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Critical acclaim comes to Detroit musician 38 years after album release
Louis Aguilar / The Detroit News

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez toiled for decades as a day laborer in Detroit's gritty Cass Corridor. To this day, he rides the D-Dot bus to get around town. Just last week, Entertainment Weekly declared him a genius. Four decades ago, Rodriguez recorded 12 sweet, yet dark, psychedelic-tinged folk-rock songs for the album, "Cold Fact," in a Detroit basement. It foundered commercially. Fast-forward to 2008 and an avalanche of raves is coming his way, thanks to the album's re-release last week by the Seattle label Light in the Attic. Two weeks ago, the native southwest Detroiter flew to Stockholm, courtesy of Swedish documentary filmmakers who believe his life story will captivate an international film audience. Next week, the singer-songwriter will travel to New York to play for a private audience of music-industry insiders at a show sponsored by the hipper-than-thou Fader magazine. What's happening to Rodriguez, 66, is a second chance that is the fantasy of every struggling artist: to be lauded around the world -- at least several continents -- and the chance to not die in poverty. "It's been a great odyssey," Rodriguez says as he sits in Motor City Brewing Works, one of his favorite Cass Corridor haunts. "All those years, you know, I always considered myself a musician. But, reality happened." His sinewy arms reflect years of renovating old houses, hauling refrigerators and other manual labor he's done to survive. One of the fingertips on his left hand is missing due to a factory accident. Yet, he has good rock-star hair, long and jet black. "The world is such a big place and there's enough for everyone. More than enough. To say you want it all -- there's just so much to share and the beautiful part of it is I get to share this with so many people. "Rock 'n' roll is a living thing. My friend told me that in a bar about a week ago, and man, I'm going to use that, I'm going to use that." That's how a typical Rodriguez conversation goes.

A rock star in South Africa

To say he's making a comeback is not true because he never financially made it. To say it's the first time his music has made waves isn't true because a decade ago he discovered that, in fact, "Cold Fact" has for years earned him a legion of fans in South Africa. That also means he's been seriously ripped off since he never saw any royalties of the estimated 100,000 albums sold there. Rodriguez wrote the 14 songs that comprise "Cold Fact" a few months after the Detroit race riots, and recorded it on the now-defunct Sussex label about the time of the brutal Manson murders in California. Vietnam War protests were raging and dividing Americans. Sen. Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. He wrote dreamy songs based on the counterculture, working-class scene in Detroit. Spin magazine describes the songs as "gutter poetry" of "junkies, dealers, prostitutes" that captures a "dark era of dreams destroyed." They mean that in a good way, giving it three-and-a-half stars out of five. When "Cold Fact" first came out, it didn't garner enough sales for him to tour -- not even a Detroit show. He made one other album, "Coming From Reality" in 1972, which also went nowhere. Rodriguez thought it was the end of his musical story. He worked day labor and started a family. He got a philosophy degree from Wayne State University and became politically active. He unsuccessfully ran for mayor, city council and state senate. Eventually, he became a Cass Corridor character. The only clue that his music registered to anyone came in 1979 when he was asked to perform in Australia. He went again in 1981. "I thought they were strange flukes," he says. He thought it particularly sweet and strange many people knew the words to his songs.

'Bigger than Elvis'

He went back to surviving in Detroit. Seventeen years later, his daughter Eva told him she found Web sites dedicated to him in South Africa. One said he had shot himself on stage. Another declared he overdosed on heroin. But it was clear he had an ardent fan base. The founders of one of those sites, a rock journalist named Craig Bartholomew, ended up calling Rodriguez after searching for him for years. Shortly after, another devout fan, Stephen Segerman, called him. "I told him, 'In " says Segerman, recalling the South Africa, you're bigger than Elvis,' 1996 conversation. Rodriguez was more like the underground hero. The escapist, gritty themes of Rodriguez's songs struck a chord of many repressed young South Africans trying to grapple with their country's brutal apartheid government, which treated blacks and other non-whites like second-class citizens. "Like a lot of people here, I discovered Rodriguez while I was in the army, which every 18-year-old used to have to do," says Segerman, who runs a record shop in Cape Town. "He was on everyone's cassette tapes. It's great pop music. But you start to realize this is raw, brutally honest -- and that's the chord it struck. I was in the army, but I didn't want to be a soldier. I didn't support apartheid. Raw, brutal honest had lots of appeal." It appealed to South Africans, for years, even after apartheid ended in 1990. Segerman claims Rodriguez is a multiplatinum-selling artist in South Africa, where his two albums were released on various labels. "He's been seriously ripped off and the trail is so complicated, involving a number of labels, no one claims to know where the money went," says Segerman, one of several South African fans trying to help Rodriguez get past royalties. Rodriguez has toured South Africa four times, and he performs to thousands who still know the words to his songs. "You walk down the street with him and he's stopped and hugged" by fans, Segerman says.

Garnering new fans

Now Rodriguez receives critical hugs. Entertainment Weekly put "Cold Fact" on its "Must List" -- dedicated to what the magazine considers the 10 best new things out this week. Rodriguez is No. 9, along with such other things as the film"Elegy" and the video game "Madden NFL '09." Another fan is European pop star Paolo Nutini, whose "New Shoes" song is featured in a Puma ad. There's a YouTube video of the Scottish-Italian singer doing a version of Rodriguez's "Sugar Man." Acting as his manager, booker, publicist and overall stabilizing force, is his daughter Regan, a Wayne State librarian. "She's amazing, man. I mean, I just still can't really believe all this stuff, and (there's) no way I could handle it all without her," he says. For now, Rodriguez can still wander Cass Corridor for hours. However, he's too busy doing interviews -- this week with the BBC and next week a major East Coast newspaper -- to spend his afternoons at the main Detroit Public Library like he used to. He still hangs at the Motor City brewery, where the senior citizen usually sits alone in a corner in this bar frequented by young hipsters, and writes in a dog-eared notebook. Beside him are a scruffy, overstuffed shoulder bag and a tattered vinyl guitar case. He often wears sunglasses at night and tends to dress in all black, from motorcycle boots to something resembling an oversized fedora hat. With the U.S. re-release of "Cold Fact," he's got a real chance of American exposure and finally earning decent money. He plays a downtown Detroit gig Sept. 20 at the Park Bar on Park Avenue near Grand Circus Park. "That's fantastic," Rodriguez says. "I mean to finally have a paid gig in my hometown. I love that."