This Song Will Set You Free

A copied CD, a front row seat and an epiphany.

My first encounter with him took place in the days when illegal downloading & CD-Rs were as ubiquitous as smartphones and streaming platforms are now. The tatty silver disc was of unknown origin and had no case, no cover and no sleeve notes, but it was clear that someone, somewhere, having burned a copy of his album, had cared enough to meticulously ink a name and tracklist on the front of it with a blue sharpie.

Whether it was the name of the artist or the name of the album was impossible to tell, but by the time the CD came to me the elegant writing had worn thin, chipped away by the number of occasions on which it had been deemed necessary to place it into a stereo and release its contents into the world. Beyond that, all I knew was that the bandmate I’d gotten it from had loved it so much when it was played at a party that he’d pilfered it for himself, and now he’d lent it to me.

When I listened to it at home, I was astounded. It was one of those rare albums that was instantly, truly brilliant - simultaneously so good that you’re amazed you’ve never heard it before, and yet so good that you’re sure that you have. With wide-eyed wonder I went to my housemates’ bedroom doors proclaiming the good news, and I made the same quiet vow that so many people had made before me: the person who I’d gotten it from wasn’t getting it back.

One of the best compliments I can pay this album is to tell you that it made for terrible background music. Every time I heard it played in a social setting, conversations withered as peoples’ attention drifted towards it. The usual discussions began about who it was, where it had come from, and where we could get more, but none of us knew. Clearly, this was music that didn’t want to be engaged with on a superficial level, and which demanded some detective work. 

With the exception of a barely legible name - “Sixto Rodriguez” - the disc itself had nothing in the way of information. The songwriting and production - thumping bass; violent, primitive fuzz; folky, strummed acoustic guitars - suggested that it was a product of late ‘60s America. But that was it. 

I suppose that it spoke to me so deeply because, at the time that I heard it, I had had just made a concerted effort to begin a journey of self-discovery, fuelled by a disillusion not just with my own authority figures, but with rock n’ roll’s own inability to offer me shelter or salvation. Rejecting the culture of materialism which I was raised on and knew so well in favour of something I was yet to fully understand, I was at a Narziss and Goldmund-esque crossroads in my life, straddling the difficult shoreline of hedonism and transcendence, and I was longing for direction as to which road to take, and how. 

The author John Green once said that “great books help you to understand, and they help you to feel understood”. Listening to this album was one of those experiences where pop music had the exact same effect; the effect, as Alan Bennett put it, of something being “set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.”

Despite its apparently ethereal nature, the very best music has an uncanny knack of being something of great substance. You see, what I lacked at the time (confidence, clarity and conviction to name but a few), this guy - dead or alive - seemed to have, and so this album quickly became something I could lean on. These weren’t songs which appealed to the listener’s ego by wrapping them up in vague, flowery wordplay and leaving them to insert their own quasi-profound, self-involved meaning. These were songs with something to say - something that most people didn’t dare to say - and they said it from a street-level vantage point which few pop singers manage to occupy once the royalty checks come rolling in. What’s more, they made bold, concrete statements about life which were startlingly unambiguous; it was as though, by committing all this to tape, the writer was double-daring us to hold him accountable. 

I was coming to terms with the fact that I had been living in a world of illusion, and this music was something that felt refreshingly real and relatable. When this guy sang about drugs, he did so not with the wide-eyed wonder of the naive hippy - hippies who my generation now knew as burnt-out booze hounds, crippled acid casualties, corporate sell-outs and corrupt politicians - but with all the world-weariness of an addict sincerely trying to escape the crushing desperation of life on Earth. When he sang about kitchen sink struggles and broken relationships, he did so with compassion and empathic authenticity. And when he sang about a broken political system that my friends and I had long since given up on, he did it by mixing sneering, cutting cynicism with a resignation that didn’t demand change, but insisted that with each other, and with music like this, we could somehow be ok without it.

The crowning glory of this incredible album came around the six-minute mark. From the moment I heard the first bar of the introduction, my heart sank to a hitherto unknown depth. The mournful embellishment of the electric guitar was set against chiming marimbas, ornate orchestral arrangements and a heart-wrenching descending bassline, and with just two notes it conjured the regret of a failed relationship and the sting of a bitter betrayal, but with a swagger which suggested that somehow this wasn’t going to be a conventional pop song, the kind to be heard once and then filed under “H” for Heart, Broken. 

As soon as our man began to sing, he confirmed everything which the guitar had foretold, and did so from a distance - not of disinterest, but from a life-affirming position of absolute, resolute authority - that defied its tormentor and made it quite clear that he had not only survived something terrible, but had really understood it, had been fortified by it, and had nurtured the conviction to commit to tape the truth that he had discovered. 

But it was even more than that. It was also a damning critique of the rankest, yet most widely-accepted weaknesses of the human psyche. How was it possible that one man could so poetically destroy the pretentious, superficial hypocrites that littered the streets, classrooms, ale houses, government offices and pop records of our times in a mere two-and-a-half-minute battering ram of a song? Revisiting it in years to come, I will weep with regret when I realise that while I raged against the world, the song was also pointing its finger at me and my own multifarious shortcomings.

To hear someone sneer at the world’s ills with such grace gave me hope that, while pop music still couldn’t solve my problems, there was at least one honest person out there with the same bad taste in their mouth as I had. Who was this man who I knew nothing about, but who knew so much about me? 

In time I would come to know, but for now I just had the music. 

---

Sixto Rodriguez:

A Detective Symphony in Three Parts.

Act One: The Rumour

My friend Derek - another aficionado of this mysterious silver disc - gift-wrapped the news and handed it to me with a warm smile, knowing how much I’d appreciate it. He’d just come back from playing a music festival in France, and he’d wound up on the same bill as the guy whose album it was. I made a clumsy attempt at indifference while I begged him for every possible detail he could give, but they were few.

Sixto Rodriguez was the name of the singer, not the record; he looked Mexican, or maybe Native American; he was old, softly spoken and extremely shy, but he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. It wasn’t much, yet it was a miracle. This wasn’t another band who promised salvation only for me to find they had split up in egoistic acrimony before I could see them live, or a singer-prophet who’d died, degraded, in a fit of drug-fuelled debauchery. This guy was alive and performing, and so the truths which he spoke were manifest in real, relatable flesh.   

It meant the world to me.

Act Two: The Movie

Next came the film, a detective story of its own which delivered the scarcely believable backstory behind the album which we had so cherished. I won’t spoil it here of course, but suffice to say it was a tale which, if you’d made it up, no-one would believe. It was a tale of talent, promise, spectacular failure, stolen royalties and a sacking, two weeks before Christmas, which killed the dream, plunging our hero into either on-stage suicide or decades of obscurity and minimum wage jobs, all of which acted as a mere prelude before a hero’s redemption so dramatic that it came second only to Jesus Christ himself. I left the cinema buoyed, wiping tears from my eyes.

Act Three: The Crescendo

The film had become such a runaway global success that a world tour beckoned and Brighton, my adopted home town, was on the itinerary.

I find myself in my aunt and uncle’s back room in Essex; as sunlight streams through clouds of tobacco smoke, the birds in the garden flit from hazel to holly while I dart between my phone and the antique desktop computer, trying to book tickets for myself and my friends. 

Ever since we found out that a serious bout of ill health had threatened to derail his triumphant tour, I’ve been tracking every bit of news I can find about Sixto Rodriguez, hoping against hope that he was ok, and that he would be well enough to grace the stage of the Brighton Dome. My daily rituals now include a trip to my desk to go online and tick off, one by one, all the stops on the road to Brighton; first London, then Liverpool, Edinburgh, Dublin and Belfast, until I find myself, on a chilly November evening, in the Basketmakers Arms in Brighton’s North Laine, its nooks and low ceiling perfect for intensifying the crackle of pre-gig electricity that hovers over our corner of the pub. Rounds are bought and bundles of pints brought over with all the care of a midwife passing a newborn to its mother. Glasses clink, and banter fills the air. My friends relax at the table while I float and fizz around its edges clutching a pint of soda water garnished with a wedge of lime.

In my quest for truth, I’ve renounced the reckless hell raising which I excelled at, and started experimenting with a tee-total yogic lifestyle. The daily dance of sacred mantras on my tongue has transfigured my taste buds and - for now, at least - quenched my bottomless thirst for booze. It’s new and strange to me, so I can only wonder how it must feel to my friends. Have I changed, or am I becoming closer to the real me? Am I judging them? Is my new habit a tacit suggestion that they, too, are supposed to act differently now? Perhaps they think me a hypocrite, slowly climbing the ladder of my ivory tower, one dry day at a time. Am I projecting it, or is there a tension in the air? Maybe it's coming from me, or maybe I’m feeling tense about an imagined tension, and they’re just picking up on that. I try to reassure myself, but my unfettered mind reels with endless permutations. I don’t know where to look or what to say. Wherever I stand, I seem to be in someone’s way. I’ve experienced this kind of thing a million times before, and every time I’ve headed to the bar for a drink. Tonight is different. I meditate on the great John Prine, someone else who understands me, and pray; just give me one thing that I can hold on to.

Suddenly I remember that we have a schedule, and my companions’ commitment to booze and their laissez-faire attitude to timekeeping seem to disrespect the enormity of the event. Doesn’t this mean anything to them? What if we get stuck at the back of a huge queue trying to enter the venue? What if we get to the front of that queue and there’s a problem with our tickets? I’m anxious to get into the venue and get seated, as if the concrete reassurance of my body weight pressing down on a folding chair could somehow guarantee me something in an endlessly mutable world. But another man’s health, the running order of a sold out concert in a 2,000 seater venue, my friends’ rampant, post-work thirst and, it seems, my own mind - all of this is way beyond my control right now. I relax a little, just enough to hatch a plan, and to appear normal enough in front of everyone that they might listen to me. They don’t. Eventually, I harry and pester, and finally demand that we leave immediately. If you want another drink you can get one at the venue and take it to your seat.

I do understand that I was probably a bit of a buzzkill for a while in the Basketmakers that evening, but I was doing my best. Thankfully, my friends loved me and, frankly, they were used to it. At any rate, the timing was perfect. We made our way into the venue - no queue, no ticketing problems - and took our seats, just a few rows from the front. I had a peripheral, visual impression of a drum kit, maybe a keyboard and a couple of amps, but my eyes were fixed on a single microphone, held by a single microphone stand, adrift in the yawning chasm of an otherwise empty stage. 

Here was that atmosphere again, coming on in waves, as everything inevitably does, only now it had snowballed. I’m not the only one who has something riding on this gig, and I’m not the only one who’s seen the film, read the news of his health, or contemplated the grim possibility of having to phone the venue to have my ticket refunded on the day of the show. I don’t need to ask in order to find this out: I have entered a world of intense feeling, and that tells me everything I need to know. That crackle in the air at the Basketmakers Arms had been felt in synchronicitous pockets all over the city, and now, on the brink of showtime, those pockets have converged on the Brighton Dome to form an electrical storm of colossal intensity. 

Somewhere above, in one of the balconies, a man, unable to contain this feeling, rips his throat raw, bellowing “RODRIIIIIGUEEEEEEEZZ” in a proud South African accent. A cheer goes up among the crowd. 

In a split second of outer-body clarity I look down at us all and think that this must be what football fans feel in the hours before a cup-final, although until today I’ve never believed in anything deeply enough to feel the butterflies of anticipation, the dizzying sense of opportunity and the same desperate hope that I feel now. 

My eyes dart around the room and I see people I know, some of whom are friends I haven’t seen in a long time. Some of them even owned that same battered CD for a while. We exchange hesitant smiles and tentative, knowing looks: we are here, together, on the brink of something extraordinary, something we will tell our grandchildren about, and which we will never experience again. The fleeting uniqueness of the event shrouds us in a sacred atmosphere, and all past transgressions are forgiven: nothing must get in the way of us experiencing this completely.

The house lights dim. The crowd inhales. I turn back and perch on my chair’s edge, fixing my gaze on the lone spotlight at the centre of the stage. I fumble for a seatbelt, but there isn’t one. I can’t look to my friends now, nor speak to them. It dawns on me that life is something to be experienced alone, yet gone through together. 

We are seated about half a dozen rows from the front, just off-centre, towards stage right. The triumphant roar of the crowd begins from stage left - they have the best view of the door between backstage and the stage itself - and ripples its way to us. For a moment, we’re left in the dark, unable to join the cheering. But it must be him! What else would elicit such a response? I draw breath and clench my fists, ready to punch the air, but I can’t commit. He has appeared, cutting the figure of the quintessential rock star - an imposing giant of a man in leather trousers, long hair, feathered fedora and dark glasses - but he’s shuffling across the stage, being helped by two assistants. He is too weak to make the trip alone. They lead him to the microphone, and he can’t find it - is he blind? - so his assistants place his hands on it, and he orients himself around it, the touch of that microphone acting as his magnetic north, his universal centre. It picks up his heavy breathing, his struggle for existence, and broadcasts it throughout the room. Cries of “Jesus!” fill the air, and the immense, religious fervour that has built up is mixed with trepidation, astonishment and concern. Nevertheless, we urge him on, willing him to succeed with all our might. 

His guitar is placed around his shoulders and he fumbles a few chords as his hands tremor violently around its neck. I think the gig has started, but I can’t tell. I’m not sure if this is even music. I just don’t think he can play any more, and he can barely breathe, let alone sing. My mind becomes an unstoppable pendulum and swings between extreme possibilities. I know we are on the verge of something big tonight, but could it really be this? Are we about to witness the most tragic car-crash of a gig the world has ever seen? What am I here for? I contemplate the very worst as the all-too-real possibility dawns on me that this could well be the night that Sixto Rodriguez, resurrected from the dead, finally drops down and dies for good on this very stage. Everyone in the room feels it. 

Suddenly, the band behind him comes crashing in, nailing the sound, and for a few bars of heavy blues groove, everything is ok. But all it serves to do is heighten the looming possibility of tragedy. 

When Sixto Rodriguez angled his head slightly, avoided the audience’s gaze, dug deep inside himself and put his lips to the mic, two thousand people feared the worst. What followed was a voice so pure and so ageless that it could have been plucked directly from the recording which he had made over four decades previously. It chimed as cleanly as a church bell and as roared as emphatically as a military bugle defying death to proclaim victory over the vagaries of time itself. Ostensibly, it was coming from a body that had been ravaged by old age, but its source was clearly ethereal, well beyond the jurisdiction of mere matter. The voice invited us to “climb up on my music, and my songs will set you free”. I was looking for truth, for something to hold on to, and on that cold winter night in Brighton the man they call Sixto Rodriguez gifted me the most important truth of all; whatever they try and tell you, we are not these bodies.