This singing sensation was nearly 40 years in the making

South African icon Rodriguez gets rediscovered here

(Steve Adams)

NEW YORK - "Do you want to know the secret to life?," Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, who performs simply as Rodriguez, asked the crowd at a recent show at Joe's Pub, a smirk peeking out from underneath his oversize hat and sunglasses. The crowd roared its approval, and after pausing momentarily for effect, Rodriguez offered his answer: "You breathe in, then you breathe out. In and out."

He closed the show with a cover that, considering the circumstances, was most apropos: Etta James's "At Last." Given his long, hard road to success, Rodriguez's patience - his sense that life is one breath after another - has served him well. After all, how many other obscure American artists can claim to be huge in South Africa and be telling the truth? Rodriguez really was a superstar in apartheid-era South Africa, providing the soundtrack for soldiers and anti-establishment dropouts, while remaining almost completely unknown at home - although he was nearly the last to know it.

Our loss is also our gain; "Cold Fact," the album most Americans never heard, has reemerged, nearly 40 years later, as a miraculous emanation from the past. Light in the Attic, an indie label in Seattle, reissued "Cold Fact" last month with lavish liner notes detailing the album's twisted journey.

Born in Detroit in 1942, the son of Mexican immigrants, Rodriguez began traversing the city's nightclubs and bars in his early 20s, playing his own unusual, delicate psychedelic folk songs between Beatles and Rolling Stones covers. Discovered by Motown guitarist Dennis Coffey (noted for his work with the Temptations), Rodriguez entered the studio to record what came to be 1970's "Cold Fact." The entire album was recorded in three weeks of intermittent sessions and emphasized the spare, uncluttered nature of Rodriguez's socially and emotionally charged songwriting.

"It's very stark," Rodriguez says of the album from his home in Detroit, where he has lived his whole life. "If you overproduce, you lose something."

For contemporary listeners rediscovering (or, most likely, finally discovering) the album, "Cold Fact" sounds like a late-'60s masterpiece still in its shrink-wrap. The album balances the unblemished sweetness of Rodriguez's voice against its lyrics, which dramatically and poetically depict a city on the brink of collapse.

Taking his cues from his musical idols Simon & Garfunkel and Bob Dylan, Rodriguez documented the turmoil of the era in elliptical fashion. "Cold Fact" offers the musings of an angry young man gazing out his window and seeing chaos and disorder closing in on all sides. "Gomorrah is a nursery rhyme/ You won't find it in the book," Rodriguez warns on "Gomorrah." "It's written on your city's face/ Just stop and take a look."

"I guess looking out that window were some of those visuals, like Kent State, the assassinations of so many people in the '60s, unrest, the resistance against the war," says Rodriguez.

"Cold Fact" is far from the first reissue from rock's golden era to turn heads. Like Shuggie Otis, whose 1974 album, "Inspiration Information," blew minds when it was rereleased by Luaka Bop in 2001, and to whom he bears some musical resemblance, the reemergence of Rodriguez provides a missing link in the evolution of '60s music. It links the poetic folk of Paul Simon with the politically infused soul of Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield.

Urban turbulence is linked with a more domestic brand of unrest; the collapse of a relationship and the collapse of a city are one and the same for "Cold Fact." The anguished romantics of "I Wonder" and "Only Good for Conversation," railing against cold-hearted lovers, rub shoulders with the narrators of "Inner City Blues" and "This Is Not a Song, It's an Outburst: Or the Establishment Blues," lamenting a dystopia whose waves were lapping against their doorsteps.

"Cold Fact" is an angry album - the "concrete cold fact" of the Dylan-esque rap "This Is Not a Song, It's an Outburst" is that "this system's gonna fall soon." "Cold Fact" is the lilting soundtrack to urban decay and degradation - the record the Warriors would have listened to on their way back to Coney Island if only they'd copped it back in 1970.

Four decades later, Rodriguez has either forgotten, or chosen to forget, the raw emotions that led to "Cold Fact." In speaking of recording the album, he is intimately familiar with every detail; discussing the experiences that formed it, Rodriguez speaks as if it had all happened to someone else.

"Those are probably very real, those feelings and things in the album," he says of its raw-nerve lyrics. "It was pretty chaotic, I think."

After the commercial failure of his second album, "Coming From Reality," he gave up on the idea of a full-time musical career - "Nothing beats reality," he says of the experience - and became a member of the "hard-working class," as he puts it. Working in demolition, renovation, and home restoration, Rodriguez put music on the back burner, never forgetting, or losing faith in, his youthful passion.

So what does it feel like to be rediscovered? "Well, I wish you had been there!," Rodriguez exclaims. "It was so stunning, it was so cool. In '98, I toured South Africa, after hearing about [my fans there], and it was just an amazing situation because of the turnout. During the concerts, they sang the lyrics to me, and it seemed like I was just accompanying them, at times." For Rodriguez, it was like touring an alternate universe - one in which he had, indeed, become a beloved superstar.

Fans in South Africa were not merely familiar with Rodriguez's work; they were passionately linked to it. "One soldier in Namibia, he says, 'We made love to your music, we made war to your music,' " Rodriguez remembers. "Another kid says backstage, 'I remember when I could hear my mother singing in the kitchen,' my material, you know?"

Having heard persistent rumors that Rodriguez had, like his contemporaries Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, died young, South Africans were pleasantly surprised to find him touring their country, playing (and selling out) 5,000-seat concert halls.

"Imagine going to an Elvis concert in 2008, or Jim reunited with the Doors," says Stephen "Sugar" Segerman, cofounder of the Sugarman.org website (named after Rodriguez's best-known song) with Brian Currin. "It was like that for us."

Anti-apartheid white soldiers, protecting a state they detested, particularly identified with the mingling of peacefulness and horror on "Cold Fact."

"Rodriguez's music and style [have] a warm and weary and caring and resigned air that just seems to wrap you in its cocoon and makes the world seem a slightly better place or easier to bear," Segerman says. "There were other albums that [soldiers] listened to, but somehow 'Cold Fact' became the special one."

Now that music has found him once more, Rodriguez has plans for the future, but his bittersweet experiences have taught him to be cautious in his optimism.

"I was crushed by it," Rodriguez says of the disappointing response to "Cold Fact" back then. "A lot of people were crushed around me, too, because I'd worked so hard on it and had such high expectations and hopes."

After a few one-off shows, he is concentrating on the rereleases of "Cold Fact" and "Coming From Reality," which Light in the Attic plans to reissue next year for its debut on CD. Instead of dreaming of multiplatinum success, he hopes for a chance to tour his own country and possibly the opportunity to record another album.

"I didn't believe this would last 30 years, to tell the truth," Rodriguez says with a laugh. "I was going to make a successful album and hit bigger rooms, but I didn't expect to be overseas. I didn't expect Australia and South Africa to pick up on it, and stay [interested] for 37 years."