Searching for Sugar Man subject Rodriguez has found a late spotlight

Like a lot of young singer-songwriters in the early 1970s, Detroit’s Sixto Diaz Rodriguez had reason to think he would make it big. He recorded two albums (billed simply as Rodriguez), singing his vivid, clever lyrics in a gentle, distinctive voice. The songs were good, but success didn’t arrive.

Despite the enthusiasm of his producers and his label, neither 1970’s Cold Fact nor the next year’s Coming from Reality sold well. Clarence Avant, whose Sussex Records put out those albums, recalls that the latter sold just six copies — one of them to Avant’s wife.

Rodriguez remained obscure, stayed in Detroit. He worked construction, had three daughters and became a community activist. (He ran for local office a few times, but typical of his success in politics, his name was misspelled on one ballot.) He stopped recording, but he never stopped practicing guitar.

Meanwhile, his two albums became a phenomenon in South Africa. Young, apartheid-protesting Afrikaners found an anti-establishment message in Rodriguez’s forgotten discs. At the time, the repressive government didn’t just ban music it didn’t like; censors ran razor blades across the vinyl to make offending tracks unplayable. That only encouraged defiant music fans. Eventually, those Rodriguez albums went platinum in South Africa.

In the United States, Sussex went out of business a few years after Coming from Reality fell short, so Rodriguez had no idea about his unexpected following. But in 1997, his daughter Eva, a soldier based at Fort Riley, discovered a website put together by South African fans curious about his fate. Many of his fans assumed that he was dead.

Fast-forward to 2012, to a Rodriguez who is still putting that assumption to rest — who may at last make it big in his home country. Swedish director Malik Bendjelloul has made a prize-winning documentary about the musician and the odd trajectory of his albums.

That movie, Searching for Sugar Man (opening in KC October 5, and now playing at Ragtag Cinema in Columbia), has elevated Rodriguez’s domestic profile this year. A schedule dotted with the occasional club gig has given way to an appearance on Late Show with David Letterman. Rodriguez, now 70, has picked up a long-overdue rave from Rolling Stone and is on a national tour that stops in downtown Columbia this week. He plays the Roots N Blues N BBQ Festival at 7:30 p.m. Friday.

In addition to discovering Rodriguez’s fanbase and discussing it in the film, Eva also shot video of her father’s triumphant late-’90s tour of South Africa, where she now lives. That footage is crucial to the finished film. Speaking with The Pitch via Skype, she recounts how her dad finally got his due.

The Pitch: Do you think it might have been better for your father because he wasn’t in the limelight until relatively recently? He obviously took care of himself.

Eva Rodriguez: That was a concern. At the discovery in the ’90s, he was around 50 at the time. Can he still play? Can he still perform? Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with him. He said once that he wouldn’t have been able to handle it so well in those days because when you’re younger, you maybe get a little overwhelmed by the attention or the money or all the things that go along with it. He’s wiser, for sure. He doesn’t let it get to him. I wish we would have had something then, but he doesn’t think about what could have been.

Rodriguez’s best-known song, “Sugar Man,” does such a good job of capturing both the horrors and occasional pleasures of drug abuse.

Rodriguez says it’s a descriptive song; it’s not a prescriptive song. Rodriguez has never done drugs. A lot of people assume he’s this addict rock star. We know drug addicts in our lives. That might be what he was doing, describing it. I know it was not from personal experience because I’ve asked him that question myself.

How much did you know about your father’s career before you discovered his South African success?

Well, it really wasn’t much of a career in terms of the entertainment industry. We were young children when he recorded those albums. We had one or two [copies] of them. Our albums were warped and scratched. We didn’t have the music with us. It wasn’t part of our life. But he was a part of our life, and he plays guitar every day, and it’s always been something he did.

What is it about your dad’s music that resonated with South Africans, particularly in the anti-apartheid movement?

I don’t think they were happy with their situation. Music is related to everything in our lives. We each have a soundtrack. There was a war going on [Vietnam]. I’m a soldier. I related to a lot of the soldiers’ stories because I’ve been to war. I had my own soundtrack when I was in Iraq and Kuwait. It comforts you. South Africa was limited and restricted. It’s small. Everyone knows everyone else. It just spread.

How does he feel about playing for domestic audiences since the film?

To me, he’s not swayed by any excitement or depression. He’s just working. He’s aware of the time, and he feels this is a great opportunity.

Malik has really done a nice job with the film. We’re all really happy with how it turned out. We didn’t know what he was going to do at the time, and he has so much footage. We weren’t sure what it would be like, especially since he was from Sweden. Once we saw it, we could see where he was going with it and suggested that he take it to Sundance, which was the way it was meant to be. People have clapped and cried and jumped and screamed.

It’s hard for me to see how someone not knowing him would view it because I’ve had a part in it. I had a copy, and I showed it to people who were close to me and to see how the response would be, and they were crying.

Is your dad thinking about making another album? It would be tough to match the first two.

That’s always the thing with people that make albums. I have the first copy of just about everybody, but I don’t really get the second, third, fourth or fifth. There’s different reasons he’s not recording now. He’s on the road. He’s never had the finances. It costs money to go into a studio. He has boxes of writings. He’s got songs. He’s even got some down. My sister took him to record some.

He wants to do it in a way that the first two were done, with good production and instruments. He’s holding out to have something like that again.