Finding Rodríguez

One of my friends, Andrea, heard some time ago from one of her friends in the doctorate, about Rodríguez and one of his songs, “Sugar man”. She sent me the song several times and insisted on the fact that I should heart it carefully since he was not only a great performer but also his ability as a composer was similar to Bob Dylan’s. Dylan? Off course, there is the possibility of Rodríguez being a good composer but compare him to Dylan sounded like an exaggeration. To be honest, I listened to “Sugar man” and it went through my ears simply, it did sound good, I won’t deny it, but I didn’t take it enoughly serious, just as it has happened to me several times with excellent bands and singers. I think it is necessary to pay more attention. Let this one be a life lesson.

Rodriguez’s life was a complete mystery for a long time, even for those who knew him closely and worked with him. He was a weird individual that lived in Detroit but nobody knew exactly what he did, who he was or where he lived. The only thing they certainly knew was that he played the guitar and sang songs that he wrote himself based on the reality he saw and lived in his own flesh in the local pubs. His lyrics are full of critics and observations on an unfair social system, which segregates and turns people on slaves of other people that keeps getting richer by the first’s work and that sacrifices life without any shame. It is a raw reality, that from which we all try to runaway but that keeps being there, that has been present for centuries in every corner of the world. Under certain circumstances, a producer heard Rodríguez in a bar in the middle of a dark night and being himself who actually compared him to Dylan, talked to the artist to record an album, because he was pure talent. Rodríguez actually recorded two albums which were a complete disaster on sales in the United States before the astonished eyes of those who knew the music business. Rodríguez disappeared. Some people said he had killed himself with a gun in the middle of a concert, others said that he set himself on fire in a concert too and some said he died because of his drugs’ addiction.

It is not well known how, but apparently, thanks to a young woman who travelled to South Africa with a Rodríguez’s long play for her boyfriend, the commercial disaster that was “Cold Fact” - the artist’s first album - landed in the Apartheid mandated territory and he turned into the free expression’s voice, in the reveal of disastrous realities and in the fact that it is valid to complaint and reveal against an unfair political and social system that sacrifices individual freedom and rights. Rodríguez became the voice of the people, heading without even knowing it a group of young, brave and independent musicians that started talking or better said, singing. There starts the whole journey to find out who is this mysterious character from which not even people from the US know anything about. Searching for Sugar man is the movie that we watched yesterday with Andrea, and it is I would say, one of the most amazing and unbelievable stories on the music business I’ve ever heard about.

There are specially a couple of things that caught my attention in this story. The first one is that despite the huge amount of terrible things of wich this lost humanity is undoubtedly author, it is also amazing the amount of people with marvelous capacities and skills you can find in a street or a bar or in any place. It is one of those facts that one usually forgets, that Socrates had so clear in his mind and that today we don’t even consider. The second is an observation about Rodríguez that mentioned one of his colleagues at work. He said that Rodríguez had the ability of creating something new and beautiful out of cruel and sad facts as those he saw and lived every day. “Have you ever done that? Turn something terrible in something new and marvelous.” Those words are still in my head. Maybe we all do not have that gift, but we should at least try.

These are the stories that fulfill my heart with happiness every time that routine turns into something unbearable for me. A few years ago I didn’t care if I went out of home or not, if I had to study or to read something or not, life was just passing by in front of my eyes and I didn’t mind. I had a lot of problems in that moment, most of them are now solved and in this particular moment, I deeply hate this lethargy spaces of time because I feel there’s a huge world out there with interesting, happy, sad, melancholic, incredible, magic and terrible things and all of them are definitively things one must see. Rodríguez has made me believe again and it has been a long time since I felt this faith in humanity.