On record, Rodriguez has an assured, slightly too-knowing voice, pleading to a drug dealer - "Won't you bring back all those colors to my dreams" - over a wistful, wheezing musical backdrop that gives way to agitation. The song is "Sugar Man" (available for free download at LightInTheAttic.net/releases/rodriguez/sugar_man.mp3), from the album Cold Fact, and based on them, one gets an image of a street-wise documenter of the dark sides of urban society: "The ladies on my street / Aren't there for their health."
On the phone, though, he's soft-spoken, apologizing that he needs to have questions repeated because of his phone and his hearing.
That disconnect makes sense when one knows that the gulf between Cold Fact and Americans' awareness of it is nearly four decades. Rodriguez released the record in 1970, and its follow-up in 1971, but the apathy that greeted them forced him to give up on music.
"I thought we were going to hit," he said last week. "Didn't happen, though."
