Finding Your Audience
Sixto Rodriguez, the Subject of "Searching for Sugar Man" Dies at 81; An Example of a Man of Modest Means who Found His Audience Late in Life
Imagine being bigger than Elvis. Imagine writing songs that inspire generations of people and becoming iconically associated with an era in the same way Bob Dylan was. Imagine your records being standards to any record collection in the same way Bob Marley’s “Legend” or Journey’s Greatest Hits are.
Now imagine living your entire life completely unaware of how big you are and what your music means to entire countries of people. Imagine selling millions and not receiving a dime of it. Imagine living in squalor and being largely destitute while all your legions of fans think you are dead.
That is exactly what happened to Sixto Rodriguez. The Academy Award Winning Documentary film “Searching for Sugar Man” documents the true story of how the Detroit singer/songwriter relatively bombed in America, how he rose to fame in South Africa, how his music gained notoriety as popular protest music during the Apartheid years and how the relative obscurity of it’s composer led to an urban myth about his unfortunate (and false) demise. If you have never seen it, do yourself a favor and watch it now.
Rodriguez’s dillema was one about “finding an audience.” He certainly had talent and was a great songwriter. If you didn’t know anything about the singer, and just listened to the music, you can appreciate the quality. So the issue was not quality or content. However, Rodriguez had a few things working against him in the United States:
Detroit, where he was from, was Motown. He was very much unlike the singers Motown was churning out at the time like The Temptations, Aretha Franklin, The Spinners, The Jackson Five and others.
He was Mexican, playing a more traditional american folk music. The image conveyed by the record industry did not mesh with listeners expectations.
He was a humble, relatively quiet guy who frankly didn’t market himself very well or hustle to sell his own records.
The kind of music he played was more popular a few years prior, but as the 60s gave way to the 70s it was increasingly on the outs in favor of other fare.
He only made two records and was in the process of the third when his record company dropped him. The record company, Sussex, declared bankruptcy, A&M Records took their losses and then dumped the records that didn’t sell in overseas markets. Then, in of all places, in South Africa, where none of the issues above mattered, his music took root. A South African record company, Blue Goose, bought the rights and started distributing and marketing the music. Apartheid South Africa in the ‘70s and ‘80s was a particularly troublesome period (far worse than the 60s were in the US), and the music and lyrics that Rodriguez wrote about “spoke” to many there, who thought of Rodriguez as just another American performer of the likes of Bob Dylan or Cat Stevens. Much of his songs had anti-establishment themes, which fit right in; when the South African government began banning some songs from airplay, it only increased their notoriety and demand. As someone in the documentary put it, Rodriguez was so popular that if you grew up in any typical liberal South African family, Rodriguez’s records were a part of your collection.
Meanwhile, Sixto lived a modest life. He gave up on his music career in 1976 and purchased a derelict house for $50 at government auction, with no heat, that he was still living in in 2013. He worked odd manual labor jobs around inner city Detroit and even ran for office a number of times advocating for the working poor. He received a bachelors in Philosophy from Wayne State University. He lived poor and quietly in Detroit.
In South Africa however, his fame was blowing up. Still, nobody could find anything about this mysterious singer from America and an urban legend grew that he had killed himself onstage in the 1970s. As the internet grew in the 1990s and 2000s, fan sites began to form and one of Sixto caught the eye of his daughter. She got in touch with the site owner and set the record straight. From there, Sixto became a folk hero in South Africa and toured it multiple times. At the time of his death, he was one of the largest selling artists ever in South Africa.
Sixto found his audience.
PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner
Believe it or not, the story of Sixto Rodriguez finding an audience is more common than you think. Songs, movies and other forms of art (even science as we’ll see) that are bombs when first released find audiences over time and then develop into beloved items. Often, it has to do with changes to how they are marketed or viewed/listened to in order to give the art a chance to be seen or heard. Quite often these are described as “cult” music or movies, with a devoted fanbase that keep them alive until they do eventually find their audiences.
For instance, in the mid to late ‘70s a rock band had some minor hits but wasn’t living up to Epic record company’s expectations, never reaching the top 40. The company unloaded all of it’s extra stock of the albums that weren’t selling in Japan. What happened was that the Japanese bought all the records sparking a tour and live album by the band, that was only to be distributed in Japan. Bootleg copies and large radio airplay helped boost the band’s appeal. To this day, Cheap Trick’s 1978 “Live at Budokan” album is considered one of the greatest live rock albums and jump started the rest of Cheap Trick’s catalog and career.1 Rolling Stone named it to its top 500 albums of all time.
In 1994, the two big movies were Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. Even after a bunch of nominations, a film based on a Stephen King novella nobody knew much about and was poorly marketed, named “The Shawshank Redemption,” crashed out of theaters after only a few weeks. Months later, it became a staple on TNT and TBS and people would come across it on cable and were drawn in. It’s now listed on IMDB as the Greatest Movie of All Time.
The Wizard of Oz cost $2.5 million to make and made only $3 million in theaters. It was widely viewed as a box office bomb. Yet a few things worked out in it’s favor. It always had very positive word of mouth, and became a cheap movie to re-release every year, especially in the middle of the country in rural America. During the war years (it was released in 1939 and Pearl Harbor was only 2 years away), when Hollywood had to scale back and focused on war pictures, The Wizard of Oz became a much needed escape and always played well, especially to children (when the alternative was a constant reminder of where all the men in town were). Lastly, when color televisions came out in the 1960s, broadcasters utilized its black and white to color transition to help sell color TVs. As a result, generations grew up watching Dorothy and Toto.
Lastly, we come to Albert Einstein. In 1900 he began submitting papers to an obscure publication “Annalen der Physik” and in 1905, he submitted five papers. Of those five, three are among the most noteworthy scientific writings ever; one eventually won Einstein the Nobel Prize, one provided proof that atoms do indeed exist and another merely changed everything we knew about physics and the world and denting science accepted since Sir Isaac Newton. And you know how many people cared about any of these papers in 1905? None.
You see, Einstein had no university affiliation, no access to a laboratory, and no use of a library larger than the patent office where he worked as a Patent Clerk, Third Class. These are not the credentials that the greatest scientific minds of the day listen to. In addition, the papers are largely theoretical in nature, without much reference to other scientific works, resulting in nobody particularly interested in reading them; kind of akin to a daydreamer waxing rhapsodically about something they think is profound and not some analytical breakdown of scientific theory. They had no (or very few) footnotes or citations, contain virtually no math and make no mention of any work by other scientists preceding them. Einstein’s papers were given zero thought by the scientific elite, who viewed them as extremely amateurish and the journal they were printed in as substandard. Einstein applied as a university lecturer and was rejected and applied as a high school teacher and was rejected there as well.
In 1917, he wrote a paper regarding how gravity impacts light. Writing “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity” (which was him commenting on his previously written article) he contemplated how gravity would impact light and expressed thoughts that were simple to consume, made predictions that were easily proven and replicated, and were demonstrated correct again and again. “The Great War” was now over and scientists were coming back to work, looking at innovative ways to consider the growing field of atomic science. Einstein’s paper raised eyebrows, but more importantly, it caused scientists to look back at his previous work, which answered questions they hadn’t considered at the time but were only now confronting. So more than a decade after his initial publications, Einstein was finally hailed as the genius (way ahead of the crowd) that he is regarded as today.
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
This one is easy. Sixto playing at his first South African concert, with the bass playing that riff for what seems an eternity, and then Sixto finally acknowledging the crowd saying, “Thank you for Keeping Me Alive.”
I tried linking to the video, but it won’t let me at this time. Once I am able to, I will post the video. For now, here is a photo of the moment will have to do.
Thank you Sixto. R.I.P.
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Footnotes and Fun Stuff
Prior to that, the most albums that Cheap Trick had sold in the U.S. was 150,000 copies peaking at #207 on the US charts. After “Live at Budokan” their next album, “Dream Police” sold over 3 million and went all the way to #6.