There sure has been a lot to get excited about on the Rodriguez front as of late, but this is definitely perched high at the top of our list of delights! Searching For Sugar Man has been nominated for Best Documentary at the 2013 Oscars! We imagine it might go a little something like this:
Congratulations to Rodriguez, Malik Bendjelloul, Steve Rowland, Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, Dennis Coffey, Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and everyone else involved in the making of the film/soundtrack! We couldn’t be more pleased. Pick up a copy of the Searching For Sugar Man OST, or Rodriguez’s studio albums, Cold Fact & Coming From Reality at LightInTheAttic.net! Watch the trailer below and see the film if you haven’t already! Fingers crossed!
Bought my copy of Cold Fact back in 1973 along with Jackson Browne’s For Everyman and Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick. Played all of them almost back to back for many, many years. Rodriguez played a big part in our lives in SA at the time. We’d be running from police when Wits protests on Jan Smuts Avenue started to heat up. Later, we’d play Dylan, Rodrigues, Neil Young (Harvest) over the PA system in the canteen of the Students’ Union Building. We all saw (and believed) that Rodriguez was as big a star in his native USA… afterall, everyone I knew had a copy of his record. It was part of the collection.
So… It took 35 years for the USA to wake up to his genius.
And who took all the money… I recall paying about four rand for the LP, and back in 1973 a rand was worth about a dollar twenty. So if half a million copies were sold in South Africa (distinctly possible – everyone I knew had a vinyl copy NOT A BOOTLEGGED cassette tape – then even at a 10% royalty, some $250,000 never made it back to Rodriguez…