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Sugar Man - Conversation Lesson

Kristin: AJ, I know you still have not seen Searching for Sugar Man, have you?

AJ: I haven’t seen it yet, no.

Kristin: When are you going to watch it?

AJ: It’s in my little list on, for my, y’know, next online viewing but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Kristin: Well, yeah, I just— I know you’d really like it. Y’know, I think you would like how the story came about which is basically this Swedish guy, kind of young, wanted to make a movie. I don’t think he’d ever made a movie.

And he just started traveling the world looking for a good story for a movie. And he ended up in Cape Town, South Africa, where he went into a music store and met this guy who started telling him about Sixto Rodriguez, this, I guess, Hispanic-American guy.

And anyway, the Swedish guy was so intrigued by the story he decided to make a movie. The story is basically this guy, Sixto Rodriguez, back in the ’70s. Joe, is that right?

Joe: Yeah, Sixto Rodriguez was a musician, singer-songwriter, who lived in Detroit in the late 1960s, early 1970s. That’s when he was performing actually. He’s lived in Detroit his whole life, but.

Kristin: Started— he plays guitar and he writes his own lyrics and has wonderful lyrics that are very political and kind of revolutionary for that time period, even for now. But the weird thing is like he never became popular here in America.

AJ: Hmmm.

Kristin: Nobody ever knew about him.

AJ: Yeah, I’ve never heard of him.

Kristin: But he became popular somehow in South Africa and people aren’t even really sure. There’s a theory that maybe an American woman was dating a guy in South Africa and flew there and brought one of his albums and it just kind of spread, like wildfire.

AJ: Hm, interesting.

Joe: So, y’know, one of the main parts I think that— since you’re unfamiliar with this, I’ll tell you AJ. One of the most interesting parts of this movie is that here’s this guy named Rodriguez who was as popular as Elvis Presley and the Beatles in South Africa. And here in America where he was from, nobody had ever even heard of him really.

AJ: Yeah.

Joe: Y’know? He was thought to be like a musician singer-songwriter much like Bob Dylan was. And I mean that in a sense that his music was simple and really the things that people loved about his music were his lyrics.

AJ: Mmmm.

Joe: Y’know, he really painted a picture with each song that he sang. And, as Kristin was saying, he spoke about topics that were political in nature. And anyway, this guy became this huge success in South Africa, unbeknownst to him. And he was unable to sell any albums here in America, so after he put out his second album he pretty much stopped playing.

AJ: So he never got any money from South African sales?

Joe: No, no, he really didn’t make any money. There’s a thought maybe that the owner of the record company, y’know, the record company that put out the albums that he made, there’s a theory that maybe the owner of that record company made a lot of money.

AJ: Ah, cheated him.

Joe: Yeah, yeah, he didn’t make anything. But— so the crazy thing is that this guy, he just stopped playing music and no one knew anything about him. The people in South Africa actually thought that he was really, really popular in America.

AJ: Uh-huh.

Joe: Which obviously wasn’t true. And he pretty much just disappeared off the face of the earth. Like he just didn’t make any more albums and no one heard anything about him. So then some stories started to circulate in South Africa about what happened to him.

Kristin: Yeah, he was this big mystery to these South Africans who loved him. So a couple of guys, one of them being the music store owner that the Swedish director met him and another South African guy decided to start searching for Rodriguez. And the name of the movie is called Searching for Sugar Man because Sugar Man is the name of one of his songs.

Joe: Yeah, he has a song called Sugar Man. But what I thought that you were going to say, Kristin, was some of these stories that people had about what happened to him. Like there was a story that was popularly circulated throughout South Africa and it was that he set himself on fire during one of his concerts.

AJ: Oh, crazy.

Joe: And that’s how he died. And then another one was that he just killed himself some other way. So the people of South Africa thought the reason they didn’t hear anything more about this guy was because he was dead and he stopped making music.

AJ: Huh.

Joe: So there are a few guys who are really big fans of his music and they tried to figure out what really happened to him. And they found out that Rodriguez was actually alive and living in Detroit, Michigan.

AJ: Mmmm.

Joe: And that’s where he was from all along. And it was really interesting because in the movie they talk about how they figured this out. It’s like these guys were like detectives.

Kristin: The kind of funny thing, when they finally tracked him down, he was living in this kind of slum house in Detroit, broke. Y’know, doing some kind of demolition work. He had pretty much quit performing, quit singing out in clubs.

AJ: Huh.

Joe: Yeah, he had actually been doing this demolition work since the early ’70s. And, as Kristin was saying, he lived in this house, if you would call it a house even, part of a house that looks just— it looks really ghetto, y’know?

AJ: Mmmm.

Joe: But the thing is the guy is a real simplistic guy and for him that was fine. So anyway, once they tracked him down— what was it, Kristin? They tracked him down because someone made a website where they said they were looking for him?

Kristin: Yeah, something to that effect. And now this is back when the internet, y’know, people weren’t on the internet as much as they are now. But his daughter, one of his daughters happened to see this advertisement basically. Do you know anything about this man, this singer? And she responded.

AJ: Hm.

Kristin: And when finally, these two guys, these two South Africans that were looking for him connected with Rodriguez on the phone he thought it was kind of a prank or something.

AJ: Ahhh.

Kristin: He couldn’t believe he was so popular in another country.

AJ: Huh.

Kristin: I wanted to say really quick, the reason he was so popular in South Africa during that time was because this was during apartheid and so it was very conservative and, y’know, just all the problems with the government and the racial problems.. Rodriguez was singing about these types of things.

AJ: Mmm.

Kristin: And the South Africans were just blown away. Like they’d never come across music like this before where somebody could be singing so freely about these types of issues.

AJ: Mmm.

Kristin: And, yeah, that’s why he was so popular.

Joe: Yeah, he was speaking about like governments being corrupt and not taking care of their civilians properly and all these issues that he was writing about were issues that people were experiencing firsthand in South Africa.

So it was almost as if he was writing these songs for the people of South Africa, even though he was writing them for, y’know, for a wider audience like the American audience or really anybody, I guess.

AJ: Hm.

Kristin: He also was singing about drugs and sex, which here again, like, y’know, with South Africa being extremely conservative, it was very taboo.

Joe: So anyway, check this out, what happened was they contacted him and they said you have this huge following here. You’re as big as Elvis Presley is. So they told him that they could set up a huge, y’know, a tour for him in South Africa.

So that’s what he did. He actually went on tour in South Africa. And, y’know, in the years that followed, this was like, what, the mid-2000s, maybe 2005 or something like that.

AJ: Ah.

Joe: And since that time, he’s toured all over. I mean, and he’s finally getting royalties now for his music.

AJ: Ahh.

Joe: So he’s really being rewarded for the success that he had in South Africa for such a long time.

AJ: Nice.

Kristin: And it’s wonderful to see because he’s a wonderful musician, singer, songwriter, and he’s very humble. So it’s nice to see him get what’s owed to him. And he’s now become popular here.

AJ: Aha.

Kristin: In fact, he’s playing in San Francisco soon.

AJ: Oh, nice, nice.

Joe: Yeah, it just— here’s this guy who basically quit the industry in the early 1970s and he’s finally being, y’know, receiving the recognition that he deserved so long ago.