Like Jim Ford’s Harlan County and Hackamore Brick’s One Kiss Leads to Another, Sixto Rodriguez’s Cold Fact is something of a masterpiece that fell into obscurity the instant it landed in record bins. Victim of poor promotion, market saturation and mixed reviews, the Rodriguez parable is structurally familiar, but ripe with lore, peculiarities and enigma. Writers and record collectors have speculated, embellished upon and even chased the Rodriguez story, tracking clues that reach from Detroit to Mexico, Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand.
By 1970, the year Cold Fact was released, the industry of rock had paid off big and was starting to bloat. For the first time, a popular consciousness large enough to generate real profit found personal and social redemption in the songs they produced. Music was the vehicle of a revolution and their was money to be made from it. Record labels burgeoned and multiplied, throwing money in all directions hoping to score the next Dylan, Beatles, or Stones. Album after album after album dropped. Some made waves; many more sank. The cash that landed Rodriguez was that of Clarence Avant, creator of Sussex Records. Avant, a Beverly Hills resident now considered a legend within the black recording industry, built Sussex on the hits of West Virginia R&B artist Bill Withers. Known as a playmaker and negotiator, Avant cut his teeth managing soul and R&B artists. He founded Venture Records, the first subsidiary to a major label to exclusively release black music, but was never able to hone in a truly successful label. Both of his attempts, Venture and Sussex Records, failed within five years.
Cold Fact was Sussex first release and Avant demonstrated little understanding with regard to marketing Rodriguez’s music. Sussex was distributed by Buddah Records, a label known for putting bubblegum pop acts like 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express on the map and successfully distributing the music of a number of soul and R&B artists. Much of Buddah’s early success was the result of its relationship with Kama Sutra Records and that label’s strong tie to AM radio. Kama Sutra released a number of hits like “Goodie Goodie Gumdrops” and “Do You Believe in Magic” that now define the AM sound. But once flower power broke, the FM airwaves became the movement’s mouthpiece. Through their industry ties, Sussex and Rodriguez had little access to the airwaves that suited his music. Cold Fact and “Sugar Man,” Rodriguez’s warbling, dope-laden first single, took to collecting dust on radio station shelves and record bins. Sixto disappeared.
In a sense, the Rodriguez story begins here in his absence. While he returned to Detroit from Los Angeles and took to working construction jobs and raising a family, his global fan base began its slow development. In South Africa, word on Rodriguez spread quickly among white dissidents because Cold Fact was one of the few records with racy lyrics to slip past the Apartheid’s stringent censors. Australia and New Zealand picked up on Rodriguez as well. In America, Rodriguez’s cult is still in its infancy, but developing. For years, no one knew for sure what had become of Rodriguez. Fans speculated, building a small mythology of suicides, drug overdoses and prison, some even said he set himself on fire on stage. Rodriguez could signify whatever or whoever the listener desired, his only context being the music and album cover of Cold Fact.
The songs inadvertently play into and transcend the Rodriguez myth. Cold Fact is coated with the urban grit of a musician born into the street life that plenty of 60’s folk artists observed, sang about, and even chose to enter from more fortunate, peripheral, social positions. Dark themes of drugs, sex, struggle, and manipulation abound. Even when his lyrics are political and tend toward convolution, Rodriguez’s never sings at his audience, always remaining a member of the proverbial crowd. Sonically, Cold Fact is balanced by wandering psychedelic miscellany and elements of more straight forward baroque and folk pop. For all the Theremin drones and woozy children’s choirs that revel below the surface, there are able horn sections and sharp guitar hooks directing each song. Rodriguez’s approach remains cool and even keeled even when his lyrics provide fairly scathing social critiques. Even at its weirdest, Cold Fact never attempts to be anything more than a pop record and that’s its biggest asset.
Albums like Cold Fact, with its enigmatic cover art, interesting history and relative obscurity, are the reason why collectors continue to scour dollar bins, thrift stores and flee markets for records. We search for intriguing, maybe even profound artifacts of all but forgotten songs and stories ripe for reclamation; stories and songs that become our own in conversations, listening parties and DJ nights. And when the songs and stories happen to be as rich as those of Rodriguez, the hours spent flipping through shitty records seem all the more worthwhile.
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