At the time of taking the stairs, his daughter Regan warns that it is hot up there. It’s dark, too. Curtains or simple fabrics obscure the windows. A smell of marijuana hovers. Her silhouette emerges in the darkness of a bedroom, in profile, her knees bent over her bed. Impossible to see the tint of the blanket, if something is hanging on the wall. His t-shirt looks plain. His voice is a whisper. On the coffee table, some candles are added for our meeting.
His face appears, eyes hidden behind sunglasses in the colors of the American stars and stripes. One of his hands grabs mine to make contact. He has these very long fingers that seemed to shrink the guitar, he gave him the rhythm, the melody was in his voice. “Are you still playing? “No, not at all.” “Even here, with friends?” ” ” They are welcome. But I listen to them play. “Why don’t you play with them?” “For many reasons. And I’m 80 years old. »
He flees the light
Sixto Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942. Today is July 8, 2022. The house is preparing to celebrate his birthday the next day, a day early. At the back, the poster of the film dedicated to him, Oscar for best documentary in 2013, was unrolled from the upper balcony. The man floats as we discovered him, as he will remain, a silhouette with long hair, the guitar in his back. Sugar Manor the story of a songwriter American without success, who does not know how much he is revered in South Africa. There, his only two albums, released at the very beginning of the 1970s, had become the soundtrack of white youth in the struggle against apartheid.
His fans believed him to be tragically dead, but two of them found him destitute in Detroit during the 1990s. committed suicide in 2014). And Rodriguez popped up, especially in Europe. It was like a time capsule, as if the thaw or the seabed revealed buried treasure, important songs from the last century, as if everything had not been said, as if other Dylans, to whom he was immediately compared, could still hatch in the time of synthesizers, utopias and buried anger.
“Rodriguez now only lived in one room, very close to a stove. When he had no more wood, he went to pick it up. » Danny Kroha, guitarist
It was like a fairy tale. The house did not appear in the film. Another façade had been chosen so as not to give its address. We only saw the interior, the only room where he had taken refuge and that the musicians of Detroit knew well. They hadn’t waited for the South Africans, they knew. From the 1990s, in the good record stores from the United States, we were looking for these two nuggets that are Cold Fact et Coming from Reality, that a certain Rodriguez had released in quick succession, in 1970 and 1971. A Seattle label – Light in the Attic – had finally released them in 2008, four years before the film, and Sixto Rodriguez had immediately resumed the path of small american scenes.
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