chris77 wrote:
I can't remember the exact words from the movie, but the gist of what I got from it was that they were speculating on how the album came to South Africa, and not presenting it as fact. I think they were saying that the story goes that a girl brought the album from the States and somehow it got spread around ,creating a bit of buzz and gathering a following which eventually lead to the Album being licensed and offered for sale in our stores, when it wasn't being sold anywhere else.
That's an urban myth, and if they've done serious research, or even if they were actually there in real time (as they claim to be and they look old enough to have been) then they'll know what the truth was. And as I pointed out already, Segerman certainly knows the truth. The truth is more prosaic though.
The story I remember from when I first got to know of Rodriques was that he was an anti-apartheid activist whose songs were banned from the country, but whose music was smuggled into the country and copied and distributed between folks as a protest statement. The story went further, and said that it was especially popular with our troepies on the border, who didin't really wanted to be there and knew the "true" meaning of his songs. They then had a good behind the back chuckle at the not-so liberal volk and vaderland types who sang along with gusto just because the songs sounded dirty.
Some tracks from "Cold Fact" were banned from air play by the SABC. It was not illegal to own the record and you could buy it in major retail outlets. Contrast this to what happened around Roger Lucey's debut album. First the lead off track was censored by the removal of the actual words. The disc was printed with the opening licks and then 2 minutes of silence to mark what you should have heard but couldn't. Then the security police (and there was testimony about this before the TRC) would visit stores and tell the buyer for the record department that it would be a VERY GOOD IDEA for you to not stock that record. Other things happened to Lucey that couldn't happen to Rodriguez because Rodriguez wasn't gigging here.
Look, the record was popular, and I'm sure that troepies on the border listened to it. But it wasn't all that they listened to. When I did my year's initial service in '76 that was not a particularly popular record by then, but the Doobie Brothers, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Sutherland Brothers, Julie Covington, David Dundass ( :-[), Rabbitt and Donna Summer - who all had hits at the time - were. The troepies were just okes, and they mostly listened to what was a hit at the time.
Later on when I did camps it was the same thing. Anything that was popular was popular. It was your link back to home. If it was a bit on the risque side then all the better.
Anyhoo, yes, people probably listened to it. So what? That doesn't mark anybody as enlightened. I more than once heard lyrics from that album used as a justification or defence of apartheid. That doesn't make Rodriguez a racist. My point is that that album was not really any kind of anti-apartheid rallying call back then. And really there's nothing in the lyrics to back that. It just mentioned sex and drugs and so it was a little dangerous and rebellious to listen to. Full stop.
The SABC banned it for airplay because of the third line of the first song ("I wonder how many times you've had sex") and for references to "Mary Jane". It didn't get played on the radio, but you could own it. Hell, it wasn't illegal to own a copy of Peter Gabriel's song "Biko". The SABC censors banned that from airplay, but you could buy the album (my brother had a copy).
But all of that is pure speculation. I don't think we will ever really know how he came to our shores. The record companies who can shed light on that have too many dirty fingers the pie to come clean.
It got here the same way Black Sabbath's and Jethro Tull's and Dylan's and Neil Young's and Bill Withers and Stevie Wonder's and UB40's and countless other act's records got here: A local company here signed a licensing deal with a company overseas by which they would market the foreign label's releases in this country. That simple.
There is no mystery. This happened routinely. Some acts didn't like it, but they couldn't do much about it because the distribution deals were in place. As somebody who bought records in local stores through the 80s and early 90s I can tell you that the discs of all the politically concious acts - including the relatively radical likes of Gil Scott Heron - were available here in broad daylight. Sting, Peter Gabriel (who, like Rodriguez, had songs banned from airplay), U2, Springsteen, Stevie Wonder, Little Steven (who played gigs in Jo'burg), Tracy Chapman... it was all here.
And the guys must have known about it because they got royalties. At the very least they could check up if they were concerned enough. Mark Knopfler identified the royalties that he got from SA and had them diverted to charity so that he personally did not benefit from sales in SA that he could not stop.
