go on to waste their lives in failure and despair, while a few lucky understand those limits and move forward to craft new lives.

And above all, the movie makes clear the magic and mystery of never knowing what impact our lives and actions and words and songs may have on others. Or how one man’s LP could help change a generation and a country. 

As Kurt Vonnegut’s Bokonon would say, “Busy, busy, busy.”   But I hope you won't be too busy to go see the movie.  It's touching, exhilarating, extraordinary. 

 


9 comments:

Alon Perlman said...

Apparently now playing the Casba San Diego Oct 28. If he does enough of it, he will end up “Rich Folks”.

Sugar man Lyrics

Sugar man, won't you hurry
'cos i'm tired of these scenes
For a blue coin won't you bring back
All those colors to my dreams.

Silver magic ships you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane

Sugar man met a false friend
On a lonely dusty road
Lost my heart when i found it
It had turned to dead black coal

Silver magic ships you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane

Sugar man you're the answer
That makes my questions disappear
Sugar man 'cos i'm weary
Of those double games l hear

Sugar man...sugar man...sugar man...sugar man...sugar man...sugar man...sugar man...

Sugar man, won't you hurry
'cos i'm tired of these scenes
For a blue coin won't you bring back
All those colors to my dreams.

Silver magic ships you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane

Sugar man met a false friend
On a lonely dusty road
Lost my heart when i found it
It had turned to dead black coal

Silver magic ships you carry
Jumpers, coke, sweet mary jane

Sugar man you're the answer
That makes my questions disappear.

Sewertoons AKA Lynette Tornatzky said...

I saw a documentary on this and can't wait to see the movie - it is just so bizarre.

Churadogs said...

It's an amazing story, quite magical, and Rodriguez is quite an interesting man, the whole story arch is so interesting (Though I suspect the filmmakers glossed over a lot of stuff that went on in the last 40 years.) The film also reminds me of the Buena Vista Social Club that Ry Cooder made, discovering these wonderful old Cuban "son" musicans and suddenly they became famous all over the world. Will be curious to see if Rodriguez music gets similarly picked up and at least this time he gets paid a bit for his music.

Mike Green said...

Interesting story and the tune is pretty catchy. Reminds me of a chapter in a book I just read " The power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg. In it he describes a tune that everyone in the music industry thought was going to be a big hit . "Hey Ya" By the OutKast. Well they put it out there and it was a flop until they started using some sneaky promoting that took advantage of habitual behavior, they found that people would listen to almost anything if you sandwiched it between two or three familiar tunes, the familiar tunes didn't even need to be very good either, they could be tunes that almost everyone would tell you sucked and they were tired of hearing it. But "Hey Ya' became familiar and took off. So Iwas thinking to myself, Where have I seen marketing that used behavior based habits as a tool? Hmnnnn.

Mike Green said...

Bokonon's 53rd Calypso

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a chinese dentist,
And a British queen -
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice -
So many different people
In the same device.

Churadogs said...

Mike, interesting regarding "marketing." When you think of how much stuff -- music, books, etc. -- is out there it's a miracle that any of it becomes a "hit."

Mike Green said...

Not a miracle at all. In most instances it's a steely eyed number cruncher with a top of the line computer algorithm. Couple that with a slick advertiser that has no morals and voila! Justin Bieber! The Kardashians!
No one ever went broke underestimating the American consumer. Bwa ha ha ha

Churadogs said...

Mike: hahah, is right. But still, if you consider for every Justin Bieber, there's, what? a thousand more talented kids who never see the light of day. So, I'd say miracle AND a steely eyed number cruncher.

Alon Perlman said...


Thanks Mike! <3 Love the Green!
(the Video has the best use of green- evah!)
But darn it Mike; You didn’t actually state the trigger phrase “Behavior based marketing” Which probably has Ron Crawford’s picture in a dictionary, at least as most sustained user. He even uses it on his latest October 23 over at Sewerwatch. (http://sewerwatch.blogspot.com/2012/10/i-need-client-who-wants-their-3500.html)
Oddly- a search has some sources noting BBM as a “new” phenomenon as being related to tracking of actual web page visitors behavior and actions within a website, as opposed to just visiting a page. Some sources identify its origins to 2008. Obviously wrong.
I didn’t know why I liked “Hey Ya” when I first saw it but it sure wasn’t due to it’s marketing, Since I avoid those venues and Poppy stuff. At some level it is the archetypical riff – with a “hook”, as I saw recently on “Top 10 Hooks” on one of those shows I generally avoid. And I was channel surfing when I paused on the hall of fame tribute to three Jewish Brooklyn rappers followed by the induction of the faces/little faces acknowledged as white skinned soul artists- then Don Kirshner; Inventor of the Monkeys Marketing phenomenon (RIP Davy and the others we lost this year)
Talent, originality and energy, do break through. But Hey yah was written in early ’02 released in September and climbed the charts steadily to #1 January 2003. The time frame is only 4 months- hey yh just didn’t have a chance to slide into actual oblivion. http://www.fastcompany.com/1812065/how-alcoa-starbucks-arista-and-febreze-kicked-normal-habits-and-found-success
So what’s strange about that one is that the OutKast actually almost had the maximal positioning and exposure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjJNvIAtx4 for lyrics
Any way thanks again for posting these interesting connections Mike, it feeds my nostalgia. And I only remembered the lyrics from the Ambrosia song (great example of a band that existed in 1969 but first successful album released only in ‘75). I did not Grok Ann’s reference till that Vin-Dit.
“Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.” KV