Cold Fact
(Light in the Attic)
And so Seattle’s Light in the Attic rescues yet another holy-grail
LP from oblivion, doing the philanthropic deed once more with a
lavishly packaged reissue of Rodriguez’s 1970 debut LP, Cold
Fact.
“Who?” you ask. The Mexican-American Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was
born in Detroit in 1942 to blue-collar stock and clambered through the
Motor City’s fertile music scene before recording Cold Fact in
1969. Produced by badass Motown session guitarist Dennis Coffey and
Mike Theodore and featuring Funk Brothers bassist Bob Babbitt and
drummer Andrew Smith, the 12 songs here deserve the sort of reverence
Bob Dylan’s Bringing It All Back Home and Phil Ochs’s All the
News That’s Fit to Sing have inspired.
Like Dylan and Ochs’s, Rodriguez’s voice isn’t technically “good,”
but it’s distinctive enough to pierce the anodyne clutter of pop
culture and rivet your attention. Actually, the content of Rodriguez’s
songs—mind fucks stemming from drugs, inequality, loose sex,
street hassles, etc.—would sound ridiculous if sung by someone
with perfect pitch and pleasant timbre. Which may explain why the
technically dazzling Tim Buckley’s “protest” songs on Goodbye and
Hello sound unconvincing as a conduit for social commentary and
lyrical agitation.
While obscure in America, Rodriguez garnered a large cult following
in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa in the ’70s. His profile
rose in 2002 when DJ David Holmes placed Rodriguez’s “Sugar Man” on his
Come Get It, I Got It mix album.
A standout on Cold Fact, “Sugar Man” is a folk-soul ballad
augmented by a killer descending bass line and psychedelic effects
(echoed backward violin, astral analog-synth bleeps, reverbed vocals on
the fadeout) from the Theo-Coff production team. The disc’s next track,
“Only Good for Conversation,” barges in on an ornery fuzz-toned bass
riff and Coffey’s acidic electric guitar. After this devastating
one-two punch, Cold Fact shifts into more conventional
troubadour tropes, but Detroit street funk still courses through the
lyrically bold compositions like faint muscle spasms. Imagine
José Feliciano covering Forever Changes‘ folkier numbers,
and you’re close to grasping Cold Fact‘s unique
sabor.
