The life of Sixto Rodriguez in his 10 best lyrics
In Searching for Sugarman, Sixto Rodriguez‘s old construction colleague Rick Emmerson recalls: “He had this kind of magical quality that all the genuine poets and artists have: to elevate things. To get above the mundane, the prosaic. All the bullshit. All the mediocrity that’s everywhere. The artist, the artist is the pioneer.” Indeed, he even managed to transfigure the narrative of the forgotten artist and pioneer a new ending when he rose from the unfortunate ash heap of history and offered up a renaissance of life-affirming magic.
Prior to this phoenix-like ascension, Rodriguez knew “the bullshit” of life all too well. However, his work never wallows in it. He might purvey the hard knocks of the street in his music, but this is always comforted by the wry smile of comedy in everyday tragedy or the old Pierrot le Fou assertion that life might be sad sometimes but it is always beautiful. The humble tale of his life stands as proof of this beyond his work as though art imitated the artist for once.
As the sixth son of a Mexican immigrant father and a Native American mother, living in Detroit, Michigan, his childhood was hard but loving, seeding the contrast of marginalised inner city life and yearning for love that symbolised his later work. This work garnered enough attention to get him signed and put out a couple of records, and while it is often pondered with disbelief how something of such quality could flop, in reality, he is a sad, commonplace paradigm of the challenges faced by the working class trying to make it in the arts.
This lowly perch is another facet that defines his work. He was a masterful poet but he did not write from a poet’s perspective. Joni Mitchell once said she didn’t like poetry because “some of them are mercenary. How many poems can you write where you say, ‘You’re so beautiful that you should reproduce yourself and I’m the guy to do it’? They can’t all be inspired.” Well, fittingly, inspiration might not be the right words for Rodriguez’s work, more so reconciliation, as though he absorbed the streets through spiritual osmosis and from that worked some alchemical wonder to make the mess of existence into a crafted masterpiece.
In fact, his life and his music reflect each other so seamlessly you can weave through them and put together a singular tale. It is a tale that exults him to the height of an everyday hero without ever striving for that mantle, and a workaday Michelangelo of words, who painted scenes of the streets with such grace that he is undoubtedly one of the greatest lyricists of all time.
The life of Sixto Rodriguez in his 10 best lyrics:
‘Can’t Get Away’
“Born in the troubled city
In Rock and Roll, USA
In the shadow of the tallest building
I vowed I would break away
Listened to the Sunday actors
But all they would ever say
That you can’t get away from it
No you can’t get away“
Born in 1942, Rodriguez grew up in inner-city Detroit where Mexicans were marginalised, and the rampant rise of heavy industry made life a mechanical grind. He bore his hardships sagaciously and began looking at the world with a philosophical eye but even the local preachers spoke of inescapability barring the route of the almighty, so he went through life on his own steam instead. He eventually turned his curious disposition into a Philosophy degree from Wayne State University. Alas, the Sunday actors were right and he still couldn’t get away from the grime and grit that surrounded him.
‘Sugar Man’
“Sugar man, won’t you hurry
Cause I’m tired of these scenes
For a blue coin won’t you bring back
All those colors to my dreams“
In his song ‘The Reason Young People Use Drugs’, another of America’s forgotten masters, Abner Jay, sings: “They are hungry, tired and fed-up. Not just the youth, the poor, the rich, the black and the well done do.” With Rodriguez’s adjacent words, we see him gather a picture of the life ahead of him following his philosophy degree. Some people are poets who can rise above mundanity, but there were also plenty of blue coins flooding into the greyness of Detroit that were colourful cans of worms disguised as comforting crutches. Sadly, the inner city pleading on display here is as prescient as ever.
‘Crucify Your Mind’
“And you assume you got something to offer
Secrets shiny and new
But how much of you is repetition
That you didn’t whisper to him too?“
Paired with perhaps his finest melody, in ‘Crucify Your Mind’, Rodriguez goes a similar way to Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and looks at counterculture prophets begging to be different with a scathing, wry scorn. Alas, he is once again too poetic and thoughtful to be entirely bitter, so even though his love life may have largely not gone his way, and he wandered about town like a lonely pariah not quite fitting in or finding much companionship, he extracts from that a wisdom that he was part of it too.
‘A Most Disgusting Song’
“I’ve played every kind of gig there is to play now
I’ve played fa**ot bars, hooker bars, motor cycle funerals
In opera houses, concert halls, halfway houses.Well I found that in all these places that I’ve played
All the people I’ve played for are the same people
So if you’ll listen, maybe you’ll see someone you know in this song. A most disgusting song.“
As the brilliant Searching for Sugarman depicts, in his younger days, Rodriguez was a roving little night worm, traipsing through the smutty streets, surveying the sights then dipping into dive bars where he would enigmatically play with his back to the audience. From this lowly gutter, he gazed outward and upwards, coupling the lofty dreams of hope with a sense of realism that showed both despair at the state of affairs, but also the sense of unity that binds the working classes with a coat of defiance. So, on the one hand, he sings of disgust, but he also sings of humanity and hope in this track; proven further by the fact that he told his daughters that they might have a small bank balance but that didn’t mean their dreams weren’t as big as anyone else’s.
‘I Think of You’
“Just a song we shared, I’ll hear
Brings memories back when you were here
Of your smile, your easy laughter
Of your kiss, those moments after I think of you
And think of you
And think of you“
Naturally, given the narrative of his life and his sad passing, it can be easy to look at Rodriguez and think of his time with sorrowful solemnity, but there are moments littered throughout his discography that show the flipside of his story. He had a wonderful albeit very private family life and this lyrical reminiscence places contentment in sweet amber. After all, he was also a rockstar who even at his lowest ebb of success surely shows that we don’t engage in art purely for the promise of a lucrative end result but for the equally impermanent but much more fulfilling joy of doing it.
‘Like Janis’
“And you want to be held with highest regard
It delights you so much
If he’s trying so hard
And you’re trying to conceal your ordinary way
With a smile or a shrug
Or some stolen cliché.”
While ostensibly ‘Like Janis’ seems to be a put-down of a woman who portrays herself as hipper than thou, you could equally apply it to his dealings with the music industry. Was he really a fit for that often crooked world? In this regard, his failure to launch is hardly despairing. In fact, it seems more like he stepped aside with his integrity intact. “I stopped chasing the music dream back in ’74,” he once admitted. Perhaps that is because he held his probity in a higher regard than any false light of fame and the conformity often required to attain it. But while he was in the belly of the beast making records, he figured he may as well point some fingers at phoneys therein.
‘Cause’ [first verse]
“Cause I lost my job two weeks before Christmas“
It is a single line and it is delivered with a hush, but it lands like a feather that floats towards a window and shatters it on impact. Galvanised by the fact he would go on to be dropped from his record label two weeks before Christmas as though he prophetically cast himself as the protagonist of this song, there is something so gutturally raw about this line that it shows he must’ve been at least a touch downbeat at times about his lack of success by usual standards. And yet he powered on and produced beauty all the same, graciously rolling with the thudding punches of life with a cognisance that even on a memory lane pitted with potholes, you can still drive down it with a smile. This is a life-affirming lesson for all of us sinners to take things with a merciful pinch of salt.
‘Climb Up On My Music’
“Have you ever had a fever,
From a bitter-sweet refrain,
Have you ever kissed the sunshine,
Walked between the rain. Well, just climb up on my music,
And my songs will set you free.”
On the surface, it might seem like there is an irony to this verse given that it opened his fateful second album, thus, to his knowledge about four people in the world climbed up on his music, but that was enough for him, and the sincerity behind this proclamation of music’s liberating potential is proof of that. As he once said: “All my life, I never gave up on music and though there was a lot of disappointment for some that the commercial thing never happened, it has never been a disappointment for me.”
‘Rich Folk Hoax’
“So don’t tell me about your success
Nor your recipes for my happiness
Smoke in bed, I never could digest
Those illusions you claim to have going, The sun is shining
As it’s always done
Coffin dust is the fate of every one, Talking about the rich folks
The poor create the rich hoax
And only late breast-fed fools believe it“
Charles Dickens once wrote that rich folks ought to “think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys.” This message of socialism and caring for those who haven’t had the luck that others have enjoyed nor congratulating yourself too much for your own abundance of it, is something that drove Rodriguez to run in a local election. When music failed him, he could’ve bowed out of public life, but it is a mark of his defiance – the defiance that bolsters his whole discography with buoyant depth – that he kept trying to share his message and make the world a better place. Here, he calls the American Dream a hoax and he does it with more quirky charm and truth than just about anyone.
‘Cause’ [final verse]
“‘Cause they told me everybody’s got to pay their dues
And I explained that I had overpaid them
So overdued I went to the company store
And the clerk there said that they had just been invaded
So I set sail in a teardrop and escaped beneath the doorsill
‘Cause the smell of her perfume echoes in my head still
‘Cause I see my people trying to drown the sun
In weekends of whiskey sours
‘Cause how many times can you wake up in this comic book
And plant flowers?“
Before getting into how this prophetically relates to his life, it seems pertinent to take pause and purvey the fact that this verse is one of the greatest pieces of poetry ever written. It sings of love, yearning, humanity and the tragicomedy of hard luck existence. It is, ultimately, a painfully sad verse that doesn’t even bother to ask for pity. Instead, it pairs it with a soaring string arrangement that seems to refute the words and suggest we can all garden beauty for a little bit longer, akin to another masterful line from Leonard Cohen: “We are ugly, but we have the music.” Well, there is nothing but beauty in Rodriguez’s music for the disenfranchised, and we can all be grateful for that.
