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ACL artist preview: Rodriguez
Zohar Lindenbaum
Plenty of the acts playing at ACL Fest waited a long time — or are still waiting — for their big break in the United States.
Sixto Rodriguez has them all beat: It has taken him 40 years to get some love from America. The story of the 67-year-old Rodriguez — who performs under his last name — sounds like the plot of a lousy rock `n’ roll B movie.
Rodriguez, who has spent nearly his entire life in the Detroit area, recorded two albums between 1969 and 1973 that received virtually no notice at the time, despite their tuneful nature, eccentric-yet-funky arrangements and Dylanesque brew of surrealistic and protest-oriented lyrics. So Rodiriguez, with a family to support, abandoned his music career and went to work on demolition and renovation jobs.
A half dozen years after he stopped recording, he learned that his albums, which had disappeared in his native country, had achieved a surprising afterlife in Australia, where he had built up a substantial fan base through word of mouth and bootlegs. In 1979 he played a series of shows there, co-billed with the similarly political-minded Australian band Midnight Oil. Then, it was back to his day jobs.
Nearly 20 years later Rodriguez’s first big break arrived, when two South African fans of his music tracked him down after a nine-month search. They informed Rodriguez that he was something of a star in their country, where many of his fans thought he was dead. (The stories that made the rounds included the claim that he had killed himself onstage — by gunshot blast or self-immolation — after singing the lines, “But thanks for your time, then you can thank me for mine, and after that’s said, forget it.”)
During subsequent tours of the country in 1998, 2001, 2004 and this past month, Rodriguez learned that his music’s raw political and sexual content had gained him a widely varied audience. “A soldier says to me, ‘We made love to your music, we made war to your music’,” Rodriguez says by phone from a restaurant in Grosse Pointe, MI. “He told me that like he was getting something off his chest.” (Rodriguez still hasn’t figured out how to respond to people who come up to him and say, “I thought you were dead!”)
Finally, the newly emboldened Rodriguez has begun to get some recognition in his own country. Last year, the Seattle label Light in the Attic put out a heavily annotated, lovingly remastered reissue of Rodriguez’s debut album, “Cold Fact,” in America. The 1973 followup, “Coming From Reality,” was reissued earlier this year.
Music is now, once again, a full-time job for Rodriguez, who has played in Ireland, France and Italy, among other countries, and hung out backstage with the likes of Wilco and Animal Collective.
Rodriguez has played a handful of US shows, sometimes backed by a quartet of young fans from North Carolina. He believes his ACL set this afternoon will be his highest profile American gig. “I think 500 people have signed up already to see the show, so I’ll have a little audience, anyway,” he says. “But check it out: One of the bands, 13,000 have signed up for them. So I’m working on, you know, getting people to the show.”
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Permalink | Comments (1) | Categories: ACL Festival 2009
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By Randy Spiros
October 4, 2009 9:43 AM | Link to this
I still have both of Rodriguez’s record albums that I dug out of the bargain bins about thirty five years ago. This guy is great. His music is great. Always thought he would have trouble making it in the almost exclusively white rock music scene back then. Not because of his music, but because of his ethnic name and that both of his album covers seemed to emphasize his ethnic background. His record covers did not make him look like a rock artist.
Glad he’s still around! Try and not miss this guy if you are going to ACL!