2023-08-09 18:17:46
He had been “revealed”, after a short confidential career from the end of the 1960s to the mid-1970s, by the documentary film Searching for Sugar Man, by Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul (1977-2014), presented at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012. Singer, guitarist and songwriter Sixto Rodriguez died on Tuesday August 8, at the age of 81, announced his website Sugarman .org, without further details.
When the film began to make the rounds of film festivals and received several awards, including the Oscar for best documentary film, Sixto Rodriguez had already been rediscovered by a core of amateurs thanks to the careful reissue, in 2008 and 2009, by the American phonographic company Light in the Attic Records, of his two albums, Cold Fact (1970) et Coming From Reality (1971). Articles had been devoted to him, he had given a few concerts in the United States. In France, the Transmusicales festival in Rennes had put it on its program in December 2009. A somewhat distant personal memory of a performance that had left people a little dubious.
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Born on July 10, 1942 in Detroit (Michigan), Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was raised in a working-class environment. His father arrived from Mexico in the 1920s to work in the city’s automobile factories, his mother was Native American – she died when Sixto Rodriguez was 3 years old. He learned a few guitar chords, started singing here and there around his 20s and lived off odd jobs. Vision problems forced him to wear dark glasses quite early. In 1967, he recorded a first 45-rpm, a little folk with an organ background.
He continued to play in clubs and in the summer of 1969 recorded a dozen songs in the studio, which were to appear on his first album, Cold Fact, released in March 1970 by the Sussex Phonographic Company. The album, on the cover of which appears only his name, Rodriguez, begins with the song Sugar Man, probably its best known today. Soft voice, a little drawling, with a nasal aspect reminiscent of that of Bob Dylan, an expressive energy also, at times, which would bring him closer to Richie Havens (one of the heroes of Woodstock with his interpretation of Freedom), a few arrangements a little psychedelic in places, strings, winds, to the production Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey, who work regularly for the soul record company Motown Records.
Work on construction sites
The album goes unnoticed. Just like the following, Coming From Reality, recorded in London at the end of 1970 and which, still under the name of Rodriguez and on Sussex, was released in November 1971. A little more folk, with a few rock thrusts, strings. In particular, we find a dreamy ballad with a hint of pop, To Whom It May Concern, who had enough to make a hit. But no.
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