There ARE Second Chances
Sometimes in life, there ARE second chances.
Rodriguez was a Detroit folk musician in the early 1970s. He put an album in 1970 called COLD FACT, and another in 1971 called COMING FROM REALITY, but they didn’t sell very well. Not because the music was bad -- in fact, it was pretty good. But that’s how things go sometimes in the music industry. Rodriquez’s career was almost over before it started.
But , somehow -- and here is a twist that is hard to believe -- Rodriguez’s recordings made their way to South Africa, and his music became wildly popular there. Many of his songs became anthems of a sort for the anti-apartheid movement. His record was even banned by the South African state, which, naturally, made it even more popular. He was as famous as the Beatles… in South Africa. But he never knew. Somehow -- the work of a corrupt local distributor, most likely -- sales figures and royalties never back to Rodriguez in the US. And, since his records weren’t doing that well in the U.S., anyway, there was no reason for his record company to expect that his music would sell better elsewhere. No one ever checked.
This was an era without Internet or cell phones, without texting or Wikipedia. No one in South Africa knew anything about Rodriguez, except that they loved his music. And it wasn’t like anyone was going to book him for a concert in South Africa during apartheid. Stories about Rodriguez sprang up, and his fans came to believe that the musician had committed suicide, somewhere, on stage, perhaps.
In other words, his fans knew nothing about him, and he knew nothing about his fans, until a pair of South African researchers decided to answer the question: “How did Rodriguez die?” After months of research, they found the musician, very much alive, in Detroit, making a living tearing down old buildings.
Before you know it, Rodriguez is playing in person -- for the first time -- in front of tens of thousands of adoring fans in South Africa.
SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN is an improbable story, which makes it all the more remarkable. It’s a story about the power of popular music, the role of imagination in political struggle, and most important of all, the possibility of second chances. We all loved the film here at Film Fresh, and we’re sure you will, too.
