When Sixto Rodriguez found his music career fizzling out in the mid-'70s following the release of two under-the-radar albums, the Detroit-born son of Mexican immigrants returned to a labouring job and began dabbling in local body politics.
Meanwhile, spores of his street-savvy psych-folk were headed this way, carried on the winds of social discontent . . .
By the late '70s, Rodriguez fans in Australia and New Zealand had picked up on the LPs that had failed to find an audience in the singer-songwriter's own territories. The gritty protest songs on 1970 debut Cold Fact resonated particularly strongly in these parts, leading to tours of Australia in 1979 and 1981.
Disenfranchised teens in apartheid-era South Africa also caught on to Rodriguez's direct, uncompromising style, but his special relationship with the republic wouldn't flower until the late '90s, when hugely successful tours would reignite his career and see his albums re-released worldwide.
Cold Fact is remarkable for its double-edged appeal. It breezes like Donovan and bites like Dylan, wrapping its jaded observations of a world unfairly weighted against the common man in alluringly simple tunes.
Rodriguez's singing is straight and sincere, with little ostentation but plenty of attitude, while his neatly turned lyrics speak of life in the grimier corners of the Motor City.
Tunes are constructed with acoustic guitar, bass and light-handed drumming, but psychedelic touches abound in the wild panning of the mix and the occasional fuzz-heavy electric. Hookers, pushers and gangsters populated the neighbourhoods he lived in and wrote about.
Sugar Man, the best known of the 12 tracks, is an undisguised ode to a drug dealer, while Hate Street Dialogue documents the hopelessness of the poverty/crime cycle and Gommorah (A Nursery Rhyme) likens America's urban jungle to the biblical home of vice and sexual deviation.
Thanks to a unified Tri-Nations effort, Cold Facts has been unearthed as a stone-cold classic. Full credit.
