Searching for Sugar Man Page #3

and she came to South Africa

to visit her boyfriend and brought

a copy of the record with her.

And her and him and all their friends

really liked it

and went out to try and buy it

but you couldn't buy it.

So they started taping copies

and passing copies along.

However it got here,

however it germinated here,

once it got here,

it spread very quickly.

I remember I was in high school

and we heard this song, "I wonder

how many times you've had sex?"

And at that time South Africa

was very conservative.

It was the height of apartheid,

and there wasn't television here.

That's how conservative it was,

'cause television was communist.

It was really... You wouldn't believe.

Everything was restricted,

everything was censored.

Everything was...

And here's this guy singing this song.

"Who's that?" Said, "That's Rodriguez."

And he became something

of a rebel son' of icon.

But the strange thing was

that we all bought his records.

Everybody I knew had his records.

I Wonder,

that was the big song

that everybody was singing

and we all bought a record.

And there he was on the cover,

sort of a hippy with shades.

But nobody knew anything about him.

He was a mystery.

Unlike other artists

that you could read about from America,

get to know something about them,

there was zilch. Nobody knew anything.

It was a mystery. We only had

his picture on the cover of the record.

The album was exceptionally popular.

To many of us South Africans,

he was the soundtrack to our lives.

In the mid-'70s,

if you walked into a random

white, liberal,

middle-class household

that had a turntable

and a pile of pop records

and if you flipped through the records

you would always see

Abbey Road by The Beatles.

You would always see

Bridge Over Troubled Water

by Simon and Garfunkel.

And you would always see

Cold Fact by Rodriguez.

To us, it was one of the most

famous records of all time.

The message it had was:

"Be anti-establishment. "

One song's called

Anti-Establishment Blues.

We didn't know what the word

"anti-establishment" was

until it cropped up on a Rodriguez song

and then we found out,

it's OK to protest against your society,

to be angry with your society.

Because we lived in a society

where every means was used

to prevent apartheid from,

you know, coming to an end,

this album somehow had in it...

lyrics that almost set us free

as oppressed peoples.

Any revolution needs an anthem

and in South Africa

Cold Fact was the album

that gave people permission

to free their minds

and to start thinking differently.

It may seem strange

that South African record companies

didn't do more

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